The sickness unto death is despair. Despair from failing to align ourselves with the eternal, with the fact that our life, our existence is eternal. Combined with the realization of the eternal reoccurrence of all events, we can see how strong is the urge to self-extinction.  The despair which proclaims “no more! not this life! Anything but what I am!” Happiness comes when we our briefly reconciled with the eternal, and wish for the perpetuation of life. Despair is the revulsion, the desire to escape our existence.

I am convinced that you and I will live out this exact same existence again and again forever. I am convinced, not as the fanatic who must believe despite all evidence to the contrary, but as the scientist can be convinced of some physical reality like global warming. If the universe is sufficiently large and uniform, and assuming quantum processes are in place, there are only a finite number of configurations in a given volume of space. The reoccurrence follows merely by chance. Add in some inflation cosmology for good measure, and we have a system that mimics any biological system under conditions of evolution – that is to say, as an algorithm. Designing an eye may seem impossible, but once nature has struck upon it, it will continue to traverse that same ground. We are the well worn path of future universes.

Biological? Yes. Meaning self-perpetuation in the face of self-extinction. Travel far enough in space and eventually you will begin to encounter similar beings that look and act like you. Eventually, you will come across your exact doppelgänger, matching your life moment by moment.

I am a hard core materialist. Any system designed to appear the same as me, shall be judged as me. Descartes missed a step. It is not enough to think about existence. One must seize existence, affirm it. Reject the sickness unto death.

The agony and revulsion of the eternal comes in full force. You mean a person born into slavery and dies in slavery, must live that enslaved existence for all eternity? Yes it does. But it also means justice is real, even if it is wanting. Wait! The child who falls ill, and dies from a painful cancer, are they destined to live the same fate forever? No, no! This can’t be right! This must be hell!”

This is the sickness unto death. We must always guard against this despair, this secret yearning to murder our own souls in the hopes of some unfounded liberation. You are eternal. Your life, perhaps a miracle or a curse. Respect it. Seize it.

There are benefits to philosophical misreadings. Ayn Rand made a career out of misreading Kant, building an entire philosophical universe to refute something Kant never said nor implied. Now, whenever I happen to glimpse aspiring John Galts pop up from time to time like so many underground revolutionaries, I am left with the amusing image of Ayn Rand as some giant Samuel Johnson monster kicking synthetic a-priori pink unicorns in the ass. I refute thee thus! This too is comedy.

The largest benefit, by far, is inversion, or if you like, comedic inversion. Why? Or better still, why not?  Inversion allows one to traverse the flowing currents of thought left untravelled by the great minds, of possibilities unexplored, territories unclaimed, to reach beyond the tyranny of settled ideas and expert consensus.

For present purposes, I am interested in Herbert Spencer and his notion of a liberal or rational utilitarianism. Spencer’s (willful?) misreading of Kant opens up the amusing possibility of an inverted reading of Spencer qua Kant. Allow me the indulgence, for it is an idea not so clear in my own head, and therefore entirely valid as an exercise in constraint. I mean philosophical constraint.

“Every man is free to do as he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of another man.” Spencer’s maxim extols the virtues of “Negative Liberty” – the absence of constraint, state interference, a zero sum game between equality and Liberty. But it also involves a sleight of hand. Negative Liberty subsumes the entirety of Liberty itself if it is to be instructive (read: moral). All Liberty is negative. Positive Liberty, that hypothetical other serving as mere intellectual abstraction, is effaced, banished into the rhelm of pink unicorns in order to turn Spencer’s maxim into a categorical imperative.  And rational too! These are the indefensible moral rules created for perfect moral human beings. Utilitarianism (teleological) becomes concrete and objective (deontological) as soon as all moral choices are willed into either/or forms of the universal law. Choose or die.

Wait? Did I just imply two competing ethical systems are one and the same? It seems I did.

I push this joke no further. There is a danger in subjecting everything to inversion. Push things too far, and philosophy become mere rhetoric.  And objectivism is actually supernaturalism, and empiricism is idealism, and communism is fascism, and capitalism is socialism, and enough. That joke isn’t funny anymore.

Hopefully, my amusing exercise was not entirely in vain. Spencer’s ambiguity is ours, a tension between essential choices and accidental exigencies glossing over a confusion about the trade offs between Liberty and equality. Think of what informs our contemporary moral debates. What is the right way to eat? To think? To act? To seek pleasure? To behave? To dress? To look?  As the number of potential freedoms increases, so to the individual becomes the subject of increased doubt and debate. The individual is not a problem for modern society, but the problem. Quintessential.

From this ground, a thousand ethical formulas now spring to life. The ancient problem “What is the good life?” becomes “What is the good life for me?”. “What is the essence of man?” now becomes “Who am I?” We no longer seek a universal ethic but rather inhabit an ethical universe. Why then do we not simply apply some much needed liberal tolerance to account for such diversity of taste, creed, belief, expression, sexuality, etc.? Surely the principle of negative liberty should apply to the level of personal expression as well, and we should simply accept this diversity and relativism with a healthy bit of liberal tolerance? And yet we do not, for else how does we explain the increasing splintering, factionalism and tribalism of our day.

So it would seem that negative liberty is not so deeply cherished, and survives more as a kind of moral reprove masking a deeper mistrust of our fellow citizens. We suspect that ethical diversity threatens that older, more entrenched morality that demands that the individual conform to a uniformity of type. It is Aristotelian throughout, the idea that a person must become what they are by nature compelled to be. In truth, the liberal ethic only penetrates the surface, while the deeper currents of Western morality do not allow such a tolerant stance. It is our inability to rid ourselves once and for all of this belief in “essences”, that prevents us from adressing a true Liberty, free from the burden of formalism.

It is not at all clear why the phenomenological experience should take the Self as its starting point of investigation. The Self seems to be an, as yet, untested hypothesis, itself in need of empirical justification. Far from being foundational, we are now aware how late the concept of the Self is in human development (see the work of Daniel Dennett and Thomas Metzinger).

It is no longer satisfactory to speak of the Self with one voice. Rather, there is a plurality of selves, multiple voices, overlapping and discontinuous, a map without definitive boundaries or horizons of experience. There is, first of all, the so-called “minimal self”, primitive, immediate, rooted in the neurological structure of the brain. There is the “narrative self” acting as a continuity of memory and personal identity, a rich tapestry of stories, encounters, reflections, deceptions. There is the “social self” mirroring and absorbing its surroundings, the environment of culture, beliefs, norms. It would seem that our basic starting point was no longer a single point at all, but a diffuse, decentered mode of experience.

Still, the desire for unity remains. It is hoped that if we could only discard what is secondary and inconsequential, we will arrive, at last, at a basic substratum, an immediate or primal constitution that we call the “real” Self. It is hard to rid ourselves of the metaphysical conception of “essence”.

It is to this end that AI mapping hopes to unveil the “essence” of cognition, and incidentally, also while it will fail for the problem of the Self is not one of essences, but rather of discontinuities.

The notion of an “essential self” would seem to involve not a single, fixed element by which we can identify and name something, but rather, a way of relating to things. The problem with such an approach, as Derrida points out, is that it ensnares us in the metaphysical quagmire, that of “self-presenting = the present”. Moreover, phenomenological experience assures that no single identity could exist across a given amount of time. Instead of a Self we have what might be called self-situations. At best, we might hope to replace the notion of the essential with something akin to an organic biological conception.