by Dr Ghulam Mohammad Khan
Human relationships and interpretations offer temporary refuge from existential emptiness, yet cannot resolve the suffering born of nature’s indifference, the self’s loneliness, and the relentless search for meaning.
Though the very being of the self is dispersed across innumerable external associations, its nature is to distil itself from all of them in moments of loneliness or silence. In such moments, one feels, briefly, that these associations mean nothing, and that the only thing that seems true is the helplessness of the self.
The associations do not make being any less burdensome, or any more liveable or manageable. They humiliate: each time, they first make one forget, and then remind one, with a sense of complete surrender, that all of it was hogwash, a betrayal, a toil for meaning in the unassailable void of meaninglessness. Every knot in these associations tightens our embrace of chaos’s design.
The influential Canada-born American sociologist Erving Goffman’s view of social interaction offers a way to see this existential problem. He describes it as a kind of performance in which we occupy different roles, interact in order to become identifiable, and manage impressions.
In a different philosophical lexicon, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger traces how easily we disappear into the anonymous, unspecified world of associations and expectations, into perhaps everything we desire, think, or wish to be worthwhile. In this way, the self does not seem to own itself, even when it believes it does.
It slowly becomes what it is through the people it encounters, the expectations it engages with, the roles it performs, and the innumerable actions it enacts in order to be recognised by others. And beneath this complex system, these associations will always postpone the question rather than answer it.
The Self behind the Performance
I once returned after a full, busy day of spectacle: meeting friends, extravagant eating, and conversation. I had apparently been well received and well liked, had received the attention I must have desired, and had bought clothes and other things for the family.
Yet I sat by the windowsill alone that evening and suddenly felt that there was nothing there for me. Nothing during the day had really touched me. Remembering became strangely difficult; nothing could be recalled with any clarity. Only the loneliness remained.
What I wanted then was not a return to the associations that had absorbed my day, but something I could not name: something incomplete, something with no shape in thought or in language, something the world outside the window seemed to be hauntingly drowning me in.
It could not be shaped or grasped; it only melted into something strange, something like silence. Heidegger’s idea of anxiety was relevant here, not because I could say what frightened me, but because what I had believed to be normal and familiar momentarily became distant and unfamiliar.
The mind, the life, and the self-seem to belong, finally, to this wretched space, which might be silence itself, or the space between the superficial, noisy world of associations and the cold, indifferent universe of nothingness.
While the self remains mired in the former, it keeps looking towards the latter for an answer to a question it can never quite shape, in thought or in language.
Associations, therefore, cannot be called wholly necessary for being, not because they mislead, but because they cannot entirely spare the self the pangs of the inevitable existential vacuum and the cognitive fatigue that follows.
It is, however, somewhat comforting to say that these associations hold the self-back from falling into the abyss. This is right, but not always. Even as they keep the self from the intractable void, where all its wishes are devoured without response, they guarantee neither hope nor peace nor joy. They bring pain too. At times, they make the self-miserable and unbearable to itself, and not so different from the void.
The Permanence of Suffering
The problem with associations is that they promise no peace while one is engaged in them. The problem with the vacuum that drags the self into loneliness when it is left alone with itself is that it has always been silent and utterly indifferent. Both, therefore, make suffering permanent.
The absurdity of which Albert Camus wrote can be traced to this contradiction. We think we live within a system of meanings, yet we cannot make those meanings answer for what the self actually wants in its moment of loneliness.
There is a strange logic here: we go on asking questions even though we know the futility of meaning leaves them without credible answers, and we go on constructing what can never protect us from that futility.
This is not to say that our attachments are fundamentally meaningless or that our lives are pointless; it is that they are fundamentally incapable of reconciling us, once and for all, with the truth of being.
After every repeated attempt to solve the problem of life, the final answer is always suffering. Whatever the method, whatever the formula, the result does not change. Suffering is the result of the helplessness of the self before an indifferent nature.
Perhaps nature is conscious but not conscious of the being on earth. Or perhaps, even if it were, the self could not process it. Suffering emanates from the inherent, unavoidable disjunction between what the self essentially is and how nature exists around it.
In loneliness, nature and the universe only jade us with their cold indifference and make our insignificance feel as abysmal as their expanse, the terrible, never-ending expanse of the universe.
Nature’s Indifference
But there are interpretations of this darkness that sound cool in the light of day and drown in the nothingness of the dark. It is not inherently bad to interpret, to stitch the small gaps of darkness in oneself, for doing so may help one stay afloat for a while; but it is truly pathetic to believe these interpretations to be true.
Nothing can suture this darkness; nothing can close its wide, dark mouth; nothing is enough to fill it. Not morality, not evil, not the human drama of building systems of signification, not the pathetic associations that abandon one all of a sudden in a moment of loneliness.
It takes years, decades upon decades, to build these associations, and a single, solitary moment to wash them away, while the darkness, that unbearable, oppressive presence of nothingness, laughs.
Those who find meaning in these associations and interpretations, and who manage the burden of being, must therefore be extraordinarily lucky. It is not easy with a disgusting, raging mind.
I used to think the mind was carefully forged to be deeply processing, but then I began to suspect that it, too, is stuck in this loop of nothingness and meaninglessness, unable to be more than it is, just like the world outside it.
The real problem, therefore, is neither poor interpretation nor the associations themselves; it is the fatigue of processing nature’s cold indifference.
Though we have convinced ourselves, across hundreds of generations, with petty, glittering forms of interpretation, nature has never spoken and has never been kind. Instead of responding to what the self wants, it seems to conspire with our mediocre interpretations and make them more convincing.
Just as our attachments deceive, nature lends its own temporary colours to make us believe in beauty and meaning: the twilight sky and the moon, the flower swaying in the breeze, the scattered clouds across a clear sky, the gushing water.
The Italian poet and philosopher Giacomo Leopardi, in his reflections on nature, confronts the disquieting possibility that nature is indifferent to human happiness, neither deliberately cruel nor benevolently concerned with our suffering.
Perhaps this is its own strange way of making the enigma bearable. Or perhaps it wants a drama in which suffering looks aesthetic. Or perhaps it is, like the mind, caught in a loop and knows nothing beyond it.
(The authors teach at Government Degree College, Bandipora. Ideas are personal.)
