One the things I have been thinking more frequently of in Paris is the idea of lifeworld, which I have read in the works of the philosopher Edmund Husserl. My take of the concept of lifeworld is a bit simplified. It is for me the subjective reality of a consciousness taken as a complex yet appearing as a constructed whole universe that is the information of what is real to a person at the moment of recollection and engaged action, and ultimately his choices.
A bit obtuse? A lifeworld is my truth, verified by my own consciousness, and where I shall draw my knowledge of who I and the world around me. This is not an aggregate philosophy, not even a complete credo of faith -it is the truth that matters to me at the moment when I need it, namely at those moments when I think of the future, before the moment of choice.
The lifeworld is the existential summary of what I have experienced and what I can hope to experience. My lifeworld is, first and foremost, the universe of the possible, the probable, given the knowledge of what I am capable. The lifeworld is the personal truth which Friedrich Nietzsche wrote of as "truth that one can be dare, truth that one can bear". Because truth is never always easy: they are hard chunks to digest.
For example, without a mirror or others to tell you what you look like, the whole knowledge of who you are lies in a visual and tactile spectacle of your front end and limbs (look down) and the tactile sensations that make up your backside. The eye, so they say, cannot be the object of its own sight. Consciousness is also the same: both can only be intuited and perceived indirectly. In other words what I look like really belongs to Others who see me! Because it is so much impractical to look in a reflection every minute of our lives to verify we are there.
Yet that is what a lifeworld does: it makes a picture of me as seen and felt by Others and by my own self-experience - a intuited image of who I am, a composite projection, a constructed self-portrait of what I am probable at that given moment. This is quite easy to prove. How many times did I look into the weighing scale and discovered that I weighed more than I thought I should? How many times have we wished we had smaller hips, or lighter complexion or better income? That is the lifeworld: an expectation based on an intuition of what must be or probably be me.
Now what makes me think of such a queer idea in this famously romantic and beautiful city? The idea was fired off by the sculptures and monuments of great men that dot the landscape. I found them in their niches at Hotel de Ville, astride bronze and stone horses on pedestals, or staring down at me from the pediments and roofs of the Louvre, and even gazing back at me from painted eyes in museums. Finally I saw them in the tombs, effigies, death masks and books. To speak plainly, I saw lifeworld at the fact of death. All these men and women are all dead. They no longer have probabilities, no extensions, no choices. They have become facts, although not everything can be known.
But I, still existing as of this writing, am still alive. And my life is buoyed up by my lifeworld, my possibilities, the fuzziness of my future choices and the terrible truth that I cannot escape the absurd fact that I must choose.
Leonardo, near his death (at 67), wrote: It seems all my life I have just been preparing for death...as a good day deserves good sleep...that a life well used begets comfortable death.
But of course, even leaving behind wills or legacies cannot deprive us of "inutile passion" or pointlessness of our Deaths. Many times I have seen this in Pere Lachaise or Cimeterie Montparnasse: our deaths are not ours but belongs to our aggrieved ones. The only lifeworld left at the end of our tether is the fervent hope that we continue to exist after our expiration. Religion says this is the afterlife. The State says this is our legacy. As an artist I hope that my work shall matter to future generations...but what assurances do we have, really? I mean in 4 billion years, the Sun will eventually die and the earth will be destroyed. What legacy is left when my work - and everyone else's is shredded to molecules, atoms and energy? (My atheism stems from that cosmic fact - our notions of afterlives and heavens and what not will be but stardust at the end of a cosmic cycle- why bother with deities?)
YET, what the idea of lifeworld does is to do away with all our hopes of extension or of perpetuity. Lifeworld is the reality, THE reality of our present, the now, which is occluded both by memory and anticipation. Well to say it in another way: what I am experiencing at the moment is a spectrum of memory-projection: who I think I am and where I think I should become. And this experience of lifeworld is not a grand perspective of our history and dreams, it is a fluid, ever-changing, ever-responsive, autonomous episode of now, then now and now. And "now" is just a property of "here". I can never be at a certain time without being in a certain place, and moving at a certain rate of distance and duration. It is not a matter of saying, that it is midnight, and I am in a chaise lounge in Paris. Rather if appears like: the sensation of sitting on a chaise lounge with a darkened sky before me, sleepiness setting in. Which is an episode that will pass as soon as I decide to sleep. Then, clarity settles with wakefulness: the experience of last night is only now a memory - like I have transited from one space-time to another. Even my sensations have changed, as I no longer feel sleepy. Am I the same person as last night? Of course not. My lifeworld is no longer that of a sleepy person in Paris.
This is what the Buddhists might say is the "impermanence" of self. In fact the person who wrote the first paragraph of this essay is no longer the same person who is writing these lines, inasmuch as you are no longer the same reader who began his perusal and the one raising eyebrows at this incredulous statement.
So what is the point of this essay? Nothing but an exercise of being aware of the transitoriness of existence and the probabilities that surround our own lives. It may seem that we are like the electrons - we are never in one place, we are in a cloud of possibilities. The lifeworld is that cloud. That cloud is us.
