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Saturday, 15 October 2016
The phenomena of addiction, and we all have our addictions however we discount them, demonstrate the paradox involved in identification with the will. From 'I want and the truth is in my desire' to 'I need and the need overcomes me no matter how much I fight against it' is there really such a great distance? You might say it is a matter of how each fits into the ecology of the self, the entire internal politics of autonomy and heteronomy, of the good and the bad, the avowed and the secret, the public and the private, but this only points to the fact of a fundamental duality in matters of the self as will. Say that there is a party of sincerity and a party of authenticity and that these two parties are inseparable, that they each need the other in order to define themselves, and that the position of the self is that of an office for which they compete. A symmetrical treatment like this doesn't quite capture the essence of the thing, since the authentic is the side of transgression and passion, and thus of the courting of a surrender of autonomy and selfhood, traditionally of the bad. This authentic bad, unlike the good, does not pretend to be able to stand on its own, and the best case it can make, and it often makes it very well, is that the good is limited, insipid, and somehow stuck in a superficial relation to reality. The goals of the good can only be truly achieved by a descent into the bad. The ideal of the pure good will is of an impossible poise, and if it lacks the innate wisdom to resist the seductions of the bad then it would be better to yield to them fully in order to expose them and be less susceptible to them in the next round - which is also impossible unless it call in divine aid. And so it goes in endless ramifications. One can be busy enough with these dramas to consume several lifetimes, without noticing that what it actually at stake has been subtly pushed behind an experiential mediation and lost sight of, so that it can never be approached any closer no matter how many rounds of the game are played.
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