Author Topic: On the horrific path to the things in themselves  (Read 445 times)

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Nation of One

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On the horrific path to the things in themselves
« on: March 06, 2016, 07:11:30 pm »
Sniffing around ligotti.net, I found an article, "Loving the Alien: Thomas Ligotti and the Psychology of Cosmic Horror".

Some answers to our question, "What are we, really?"

Reflecting on this question will justify spending our lives just farting around.

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We should strive to see ourselves as the puny and fundamentally insignificant beings we are. We need to abandon our comforting illusions of a human-centered world and orient our thought to the vast cold universe of things.

We must inquire how things look from the perspective of the things themselves; we must attend to the world without us. As Thacker writes, those who desire truth should lose interest in their own experience, and instead track “that which in the shadows withdraws from any possible experience.” We will thereby overcome the Kantian human revolution and become soldiers of Lovecraft’s inhuman revolution, on the horrific path to the things in themselves.

Ligotti gives this wild impulse to surrender our human way of seeing things its proper name: vice. His protagonists voluptuously give themselves over to it. They seek disciplines and practices that will give them the capacity to see the human world as a deceptive veil, “an ornamented void.”

An ornamented void ... a perfumed corpse?

Aha, and here we have one of my favorite themes, that nothing is what it appears to be:

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Things are not what they seem. This is the mantra and the practice of cosmic horror.

To Ligotti’s protagonists, this unreality is deliriously liberating.

Ligotti looks for inspiration as much to writers of the high modernist tradition (Kafka, Baudelaire) as he does to Lovecraft. This conjunction should be unsurprising, because the key modernist aesthetic strategy, which Viktor Shklovsky in his classic 1917 essay “Art as Technique” termed defamiliarization, is also the key strategy for producing the unreality of cosmic horror. Defamiliarization cancels the habituated meanings of the human world, and allows appearances to float free.

The unreal is the path to the unborn.

One might be tempted, along with Lovecraft’s philosophical readers, to read the story’s reference to “the unborn” as symbolizing an effort to imagine “the world without us.” But just as Ligotti describes the unreal as an experience, as a way of participating in the world beyond the human, so too does the unnatural radiance that clings to the image of unbirth here denote an uncanny new mode of experience.

We might approach this experience by asking: Who is it that feels liberation when the weight of life is lifted? Who is it that feels infinity flower as the appearances of the human world drift free of the things?

If in Ligotti’s cosmic horror “unreal” names the desired object of perception, then “unborn” names the desired subject of perception. The one who opens himself to the uncanny experience of the disintegration of the human world, discovers in himself a trace of someone or something that is not human.

Lovecraft says: There are people who like this kind of thing. Ligotti says: And you are one of them. You who love cosmic horror are one of them, one of us.
« Last Edit: March 06, 2016, 07:36:04 pm by H »
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

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Nation of One

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Re: On the horrific path to the things in themselves
« Reply #1 on: June 27, 2016, 09:40:23 pm »
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Reading Kant is not easy. Depending on who you ask, German philosophy has killed more people than the electric chair. Nobody knows if it is because of the dense text or if it is because of its tendency to invoke existential crises in readers. If you are faint of mind, then I suggest you return to reading more tame philosophy from a more contemporary thinker like Dr. Suess.

For those who wish to brave the brinks of existential terror in Kant’s philosophy, then the Two Worlds view would lead to the logical conclusion that everything before us is merely an illusion. It’s an easy enough of a mistake, but Kant would prefer to have us believe that the Thing in Itself is real, and that we shouldn’t take everything before us as an illusion. Considering Kant’s hopes and also his propositions about the nature of objects and the painfully limited nature of our sensible intuitions, I don’t know which is more terrifying — the possibility that everything we see is an illusion, or that there are unknowable objects that will forever confound our senses and intuitions.

From: The Philosopher of Terror

Invoking existential crises ... tempting as a subtitle!
« Last Edit: June 27, 2016, 09:42:35 pm by Nobody »
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

~ Tabak und Kaffee Süchtigen ~