No Escape

I realised last night that my answer, given in response to a question posed by a friend of mine, was false. I was asked what my fears are. I answered quickly that I fear being "unknown" more than anything else. This is a lie; a complicated lie granted, but a lie nonetheless. Where in one sense I do fear the fragmentation, isolation and solitude of the existence I see around me, I also dear the opposite of this. I fear being known. I construct arguments and theories which support my flight away from "the other". I latch onto the extreme of knowablity and claim triumphantly that because I cannot be known fully by a single person that it is futile to try to interact with and know "the others" who surround me. What does this extreme look like in more detail I wonder.

I am thoroughly convinced that human beings are not finite beings. This point ultimately brings me back to a point where one can be known, but I will return to it at the end of this piece. I shall begin my argument from the opposite of what I deem to be true. All human beings are finite. This should necessarily narrow the scope of aspects that a human can possess, making them effectively knowable. Yet, let us look at the different ways in which a person must be known in order to be known fully. This shall prove to be an infinite list, contrary to my starting point.

1. People can be known emotionally.
2. People can be known physically or carnally.
3. People can be known intellectually.

A scientist would look at these categories and collect data from numerous sources to create a centralized and agreed apon individual. They would ignore outliers from the data and create a very convenient and simple, albiet quantitatively vast, picture of an individual. This way of investigating an individual is inherently misguided and flawed. There are underlying complxities to these categories which force open the picture of the individual to an infinite spectrum.

The first is the difficulty of the perspective of the observer or interacter. Every person interacts in these three ways differently. For example, John Doe's wife and son know him in very different carnal ways. The notable difference is that his wife knows him sexually, but the son is a part of John's flesh and has a different physical relationship with him. Even John Doe's office affair partner knows him differently than does his wife because the physical sensations are different. The relationship is different. This is an example of the perspective difficulty in the physical sense, but also applies to the other two categories as well.

The second difficulty is the different tones and tinctures within even one observer. Emotions are not all the same. There are different intensities, durations and initiations of emotions which make an emotional experience different every single time. It is not the same thing to get angry at a dog for pissing on the carpet as it is to get angry at a person who has just shot your wife. Even the emotional response to the same person changes due to different circumstances.

I have some other thoughts of the differences. They involve remembering/history, reputation, the interaction between the three ways of knowing someone and irrationality. I do not have time to elaborate on them now, but I may get to it. I feel confident that the difficulties hitherto described are enough to support my claim that human beings are not as finite as they seem. All of the different ways of knowing a person makes it impossible to finitely nail down a definition. Perhaps to be known is to be known in relation to everything else in existence. Buddhists call this dependant origination. In sum, that everything arises in relation to other things and do not exist on their own, but in connection to one another. That is not to say that the self does not exist, but the falsely imagined lone sense of self does not exist. This brings me back to my musing on knowability.

Do I fear being known or unknown? Take for granted that we cannot be fully known by a single being. Yet, we can be known by the infinite fully. Perhaps this is what God is. I do fear being unknown, I fear oblivion, an existence without God, an existence without the connection. I also fear being known on a more primal level. I do not want people to know me deep down, because I, like everyone, have deep dark spots. I do not want those places to be found by people. But, can I escape the infinite, can I escape God. NO! To be known is to be fully exposed, something my mortality will not allow me to do.

I have to stop for length, sleep and sanity. I leave the question as open as it was when I began writing tonight, and I pose it to you my reader. What are your fears? My fears are simultateously to be unknown and known, a frightening paradox which threatens to tear me apart, from which there is no escape...