A few days ago, I read a newspaper article, titled “woman falls to death in bungee jumping accident.” I was terrified and appalled by my indifference. To what can I attribute this silent atrocity? Several inquiries can be made regarding my mishap.
Words are representations of certain events or personal sentiments which actually exist external to the self. These representations, then, evoke certain imaginations or emotions in the reader’s mind. Such imagination or emotion, however, are circumscribed to mere subjective experiences of deeply personal roots. There are three reasons for this – first, the act of imagination happens during and only through the self’s volition; second, the need for imagination springs from the lack of actual information presented to perceptual faculties; third, the construct of imagination itself is based on personal perceptual experiences (e.g. when one imagines a forest, one’s imaginations exist through one’s template of visual images or similar perceptual knowledge sets of forests based on past perceptual experiences), which build up things that exist entirely, only, and uniquely within and through oneself. Hence, the imagination one has through words must be in many ways independent from the real or essence of events. One can hence proclaim, without much logical deficiency, that imagination bears no relevance to reality. Words, then, are poor mediators between one’s mind and the real world. The essence of things are helplessly hidden, misled, and misinterpreted through words.
Yet one can soon conceive a more important issue through this. Should one have witnessed the event itself instead of being “assisted” via words, would this have enhanced one’s understanding of the actual event? I answer, no. As I have mentioned in my previous post on appearances, essence cannot be derived through perceptual faculties. What is a being was, is, and will remain a uniquely individual being, foreign to the essence of another being. Insofar as a being exists in the world, it lives only in one world – the being’s own world. Everything external is inevitably perceived and understood in the being’s own personal terms. Therefore, even upon encountering in person the event in question, the viewer would have seen and understood nothing of the real event and the subjects involved in it. The very existence of beings warrants this simple constant, which perpetuates through every existential contact and exercise.
It is hence natural that I, an external observer of representations of a real event, will ultimately fail to fathom the lady who is no more and the event which made her no more.
a sipofjin 