The “healthy” person, the self-realized soul, the “real” man, is the one who has transcended himself.
How does one transcend himself; how does he open himself to new possibility? By realizing the truth of his situation, by dispelling the lie of his character, by breaking his spirit out of its conditioned prison. The enemy, for Kierkegaard as for Freud, is the oedipus complex. The child has built up strategies and techniques for keeping his self-esteem in the face of the terror of his situation. These techniques become an armor that hold the person prisoner. The very defenses that he needs in order to move about with self-confidence and self-esteem become his life-long trap. In order to transcend himself he must break down that which he needs in order to live. Like Lear he must throw off all his “cultural lendings” and stand naked in the storm of life. Kierkegaard had no illusions about man’s urge to freedom. He knew how comfortable people were inside the prison of their character defenses. Like many prisoners they are comfortable in their limited world and protected routines, and the idea of a parole into the wide world of chance, accident, and choice terrifies them… In the prison of one’s character one can pretend and feel that he is somebody, that the world is manageable, that there is a reason for one’s life, a ready justification for one’s action. To live automatically and uncritically is is to be assured of at least a minimum share of the programmed cultural heroics…The prison of one’s character is painstakingly built to deny one thing and one thing alone: one’s creatureliness. The creatureliness is the terror. Once admit that you are a defecating creature and you invite the primeval ocean of creature anxiety to flood over you. But it is more than creature anxiety, it is also man’s anxiety, the anxiety that results from the human paradox that man is an animal who is conscious of his animal limitation. Anxiety is the result of the truth of one’s condition. What does it mean to be a ‘self-conscious animal’? The idea is ludicrous, if not monstrous. It means to know that one is food for worms. This is the terror; to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating inner yearning for life and self-expression—- and yet with all of this to die…
“[Kierkegaard] has told us that by realizing the truth of our condition we can transcend ourselves. And on the other hand he tells us that the truth of our condition is our complete and abject creatureliness, which seems to push us down still farther on the scale of self-realization, further away from any possibility of transcendence. But this is only an apparent contradiction. The flood of anxiety is not the end for man. It is, rather, a “school” that provides man with the ultimate education, the final maturity… Anxiety cannot be lied about. Once you face up to it, it reveals the truth of your situation; and only by seeing that truth can you open a new possibility for yourself.
ϟ All I Ever Do
The more I care about something, the more I think about it. The more I think about it, the more I obsess. The more I obsess, the more likely I am to go and fuck it all up. Such is my way.
ϟ “There is no such joy in the tavern as upon the road thereto.”
This is a quote from Blood Meridian, which I’m reading right now. I immediately fell in love with it as soon as I read it. I’ve been doing research online, looking for commentaries on what it may mean, but I haven’t found much. The way I like to think of it — and I may be way off — is that the chase is always better than the prize. There’s more enjoyment in trying to get something than when you finally get it. As soon as it’s in your hands, you realize how much of what you had thought of it before was mere illusion.
Of course, this is only my interpretation and it’s probably wrong since that meaning doesn’t fit all that well in the context in which the quote appears. Who knows, though. I just like to think of it this way. I’m really enjoying Cormac McCarthy’s fiction right now. His writing is so sparse and eerie, so dark and so especially foreboding in this novel.
