Travelling, Time and Existentialism

In a modern world that is saturated by the unauthenticity, there is little space for genuine reflection and self-realising. Post-industrial technology has out-run man himself; the end has succeeded the means. Debord, Baudrillard et al have warned us of a world where the image would transcend reality, where living was no longer about “becoming” but about static-being – a static relation to the fetishistic has proliferated the life of the post-modern man. I would say we never left modernity, post-modernism really, is a hyper-modernism; a twisted caricature of the Enlightenments humble hopes. Technics, have predominantly shaped a sheepish, western morality – we no longer can be killed, we must be preserved, individuals want to live forever. Humility has been a human property that has come and gone in full circle, from the Christian mawkishness, to the liberal anthro-centric wet dream. All must be equal; all must be cared for, amen.

Where then can we find a peace? A peace that is not threatened by the idealists, and moralists and scientific-rationalisation of the most organic and personal moments of life?
We can find it in existential awareness, and this can only really be found, on a consistent level, through the awareness, and fluidity of Bergson’s “duration.” Time is relative; Einstein tackles this at the scientific level, but its implications to a philosophical out-look are huge. In the travelling I did during 2006, I found the rhythm of Bergsonian duration at its most salient through an existential meandering that took time to be only a reality within the sense that it endured us, it brought about a “becoming” time and choice, then, became arbitrary. Das Man was left behind; a constant process of becoming, of looseness, a loss of a concrete self, a passive-schizoid became the order of the day. This, I feel, is not a realistic life-goal. We must find ourselves in order to further ourselves – but a peace is found and an understanding of the scale, the degree, of the bigger picture can be gleaned. Somewhere in-between 0.5 and this experience ly’s the fulcrum, the golden mean of a content consciousness, and to this balance we must strive.