Longevity logo

Existential Suffering & Primordial Anger

Striving Toward Balance

By James SiroisPublished 4 years ago 12 min read
1

There is a deep and dormant confusion that lies within all human beings- confusion about the existence we are directly aware of but can not understand or accept.

The proof of this can be seen in the world's most potent ideas about the nature of suffering and how they teach us to either tolerate it or circumvent it. The eastern religions tend to negate human life by dissolving the ego and the western ones tend to affirm such life by re-enforcing it. Resuming both: to not suffer or to feel pleasure. Can we affirm our lives with an ideal balance between both suffering and pleasure?

Such a question seems to have the only answer: that all we can do is try.

Trying to balance yourself as an individual in this reality becomes very absurd after failing to do so for many years since birth, as you inescapably come to face the big question after becoming self-aware enough to ask: why try?

Behold the absurdity: I try to live without knowing why.

That is where religions provide purpose as the antidote we come to need as the result of the rituals they teach us to balance our suffering; rituals are necessarily repetitive and repetition eventually forces us to think about its purpose. The day comes too soon to realize that the stories religions give us about purpose are just abstractions created by equally weak ancestors which serve to blunt the awareness of the absurd.

This is what precisely causes anger; the existential confusion masked over by human abstraction creates an anger so primordial that we do not even notice its existence within us. There is no pinpointing a moment in the past when we become angry this way but we become people driven in part, by this anger.

So what if we strip ourselves of this anger and then also the confusion by stripping ourselves of "thought" altogether? Meditation seems to point us in that direction and is what leads to the ascetic monks of various denominations who sit in caves or mountains, wasting away in the bliss of their maximally negated lives, only affirming enough life by eating to sustain themselves in order to remain on that point between life and death- most of them would not comment on either life or death being relevant of course, yet that does nothing to bring an individual any comfort or reason to become meditative- it would require enough pain and desperation to push them into that life to begin with. The luring idea that suffering is an illusion is a not a natural path forward into living a human life (one which has a bodily nature while also endowed with a mind seemingly separating itself from nature through self-awareness). This is why I see buddhism as a potentially self-destructive process, as they conflate loss of self-awareness with the awareness of the "universal self." The fact remains however, that they negate fulfilling their purpose in this life. (This is justified by the idea that our purpose is to release ourselves from samsara, a cycle of rebirth until we are enlightened enough to realize "the truth").

Purpose, whether it is to feel pleasure (even the pleasure of not suffering) either now or in an afterlife, or even for the lack of lives, becomes absurd without a fundamental truth, and all fundamental truths which have been constructed by mankind have always rested on a paradox which requires from us the skill to interpret such a truth to fit our equally paradoxical mode of functioning: our needs versus wants. Perhaps this is why a priest, rabbi, imam or monk is always attractive- people would rather not have to interpret the events and decisions of their lives themselves, as it brings them closer to the awareness that all truth is paradoxical. Those who have the desire to wield power however, they are the ones who recognize that truth is interpretable therefore a source of power, and so they become the priest, rabbi, imam or monk themselves. They are artists who untangle their clients' needs and wants and match them with an interpretation of truth which serves their own purposes- meanwhile none question why the fundamental truth needs interpretation if it is truth. 

It should also be remarked that religious figures do not have to be traditional- Yoga masters, psychics, fortune tellers, political activists, gurus, kooks and social justice warriors are all forms of the disintegrating idea of the traditional power figures; they used to be seen as burdened wise men who exchange their happiness for honour- such an image was required by the followers in order to feel like they are less burdened (hence why religious figures are usually ascetic to some degree) but now people desire the power as much as they desire freedom from existential burden, and so grasp at both.

They live lives as two roles: the interpreter of truth and the receiver of it. I do not imply that they are wrong for doing so, as I believe it is necessary to do it however it is clear that people do not take on the hardships of both roles but clutch at the empty benefits without having worked for them- hence why society finds itself fragmenting at the seams when it comes to morality: too many world-views and interpretations coming from a place of individual selfishness rather than hard, philosophical examination and honesty.

Any and all such world-views have their limitations and those who defend a particular one are unable to see their own view's weakness precisely because it is the current one they use to prop themselves up over the absurd lava rushing underneath; needless to say, no one wants to get burned. Perhaps this is why others are thrown into the liquid fire in their stead: there is not enough place for you is a mentality of the selfish, and let us make no mistake about it, a world-view comes from a very deep need for self-survival. The manner through which we harvest the power of self-survival however, is what determines how evil or good we will actually become within the worlds of our own making, and some worlds look better than others from the outside.

The heaviness to be felt by the responsibilities I have just outlined so far, in contrast to the existential absurdity I explained before-hand, along with how humans capitalize on all of this, is really starting to get dark and burdensome. Condensing it might alleviate the dizziness of it all:

-Our existence is absurd therefore terrifying and instantly undesirable.

-We use the absurdity to make something of it, either through wielding it's power by interpretations or experiencing pleasure from interpretations or we attempt to do both.

-The responsibility to deal with absurdity remains the same no matter what we do with it, and we are back to feeling the burden of it all over again in the Sisyphusian manner.

Can anyone honestly stand in the face of such an existence and not feel anger? The confusing nature of this pattern comes from how quickly and easily the veil of purpose can fall from our eyes to reveal the harshness of absurdity. Balance within this existential hell does not really offer any comfort or solution either, as balance requires that we fall out of balance in order to continue striving for it- and this is an absurdity in and of itself. There is no escape from the absurd.

The absurd Sisyphus Inside Camu's Mind

There is however, what Camus defended to be the comforts which exist and are equally valid to experience as are the uncomfortable experiences stemming from absurdity. These would be what we regard as "the simple things in life": art, food, sex, nature etc. However these things are not simple, and are just as absurdly paradoxical as the pain of our existence really is.

