Readings: Those Mean Ol' Existential Blues

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Below are several short excerpts from three books that I am currently reading simultaneously. I was struck by how certain of the themes in these disparate volumes seem to strike sympathetic chords. I’ll kick it off with the following quote by Simone Weil from First and Last Notebooks:

Everything that is in the world is conditional.

That sounds harmless enough, even kind of obvious, until you start to consider some of its theoretical implications. Consider it, for instance, in the light of these excerpts from David L. Clark’s essay, “Otherwise than God: Schelling, Marion” *

Ineradicable melancholy is Schelling’s name for the underlying rapport that beings share with what conditions them, but which also forever eludes them.

And,

Life is no more and no less than the originary incorporation of its ground, the binding of itself to the absent alterity that sets existent beings on their perilous, mortal way. Ineradicable melancholy names the absolute conditionality of life, the subjectless, structural ‘recognition’ that life has from the start ‘lost control’ over its condition.

In the series of notebooks collected in one volume under the title, Some of the Dharma, Jack Kerouac makes the melancholy observation that:

It’s like we were all in jail and I’ve received instructions on how to escape. However I’m the only one now who realizes we’re all in jail, the others don’t know it yet they have an uneasy feeling that something is wrong but they put on gay fronts.

Kerouac—whose musing are heavily influenced by his contemplation of Buddhist scriptures—by equating human life to jail-time, implies that mere existence entails a kind of transgression, or guilt, resulting in the pain of an involuntary confinement.

Following Simone Weil, who sees this fundamental transgression as a theft, maybe we can understand Kerouac’s “jail” as a kind of “debtors’ prison”:

We have stolen a little of God’s being to make it ours.
God has made us a gift of it. But we have stolen it.
We must return it.

If only we could bring about Kerouac’s jail-break, we could, perhaps, begin to make this restitution.

But, while Simone Weil sees this feeling of conditioned freedom and existential debt as being owed to God, David L. Clark, explains F.W. Schelling’s interpretation that:

[H]umankind can never wholly possess itself or live entirely within itself, because it is always in arrears vis-à-vis its determining grounds.

Perhaps it is that which Jack Kerouac characterizes as “putting on a gay face” that Simone Weil sees as “lying to oneself” in extending the trope of existence as a borrowing transaction in the following:

The things of this world can serve as a kind of bank for the portion of our energy at our disposal – and it can be stored in them and even greatly increased by lucky speculations – but only at the price of lying to oneself.

Consciously or not, we intuit our indebtedness to the ground (or God) that gives us existence. Defensively, we create for ourselves the illusion of an autonomous self, either by self-delusion (Weil), or by self-distraction (Kerouac). Schelling, according to Clark, would have it that there is no exit through which to escape from these mean ol’ been-down-so-long-it-looks-like-up-to-me blues:

Life is the fundamental ontological structure of existent beings, whose pattern lies in God. If it were not for their agonistic and, in a sense, contingent struggle with the dark ground, these beings – divine and human alike – would instantly fade into the bloodless abstractions for which Schelling castigates European philosophy. Without the contrasting medium of the ground, without being conditioned by the ground’s otherness, nothing could ex-ist or stand-out, not even God. Animated and actualized beings are dependent beings: this is the lively equation that Schelling’s essay on freedom writes and rewrites.

Simone Weil speaks of this kind of thing elsewhere in terms of the need for obedience to necessity.

My personal observation is this: Only on Calvary do we see the tableau—sans any fancy philosophical birdsong—of the cost of true Freedom.
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*Clark’s essay appears in the anthology, Trajectories of Mysticism in Theory and Literature, edited by Philip Leonard


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