Monday 17 November 2014

cogito ergo sum

It's 40 minutes to midnight and just like routine the house mates and I have slowly drifted into our little pigeon-holes. Sometimes we'll huddle around the heater in the living room and sometimes we watch movies and sometime even the occasional tang yuan party or two but everyday we need to hide in our rooms to be by ourselves because there is comfort in being alone - that is, alone with your thoughts - because spending time with yourself is very important and many people forget that.

I'm swathed in a cable knit sweater and nursing a cup of chilled tea - it is supposed to be warm but it is winter and the heat from the heater is unable to travel to my room - and smelling the musk of my scented candle and enjoying the closure of the day where your thoughts are free to form as it slowly pours out your mind uncaged and free to become whole.

It is nice to be close to my thoughts. Under the hypnotic daze of sleepiness, the Walls slowly draws back down for reprieve. This is when I feel the most true. In the day fragments of thoughts become tangled up, censored, filtered and stuck and never comes to bubble up as complete form for me to draw out so it slowly dissolves back into my subconscious.



A couple of weeks back I learnt in Western Philosophy that a French Philosopher named Descartes once famously said "Cogito Ergo Sum" - I think, therefore, I am and has neatly used logic to explain that the proof of our existence lies in our ability to think. (Read: Meditations One and Two) While aware of the loopholes in his argument, I couldn't help but start pondering about how it is our mental faculty - to discern, to scrutinize. to judge, to imagine etc. -is a good indicator of our existence. I am a real thing, but what thing? A thing that thinks. I exist but what am I? I am the I whom I know I exist. Then, I will exist for as long as I think.

Following this premise then it is true to say that I will cease to exist when I cease to think. Would it also hold some grain of truth if I say that I do not fully exist in moments when I do not think independently but follow the will of the masses? And for that short moment, I did not exist fully in the world but in fractions. If it were true then I wondered where did that missing fraction of my existence went to. Am I to be an eternal glow in the distance, flickering in and out of existence in this world? I am here but not here, there but not there either.

I thought that strange and sad at the same time. Denying your own existence, even in parts, is such a a waste and I'm saying all this not in an emotional way but in an economical way - as in don't you want to maximize the utility and optimize your life.

idk maybe all this is coming to my head because I'm afraid of shutting my own mind down because what I want/need is not in the flow of the mainstream of what is most advised/rational etc.

(this is the part where my friends would - ironically - tell me to stop thinking so much haw haw haw okay bye.)


1 comment:

  1. Keep thinking!! Questioning the superstructures is good sometimes hawhaw. Stay warm in shanghai xxx

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