The yearning for disembodied existence

*"Candy says, I've come to hate this body and all that it requires in this world"*

The human body demands work for it's maintenance. Difficult to say if women were considered second class citizens because their social roles relegated them to care and nurture the material existence of the members of the household, or if the platonic disgust for material reality was an extension of their misoginy. The world of politics and ideas, over which men ruled, was the important one, and our embodied existence, a mere hindrance in the journey of the soul.

The power of volition, unique of the levers of the mind capable of slightly modifying the position of muscle, they wanted to be supreme. As such invented all kinds of magicks and rituals, falsely attempting to establish that superiority, to no avail. Because matter is not to be subordinate to a single individual's mind. The influence goes in the opposite direction, with drunkenness and disease impairing and conditioning mental functions. This desire has never left us regardless. Even for most material atheists, the aspiration to become a disembodied ghost in the machine is more than apparent. It's in fact the final goal, the horrific endgame.

Many have taken a jab against this notion, Nietzsche and his hammer most prominently, but I find Mishima and his mysticism of flesh and steel the most iconic (blahblah you'd like this guy). Being a writer, rejected all kinds of intellectualization as intrinsically alienating from direct experience, and the moments of extreme physical exertion as the only road to salvation. Everything we define as eternal and unchanging is necessarily a product of the imagination, since the world is defined by constant change. Didn't spare him from the despair of seeing his own body deteriorate with age, as it had become of so much value in his philosophy, and it came with certain warmongering tendencies.

The mistake is that the poison was infecting all the same because it unadvertedly accepts the false dychotomy. The platonic dualistic ontology of opposing mind and matter. Yet everything we perceive and know about matter is also an appearance on the mind, as much as the mind's contents get influences by the brain's physiology. The famed inner kingdom is not detached from anything else, but in conversation with it all.

Give a bar of gold as an example. The modern platonist would say the actual metal isn't important, but that the social construction is what gives it value and makes it function like it functions. The modern antiplatonist would say the value is an invention, society is crazy, it's just a malleable metal. Both would be wrong. The properties of the actual material and the ideoform that replaces it, both are needed for a complete understanding of the totality.

The vessel we are for the untainted souls we believe we are. When will the prospect of uploading our consciousness to a digital circus become unappealing in it's deeply understood absurdity? When will we make peace with the having to cook and shower and clean and shit and fuck and heave as if liberation liberated from the nominal chopping of the wood and carrying of the water? And when will we stop sending stupid teenagers to take refuge in the contingency of a figurative inner bliss like mythical lotus eaters? Because at that point of putting yourself to sleep at the cost of everything held dear, better to just do drugs.

Bibliography

1. The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt

2. The End of Faith, Sam Harris & Nihil Unbound, Ray Brassier

3. Sun and steel, Yukio Mishima, Intro

4. The Case Against Reality, Donald Hoffman

5. Das Kapital, Marx, Vol. I

6. The Last Messiah, Zappfe

7. SOMA (2015) & The Odyssey, Homer