I can say this with confidence because of the absurd notion of "balance" which we are stuck with: all things in moderation- another trope repeated as a mantra without the acknowledgment of its underlying absurdity: Moderation in relation to what? By who's standard? Even by our individual standards, moderation can be chosen and interpreted at the peril of our limitations; everything that I eat, drink and do can be good or bad depending on which frame of time I apply to it- and even if I apply it to the extent of my life-span, I know not all the information necessary to make a judgment of good and bad, therefore I can not truly achieve a balance which is not simply an illusion by contrast to other people's lives.

I have dug to the bottom of these essential illusions to come face-to-face with Camu's singular serious philosophical question: Should we commit suicide? His answer was that even our self-inflicted deaths propagate an absurd pattern of not taking responsibility into our own hands in order to face absurdity, but I have not yet found in his work, any moral justification for being responsible to begin with. This is because absurdity as the fundamental truth is once again, a completely flexible and interpretable notion, and therefore not really a "fundamental" to begin with. He just happened to interpret absurdity in order to justify the life he was living, but I believe he could just have easily interpreted it to answer his question the other way: yes, we should commit suicide.

The Symmetry of Identity Between Life and Death

Could this be the final honesty required to move forward in the search for a greater truth? If ending our lives is just as valid as living them, we are left with no direction to take and no decisions to be made: a true stalemate. I believe stalemates are necessary in order to find truths, as a definitive conclusion only offers us a prolonging of the truths to be found.

Exposing just how absurd existence really is, especially to the point of stalemate like this is cause for more anger. This is the primordial anger which festers at the deep, dark bottom of our very awareness, the collective unconscious and maybe even the metaphysical, this anger is what has provoked in me more curiosity. I can not say that I have found a new truth but rather another question: What are we angry for? 

Is primordial anger justified or absurd?

Primordial anger- towards yourself and the world for the confusion of the absurdity of existence, is to release something absurd (the anger itself) but fundamentally true. Conversely, that same absurdity can lead us to release an equally absurd experience of primordial elation, what is felt through art and beauty, what is an awe of existence and also fundamentally true.

Primordial anger and elation, which is caused by the absurdity of existence, both transmute into each other, justifying the absurd itself; this is fundamentally paradoxical but true- its is a truth, a fundamental.

My conclusion is that all concepts necessary for living a good human life require an anti-thesis in order to support a truth conducive to living at all, and living well- and so the anti-thesis of absurdity must be the concept of justification rather than responsibility.

Why live an absurd life? The answer can not be because you are responsible for it, as this would ask of you to be God, but rather because it is self-justifying; and from this arises the responsibility to become God.

James Sirois

-This is what came out.

Post Script

For those who want to know more...

Curiosity leads to more questions but is rewarding

"Asclepius" is the personification of my idea that the remedy for absurdity is contained within the absurd through it's self-justification.

He was a man become demi-god by virtue of his healing powers; Asclepius could not kill the Gods as no one can (They represent absolutes and the absurd is absolute) but the Gods in Greek mythology could die in the sense that they would be negated by making them irrelevant, usually through forgetting them or not worshipping them.

Asclepius

Asclepius instead negated the Gods by resurrecting himself and others from death and thereby, life could be affirmed by escaping the tyranny of an absurd existence, what is to live with our awareness of our existence but without the ability to understand it. By becoming God-like, we no longer have death to seal us into the absurd as we can live forever to justify our existence by taking part in the creation of absurdity. Asclepius by-passed human weakness by justifying it: we can become more than absurdly human, and enter the realm of the Gods. For this to happen, he was killed by Zeus but was later resurrected as a full-fledged God.

The Greek personifications of Gods parallel each other very nicely across the ideas of Nietzsche, Camus and what I am expressing. Nietzsche's Dionysus counter-balanced Apollo to preserve joy (although still absurd), Camu's Sisyphus took responsibility for his own happiness by enjoying his torturous absurdity and Asclepius justified his existence by becoming God-like; what he represents is a willingness to preserve life and to propagate absurdity- by paradoxically and actively trying to become human by taking on the role of your own creator. This is in contrast to the Sisyphusian, who smiles in defiance of the Gods with contempt, by approaching a hedonistic and necessarily sado-masochistic way of experiencing human life.

The notion of transcendence to be achieved through lives and afterlives (what is life on earth, heaven and hell) is beautifully coherent in the story of Asclepius, who had angered Hades for preventing souls from entering his underworld and worrying Zeus about disturbing the balance of humans on earth. Such an act as striving for the well-being of one's self and others represents a strong message to the Gods, which can be interpreted as righteous and humble: He kept people from going to the underworld and thereby his father Apollo convinced Zeus to make his son Asclepius a God in the heavens.

This is why salvation is found in the attempt to live well and to create beauty, because it is an act of God-becoming through the experience of elation in the face of the absurdity placed deeply in our hearts by the Gods, as if to taunt us into asking the question: How will I justify the primordial anger I have for being human? We can decide to reach for elation by being bold enough to be honest in the face of God: I am angry at you but will become like you regardless- to do otherwise is to truly suffer.

The Great Nietzsche

psychology
1

About the Creator

James Sirois

I am a writer, film maker and traveler.

Reader insights

Be the first to share your insights about this piece.

How does it work?

Add your insights

Comments (1)

Sign in to comment
  • Jennifer Morrow12 months ago

    Some of the greatest words I’ve read in recent times. James, are you still creating?

Find us on social media

Miscellaneous links

  • Explore
  • Contact
  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Use
  • Support

© 2024 Creatd, Inc. All Rights Reserved.