Reminding Myself How I Haven't Changed

I wrote this entry a month ago or so in my former blog. As I was reading through some of my old entries, this one I think is worthy of being republished here because the issues I am dealing with in it are still pertinent to my life now:

Do you ever wonder what it would be like to give up? Wake up one morning and decide that nothing was worth your time anymore. I sometimes get a taste of what that would feel like: while stressing over a paper due the next morning, I wonder why a something so phenomenologically insignificant can get me so upset, and then I wonder what would happen if I just didn't do my paper and gave up on going to class. Life is full of invisible leashes that we strap on ourselves. The fact that I am a student, a son, a boyfriend, a secret-keeper, a law abiding citizen, or a social being at all results from my belief that by chaining myself to society and being as dependent on others as possible, I am realizing some sort of Hegelian freedom where my rationality wins out over my irrational instincts. But being part of this world spirit continually coming into being is exhausting for one's sense of freedom. Rationality means determinism no matter what any philosopher says about the arbitrariness of the will. And living a fatalistic life based on mindless logical computation certainly disenchants life (as Weber described the modern world), but it also disenfranchises the will the live. But living whimsically, a slave to the uncontional as Kierkegaard puts it, is only an antithetical trap posing as an individualistic solution to the problem of finding one's purpose in life. Kierkegaardian freedom means giving up the bonds of rationality and living in constant fear and trembling. But this denial of something so seemingly concrete as sagacity reminds me too much of retreatism. Giving up may feel like a solution to my problem of emptiness, but it is nearsighted. It lives for the moment but forgets that moments are successive and denies that they are connected. Man has no nature in existentialism, but this seems like an inadequate explanation of man's activities in light of modern psychology, genetics, and the historical method proposed by Troeltsch but hinted at with Hegel. And so here I am, stuck between a philosophy with a long term goal of utopian, collective living infinitely far into the future, and whimsical, individualistic living blind to logic and science. Tyler Durden said "We are all composed of the same decaying organic matter," and that's what's real to me right now. Live's only meaning is found in the end of this decaying process for the individual, but this denies the ever changing existence that is necessary for Hegel's utopia. And the denial of one's existence for the betterment of the state opposes the existentialist (at least the atheist existentialist) conception of the need to focus on the existent rather than the speculative, i.e. a future collective utopia.

I realize that some of the ways I describe Hegel's and Kierkegaard's philosophies may be a little inaccurate. As time has passed I have learned more about Hegel's 'State' and Kierkegaard's reaction to Hegel, but I still feel wedged between a philosophy that rationalizes the good life and one that believes this sort of rationalization is foolish when it comes to how to live.