Degradation through Work

Diposkan pada oleh Skeptical Inquirer

Since I will not die right away, nor regain my innocence, going through the same routine motions every day is sheer madness.

Banality must be overcome at all costs and the way cleared for transfiguration. How sad to see men bypass themselves, neglect their own destiny instead of rekindling the light they carry within them or getting drunk on their abysmal darkness!

Why not wrench from suffering all that it can yield, why not tend a smile until we have reached all the way back to its vital springs?

We all have hands, yet no one thinks of using them to convey absolute expression through their delicate movements. We admire hands in paintings, we love to talk about their meaning, but if they must express our own inner tragedy, they remain stiff and awkward. To have a spectral hand, transparent like an immaterial reflection, nervous, tense as if in a final spasm.

I FEEL IN ME a strange restlessness, growing and dilating like a regret, taking roots like sadness. Is it fear of my problematic futuconsciousness fear of my own anxiety? I am overcome by anxiety about my own fatality. Could I go on living with these obsessions?

Is all of this life or an absurd dream?

In me is wrought the grotesque fantasy of a demon. The demonic character of this world is concentrated in my anxiety a mingling of regrets, twilight dreams, sadness, and unreality. It will not be the perfume of flowers that I scatter on the earth, but smoke and dust as after a great cataclysm!

Degradation through Work

Men generally work too much to be themselves. Work is a curse which man has turned into pleasure. To work for work’s sake, to enjoy a fruitless endeavor, to imagine that you can fulfill yourself through assiduous labor—all that is disgusting and incomprehensible. Permanent and uninterrupted work dulls, trivializes, and depersonalizes. Work displaces man’s center of interest from
the subjective to the objective realm of things. In consequence, man no longer takes an interest in his own destiny but focuses on facts and things.

In the modern world, work signifies a purely external activity; man no longer makes himself through it, he makes things. That each of us must have a career, must enter upon a certain form of life which probably does not suit us, illustrates work’s tendency to dull the spirit. Man sees work as beneficial to his being, but his fervor reveals his penchant for evil. In work, man forgets himself; yet his forgetfulness is not simple and naive, but rather akin to stupidity.

Through work, man has moved from subject to object; in other words, he has become a deficient animal who has betrayed his origins. Instead of living for himself—not selfishly but growing spiritually—man has become the wretched, impotent slave of external reality. Where have they all gone; ecstasy, vision, exaltation?

Where is the supreme madness or the genuine pleasure of evil? The negative pleasure one finds in work partakes of the poverty and banality of daily life, its pettiness. Why not abandon this futile work and begin anew without repeating the same wasteful mistake? Is subjective consciousness.

I AM LURED by faraway distances, the immense void I project upon the world. A feeling of emptiness grows in me; it infiltrates my body like a light and impalpable fluid. In its progress, like a dilation into infinity, I perceive the mysterious presence of the most contradictory feelings ever to inhabit a human soul. I am simultaneously happy and unhappy, exalted and depressed, overcome by both pleasure and despair in the most contradictory harmonies. I am so cheerful and yet so sad that my tears reflect at once both heaven and earth. If only for the joy of my sadness, I wish there were no death on this earth.

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Diterbitkan oleh Skeptical Inquirer

• Central For Inquiry (CFI) • Skeptical Inquirer • Free Inquiry • Point of Inquiry ------------------------------------------------------------ 1. Yang nyata ialah manusia itu sendiri bukan tuhan, bukan manusia pikiran tuhan, tetapi tuhan adalah pikiran manusia, agama tidak merubah kenyataan dan mengukir sejarah, tetapi manusia itu sendiri yang merubah dan mengukirnya. Bukan tuhan yang menciptakan manusia tetapi tuhan adalah angan-angan manusia. Agama tidak merubah kenyataan tetapi menusia bisa merubah kenyataan. 2. Agama ialah proyeksi manusia : tuhan, neraka, surga, malaikat. Kenapa? Karena manusia butuh tempat untuk mencurahkan keluhan karena dunia tanpa hati, jadi penderitaan tempat lahirnya tuhan. Dengan demikian agama disebut keterasingan manusia dari kehidupan karena struktur masyarakat tidak mengizinkan secara penuh perealisasian diri sendiri, sehingga manusia membangun kerajaan angan-angan (agama). Dalam kenyataan manusia menderita lalu ia mengharapkan surga 3. kenapa agama khayalan, karena agama tidak inderawi, sedangkan manusia inderawi, manusia penuh dengan kepastian sedangkan agama berbau unsur spekulatif, unsur yang tidak bisa diterima secara ilmiah 4. Jadi agama dan tuhan ialah ciptaan manusia itu sendiri, tetapi manusia itu sendiri lupa dengan ciptaanya (seperti pada zaman jahiliyah dahulu sebelum nabi muhamad dating : orang-orang kafir zaman dahulu mengukir tuhan dari kayu dan batu, yang kemudian disembahnya, sama seperti kita kini yang memproyeksikan tuhan lalu menyembahnya). Agama penyembahan tuhan terhadap dirinya sendiri. Agama penyembahan manusia terhadap ciptaanya sendiri 5. Sehingga khayalan atau angan-angan itu mempunyai eksistensi realitas yang membuat manusia takut dan harus menyembahnya dan tuhan mempunyai hakikat lain yang manusia harus sembah. Sifat-sifat itu yang membuat manusia egois. 6. Penderitaan manusia ialah tempat lahirnya tuhan, penderitaan yang memaksa manusia mengasingkan diri ke dalam agama, itulah dasar yang menyebabkan manusia merasa butuh agama dan tuhan 7. Teologi harus diganti menjadi antropologi dan agama ialah candu rakyat. 8. Kritik agama hanya meruska bunga khayalan pada rantai, bukan bunganya yang harus dipatahkan tetapi rantai itu sendiri. Rantai (factor yang menyebabkan manusia mengasingkan diri ke dalam agama) 9. Kita seperti wayang dengan penuh kesadaran dan kemauan tetapi kita tidak bisa lepas dari tangan sang dalang. 10. Kalau semua ini benar, maka manusia bukan merealisasikan keinginanya tetapi mengharapkan berkah dariNYA (proyeksi manusia itu sendiri/perubahan pasif) 11. agama ialah keterbatasan: agama melarang kita bergaul dengan duniawi, sehingga kita hanya memikirkan surgawi Tanpa agama kita bisa hidup lebih baik, tanpa mengaharapkan hibah/welas asih dariNYA, hanya mengandalkan kenyataan dan diri sendiri. 12. Kepasrahan adalah kelemahan agama 13. Tuhan seperti halnya dengan setan, bila ia terus diyakini dengan adanya exsistensinya maka semakin berkuasalah ia, kita seperti member roh kepadanya dengan keyakinan kita. GROUP : https://www.facebook.com/groups/scientistsecularist