Depth

What is common to everybody?

  1. Primordial perception of phenomena. The senses and the unavoidable common sense synthesis of the senses into things, also known as objectivity.
  2. Basic biological needs. Nourishment, sex, shelter, (some degree of) safety.
  3. Fundamental laws of thought. Logic, mathematics.

According to everybody this is the totality of what exists.

This is sea-level humanity.

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Less common are cultural needs: the impulses of human beings to remake themselves into something new.

It has been shown that homo sapiens and culture coevolved. Biological evolution did not end before culture began. Culture arose from biology, and biology evolved under conditions of culture. Every generation can be said to be the child of the last generation of humanity. This process has not come to a rest, despite our perpetual and often violent efforts to arrest the movement.

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It is human nature to be artificial. When we try to be natural in the way a fox or a bird is natural, we falsify our nature. This is why the “naturalness” of hippies often seems so forced and contrived.

The important distinction is not natural versus artificial, but vital versus unlivable. Most forms of artificiality are unlivable from the start. But even the most vital artifice eventually outlives itself and must be replaced. This is the importance of natality — of perpetual rebirth.

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The impulse to change ourselves comes from within in response to our physical and cultural environment.

The impulses are unreasonable. They are wild spirits, and they can be violent. They lack language and they lack names. They also lack moderation. Frequently they are autistic. They erupt from “beneath”. They want life.

Out of necessity these spirits are barred from the house of the soul. The soul is a stable household intent on maintaining its order.

The wild spirits storm and scheme and try to break down the door. Sometimes, they decide they do not want to live in a house at all (they don’t want to be “domesticated”), so they wander in the wilderness and deserts. They’ve been known to build their own dwellings in remote places. Some spirits are too titanic, and must be chained down by various means.

Very occasionally a spirit learns to appeal for admittance. The minute it stops smashing the door or turning its back on the door, and simply knocks on it, it can enter.

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The spirits who learn the art of the word add their voices to the chord of the greater common sense, to the living conceptual world.

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Depth is a subjective dimension, which means it is experiential.

Specifically, it is based on having experiences and relating these experiences to one another.

The experiencing of what cannot (yet) be expressed with explicit language, which is felt privately by individuals, which becomes perceptible only indirectly through behavioral reaction, or through art — is the lower pole of depth.

The communion of these individual experiences in shared language and shared practice is the upper pole of depth: height. A plurality of perspectives exist apart but also together in the greater overarching perspective of pluralism.

Height overlooks experience and surveys it, knowing what is beneath.

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The danger of height is alienated sophistication. Such height surveys treetops without ever having walked on the forest floor or knowing what is beneath the soil and the rocks. The roots are missing.

The danger of the lower pole is intensified solitude. Feelings feel their own feelings alone and suffer solitary confinement.

Depth is the span of lowest to highest.

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“We are misidentified — because we ourselves keep growing, keep changing, we shed our old bark, we shed our skins every spring, we keep becoming younger, fuller of future, taller, stronger, we push our roots ever more powerfully into the depths — into evil — while at the same time we embrace the heavens ever more lovingly, more broadly, by imbibing their light ever more thirstily with all our twigs and leaves. Like trees we grow — this is hard to understand, as is all of life — not in one place only but everywhere, not in one direction but upwards and outwards and inwards and downwards equally; our energy drive trunk, branches, and roots all at once…” – The Gay Science

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