#8 Infinite and lacking structure

‘I think, therefore I am.’ and the weight of my thoughts

Hi thereee,

Skipping on life updates except two facts that make me feel like a changed person: I have become a morning person, and I love eating food now.

On being a person, constantly, over and over again

Recently, I came across a post/ meme-thing that I deeply resonated with. It made me think how, over the past few months, I have found existence to be a really big…hassle. Whenever I feel I’ve got a grip on ‘adulting’, I run into troubles, mostly health-related issues, one after the other, which makes me think how unsustainable living is (unsustainable is the measure of difficulty it’s currently at).

yeah, this thing is where it all started

Because I’ve read a lot of existential literature in the past, I know I’m not the first person to feel this so deeply. In fact, some of my favourite writers like Fernando Pessoa and Franz Kafka have contemplated being a person for the longest time. To be just a little dramatic, it made me think of Pessoa’s,

I asked for very little from life, and even this little was denied me. A nearby field, a ray of sunshine, a little bit of calm along with a bit of bread, not to feel oppressed by the knowledge that I exist, not to demand anything from others, and not to have others demand anything from me.

Not going down the completely existentialist or personalist route, it’s been quite something reading about the weight of living, how physical affects the mental and vice versa. It sent me down a rabbit hole to study what it means to be a person as explored in literature and philosophy.

From ancient African Ubuntu¹ philosophy, where a newborn baby is not considered to be a person, and that personhood is acquired over time through experiences and interaction. And how Russian philosopher, Mikhail Bakhtin², said that the act of being happens in the space between the self and the world.

Then, moving to René Descartes³, who said, one can only be certain about the fact that they are thinking; everything else is temporary. He believed that the world outside of one’s brain has nothing to do with the idea of the self. (Yes, I am also thinking about ‘I think, therefore I am.’⁴)⁵

What started as a search to find dead philosophers’ opinions on their misery led me to read so widely about what it means to be a person. In every school of thought to exist, philosophers have spoken about ‘being a person’, be it Marxism, Stoicism, materialism, and so on. Then I stumbled across…

The essence of man comprises both the spiritual sphere, the sphere of the mind, and his bodily organisation, but it is not confined to this. Man becomes aware of himself as a part of the social whole. Not for nothing do we say that a person is alive as long as he is living for others.⁶

I used to think that I am only a ‘person’ when someone is looking or when I am in the company of people. However, I’ve slowly learnt to be a person by myself; like now, for instance, as I look at my screen, and type frantically, trying not to lose a single thought. Again, to quote Pessoa,

I am, in large measure, the selfsame prose I write…Whatever I feel is felt (against my will) so that i can write that I felt it. Whatever I think is promptly put into words, mixed with images that undo it, cast into rhythms that are something else altogether. From so much self-revising, I've destroyed myself. From so much self-thinking, I'm now my thoughts and not I.

Not digressing, I truly believe I am a ‘whole person’, even when I’m all by myself, and at the same time, I do live for others. So much of the happiness I derive daily is from my interactions and seeing people around me happy.

a little whimsy, if i may?

So, who is a person? What defines personhood? Who am I?

I offer you thoughts not in the Plato, Socrates, Kant style of things but more in the direction of Oscar Wilde, Viktor Frankl, Whitman, Kafka and Pessoa. For when Wilde says, “What are you? To define is to limit”⁷, or Whitman says, “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)”⁸, or Pessoa says, “Because I’m the size of what I see and not the size of my stature.”⁹, it makes sense to me.

All of these thoughts about being a person also made me think about human insignificance and Carl Sagan’s ‘Pale Blue Dot’ Speech, but I shouldn’t get into that now, when we’re already looking at so much of philosophy and art horizontally.

What could hit the sweet spot between the two though is Ocean Vuong’s, “If, relative to the history of our planet, an individual life is so short, a blink, as they say, then to be gorgeous, even from the day you're born to the day you die, is to be gorgeous only briefly.”¹⁰

I’ve said too much. Now, loose ends are yours to fill, and line spacing is comfortable enough for you to read between the lines.

Anyhoo, always caught in a whirlwind of my thoughts, I cannot take ‘Don’t think too much’ as millennial advice and cannot relate to the Gen-Z ‘It’s not that deep’. Sometimes I wish I were a little bit oblivious and ignorant and could quickly move away from my thoughts. But hey, what we got instead is ‘The burden of feeling. The burden of having to feel!’ (Also Pessoa, I love his writing, thank you.)

If you’ve read it till here, please drop in a comment or text me what you think about this essay.

It would mean the world to me. After a really long time, the process of writing has given me so much joy, I hope you see it.

For visceral relief

Bonus

Last week I discovered aeon.co, which is now one of my favourite websites, really. You should check it out too!

I hope there’s always enough light in your days and hope in your heart!

Till then,

Thoughts and yap,

Ishika <3

1. https://missioafricanus.com/2021/09/13/the-ubuntu-philosophy-and-african-christianity-personhood-and-community/

2. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Mikhail-Bakhtin

3. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/descartes/

4. https://philosophybreak.com/articles/i-think-therefore-i-am-descartes-cogito-ergo-sum-explained/

5. https://aeon.co/ideas/descartes-was-wrong-a-person-is-a-person-through-other-persons

6. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/spirkin/works/dialectical-materialism/ch05.html

7. Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. Edited by Joseph Bristow. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006

8. https://poets.org/poem/song-myself-51

9. Pessoa, F. (2001). The book of disquiet (R. Zenith, Trans.). Penguin Classics. (Original work published 1982)

10. Vuong, O. (2019, June 4). On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous: A novel. Penguin Press.