Criticality: the Ambiguous | Archetypical Philosophies 10
a Short Essay for the Modern Existentialist
1 | The Origin; the End
And so, we stand upon the precipice—at the very end of our journey. We’ve heard and we’ve witnessed this myth—our story—buried deep in the midst of human wisdom and tradition, its origins now lost to the mists of time. We hold in our hands now an object of great power—a Dialectical Cube which contains a brute logic capable of placing and revealing any mind within its bounds. An architecture woven from pure fiction and fantasy; an idea made real through the collective exercise of Agency.
Within the structure of Sartrean-Beauvoirian theory, we find this concept of:
Ambiguïté: an equivocation, or a double-entendre
A concept which bears French-Existentialist connotation, and which states the following:
The human being is not a static Object—not an immovable Being which constitutes a fixture within a void of empty Nothing. Instead, the human being is a movement; a vector, and a trajectory—ever-moving, ever-changing, ever-growing, and ever-evolving.
The human being is not a static Object, but instead is a volatile Subject; an actor and an Agent born as a Nothing thrown into a world filled with Everything—with Being—and, as such being originally undefined, thus becomes responsible for defining its own self.
And so, we privileged few who realize and acknowledge our own fundamental Ambiguity—our nature as volatile and changing Agents in this world—understand and embrace this Subjectivity. To hold an attitude of Ambiguity thus simply just means that:
One should remain open to new information; to novel interpretations and the re-evaluation of one’s own knowledge and data—at least… for so long as it remains the case that one’s goal is to actually know truths.
2 | Where True Freedom Lies
The human being is a movement—a life, a vector which travels beginning-to-end. The human being is a movement—and the only things which cease to move are those which are dying or dead.
And so, the Ambiguous is he who believes that there are two kinds of people in this world:
The trusting, and the curious.
There are those who make their movement toward the edge of the Cube; who invest themselves wholly in the stories they’ve been told, placing their faith in the inherent truth of a myth once-written by man (either by themselves, or by someone else). And then, there are those who make their movement towards the origin—the center—who place their faith in what they themselves discover and understand. In this way, they transcend this human struggle to find canon, and instead embrace the perpetual incompleteness of their Ambiguous nature.
To attempt, after all, to take a corner of the Cube and thus declare that philosophy to be correct… is to adopt a form of dogma—to trust a truth to be inherent. To simply trust is an ossified rigidity—an unwillingness to update one’s opinions even in the face of data which might tell one that those opinions could be wrong.
To trust is to be like the rock of the earth—strong and unyielding in the face of great pressure… until the day when the strain grows too great, and the brittle stone begins to crack and break.
To be curious instead is to flow like water—flexible and versatile in the face of obstacles, and to continuously explore the ambiguity of possibility in order to find a path forward.
Thus, the Ambiguous is the Critical—he who unshackles himself from dogma through his willingness to update his opinions. The Critical is free because he is not bound by the rigidity of adherence to stone-truths, but instead is able to admit his faults and errors in good faith, and thereafter to change and alter his philosophy to accommodate the discovery of new information.
And so, the Critical finds his place at the center of the Cube, for he is the one who knows and understands that the trusting are those who’ve identified some truths—and, thereafter, have chosen to dig themselves into their own corners in order to defend their trust. They cling to and worship those truths as absolute, universal guiding principles which can never be contradicted, believing in their hearts that they have no need for curiosity—that they need seek truth no longer… because they’ve already found it. The Critical, however, knows and understands that this is not the case—that, to the best of his knowledge… absolute, final, Metaphysically Objective truths are not accessible to Man or mankind.
In the words of Nietzsche:
The truth is not a thing so weak that it need be defended.
The truth, after all, is a thing which is obvious and plain for everyone to see—or, at least, should be so to the curious and Critical mind.
Philosophy: a mindset. An attitude.
The way that a person chooses to see the world, and therefore to approach living their life.
Αρχή | archí: origin
Τύπος | týpos: form
An Archetypical Philosophy is the bare-bones, logical basis of a person’s mindset or attitude, inferred from observation of the way in which they choose to live their life.