Musings on the Absurd: Temporality


Who am I, if not the sickly embodiment of my own temporality? The so-called “human condition”: that ultimately vain and ineffectual interruption of not-being, is a cruel dialectical joke; a pointless and irrevocable mistake brought about by a birth in which we had no say.

Imagine if, in the fetus stage, we possessed the power of foresight; the ability to see life as it is and all that awaited us– would we have been so repulsed, so indignant, and so disappointed at the grim prospects of existing as such that we would turn away and simply say, “nevermind!”?

That we cannot undo our birth is truly tragic. That we cannot step outside our own temporality — equally so; but this is all made worse in light of the fact that one cannot step outside one’s own conscious relation to temporality itself.

If we must have been born, would it not have been better to enter this world as a lower-form of life? To partake in the rapture of existing sans consciousness of our own temporality — that which grabs hold of the paradoxically absurd relationship between our own finite being contra infinite possibility and becoming?

Our existence is the most disconsolate, dreary, and disappointing. For we are the wretched slaves of time itself — forever caught in its indifferent whirlwinds – tossed about aimlessly between an unfortunate birth and an untimely death. The only solace is beyond our reach: to have never been at all.

*****

Temporal structure of the Self:

My facticity: I am always already thrown into a world; I always already was what I am.

My possibilities: I am always ahead of myself in such a way that I am the projection of my ownmost possibilities ahead of me.

My existence: I am always already in the world, always already what I am/was/will be, and always ahead of myself projecting my own self onto my own possibilities.

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