A bit obtuse? A lifeworld is my truth, verified by my own consciousness, and where I shall draw my knowledge of who I and the world around me. This is not an aggregate philosophy, not even a complete credo of faith -it is the truth that matters to me at the moment when I need it, namely at those moments when I think of the future, before the moment of choice.
The lifeworld is the existential summary of what I have experienced and what I can hope to experience. My lifeworld is, first and foremost, the universe of the possible, the probable, given the knowledge of what I am capable. The lifeworld is the personal truth which Friedrich Nietzsche wrote of as "truth that one can be dare, truth that one can bear". Because truth is never always easy: they are hard chunks to digest.
For example, without a mirror or others to tell you what you look like, the whole knowledge of who you are lies in a visual and tactile spectacle of your front end and limbs (look down) and the tactile sensations that make up your backside. The eye, so they say, cannot be the object of its own sight. Consciousness is also the same: both can only be intuited and perceived indirectly. In other words what I look like really belongs to Others who see me! Because it is so much impractical to look in a reflection every minute of our lives to verify we are there.
Yet that is what a lifeworld does: it makes a picture of me as seen and felt by Others and by my own self-experience - a intuited image of who I am, a composite projection, a constructed self-portrait of what I am probable at that given moment. This is quite easy to prove. How many times did I look into the weighing scale and discovered that I weighed more than I thought I should? How many times have we wished we had smaller hips, or lighter complexion or better income? That is the lifeworld: an expectation based on an intuition of what must be or probably be me.
Now what makes me think of such a queer idea in this famously romantic and beautiful city? The idea was fired off by the sculptures and monuments of great men that dot the landscape. I found them in their niches at Hotel de Ville, astride bronze and stone horses on pedestals, or staring down at me from the pediments and roofs of the Louvre, and even gazing back at me from painted eyes in museums. Finally I saw them in the tombs, effigies, death masks and books. To speak plainly, I saw lifeworld at the fact of death. All these men and women are all dead. They no longer have probabilities, no extensions, no choices. They have become facts, although not everything can be known.
But I, still existing as of this writing, am still alive. And my life is buoyed up by my lifeworld, my possibilities, the fuzziness of my future choices and the terrible truth that I cannot escape the absurd fact that I must choose.
Leonardo, near his death (at 67), wrote: It seems all my life I have just been preparing for death...as a good day deserves good sleep...that a life well used begets comfortable death.
But of course, even leaving behind wills or legacies cannot deprive us of "inutile passion" or pointlessness of our Deaths. Many times I have seen this in Pere Lachaise or Cimeterie Montparnasse: our deaths are not ours but belongs to our aggrieved ones. The only lifeworld left at the end of our tether is the fervent hope that we continue to exist after our expiration. Religion says this is the afterlife. The State says this is our legacy. As an artist I hope that my work shall matter to future generations...but what assurances do we have, really? I mean in 4 billion years, the Sun will eventually die and the earth will be destroyed. What legacy is left when my work - and everyone else's is shredded to molecules, atoms and energy? (My atheism stems from that cosmic fact - our notions of afterlives and heavens and what not will be but stardust at the end of a cosmic cycle- why bother with deities?)
YET, what the idea of lifeworld does is to do away with all our hopes of extension or of perpetuity. Lifeworld is the reality, THE reality of our present, the now, which is occluded both by memory and anticipation. Well to say it in another way: what I am experiencing at the moment is a spectrum of memory-projection: who I think I am and where I think I should become. And this experience of lifeworld is not a grand perspective of our history and dreams, it is a fluid, ever-changing, ever-responsive, autonomous episode of now, then now and now. And "now" is just a property of "here". I can never be at a certain time without being in a certain place, and moving at a certain rate of distance and duration. It is not a matter of saying, that it is midnight, and I am in a chaise lounge in Paris. Rather if appears like: the sensation of sitting on a chaise lounge with a darkened sky before me, sleepiness setting in. Which is an episode that will pass as soon as I decide to sleep. Then, clarity settles with wakefulness: the experience of last night is only now a memory - like I have transited from one space-time to another. Even my sensations have changed, as I no longer feel sleepy. Am I the same person as last night? Of course not. My lifeworld is no longer that of a sleepy person in Paris.
This is what the Buddhists might say is the "impermanence" of self. In fact the person who wrote the first paragraph of this essay is no longer the same person who is writing these lines, inasmuch as you are no longer the same reader who began his perusal and the one raising eyebrows at this incredulous statement.
So what is the point of this essay? Nothing but an exercise of being aware of the transitoriness of existence and the probabilities that surround our own lives. It may seem that we are like the electrons - we are never in one place, we are in a cloud of possibilities. The lifeworld is that cloud. That cloud is us.
That is no longer me standing in front of Hotel de Ville. That is a record of light that reflected off me and that is registered digitally in pixels. This picture came into being around a week ago.
RSS Feed