the end of man

“Just make a choice.” Radical freedom comes from an understanding of “existence precedes essence.” We can only be free to choose who we are once we understand we are nothing. The choice to be radically free is the first choice of an unending series of choices one must make. The number, weight, and complexity of these choices do not diminish. Still, we make that first choice to be free. Before it, no choice has ever been made. Most people die before ever making a choice.

So then, how does one come to understand the truth that there is no truth? Man must be in nature. Man in his most natural state, free from all but himself, is man in nature. From nature we have built abstractions, labels to escape the existential. Outside of nature, you are numb to the ever pressing and dreadful questions of existential weight. You become a mummy of a man, wrapped in the labels of society. But in nature, what is a man but dust from dust. Only in nature are you truly free to see the world and yourself, nothing.

See, society is a set of abstractions from nature, built on the foundational structures of the world. It is an amalgamation such that the truths become convoluted, enough to the point we can mimic existence without its weight. You can claim a semblance of meaning, perhaps great meaning if you collect enough labels. But it is nothing more than the wrappings of a skeleton.

Yet man must still be in the world. Man was not meant to live in the cave. Has the underground man not proven as much? Zarathustra comes down from the mountain, lives in the world, returns to his cave, and comes out again. Take two fundamental truths, abstract upon them, and you get a construct: a custom, an institution, a society. However, by experiencing society and taking that construct apart, we can understand the fundamental truths it was derived from, and discover new ones that were never put into it. From nature, in the world, to nature: from nature we are born, in the world to experience, and in nature to understand.

This is why the greatest of men, most creative of men, are men of nature. Creativity is the arrangement of an assortment of building blocks in a manner never done before. However, this requires a fundamental understanding of every block of every kind (at least of the ones we put to use). Such is the reason the greatest minds (creatives) studied math, wrote poetry, built sculptures, and taught philosophy.

The world is made of fundamental truths, many of which we cannot grasp. We must, then, grasp as many abstractions, as low as possible, across many fields to derive the sets of fundamental truths upon which they were built. Without a hold of these fundamental truths, we can only work with man-made abstractions and be blinded by abstracted fixation (functional fixation).

Now more than ever, nature and creativity is at risk. AI can give you the blocks of abstractions and even arrange them, but it lacks the fundamental depth of understanding that creativity requires, and without that depth it can only fall into the predictable state of functional fixation.

The cure is twofold: be in nature and study those who were in nature. Only a creative who has experienced radical freedom of inspiration could write the following: “...one can still hardly reject the idea of being a mere incarnation, a mere mouthpiece, a mere medium... Everything happens involuntarily in the highest degree, yet in a tempestuous feeling of freedom, of being unconditioned, of power, of divinity. The involuntariness of the image and metaphor is the most remarkable of all... everything offers itself as the nearest, most appropriate, simplest expression” - Nietzsche. The profundity with which he stated thus and subtitled Zarathustra “A Book for All and None,” is beyond measure.

My [[im just falling for an indefinite time|poems]] the embodiment of these two realizations. Nobody understands the imagery in them but me, even I find myself unable to recall at times the meaning imbued. Yet they are for everyone, because the images come to me as revelations, the purest form of expression I have. I find my hands becoming a conduit for the ink to flow, for the unconscious to violently manifest into the world; "The whole of Zarathustra is an explosion of forces that have been accumulating for decades” - Nietzsche.

This then is man, as free as he was meant to be: to experience and reflect thereupon. “We must constantly give birth to our thoughts out of our pain, and nurture them with everything we have” - Nietzsche. We must remain vigilant yet free, for when the wind of inspiration comes, we must be ready to fly away with it. “Those who feel the impulse to pursue the path of enlightenment should immediately take the step, and not defer it while they attend to all the other things on their mind... There will be no end to it all, and the day of decision will never come.” - Kenkō

My greatest desire is to spend every day learning and experiencing, developing my understanding and collection of blocks, so that I may, in moments of inspiration, architect a marvel the world has never seen.