Samuel Eger

College Composition
Reflective Essay
May 27, 2016
The Rise of Adam
Descartes was the first to dichotomize the metaphysical world into the object and the
subject. But Descartes, unlike most of his successors, saw it as less of a way of thinking and
more of a way of being. He speculated that the seat of the soul (the metaphysical subject) was the
pineal gland, by which the subject manipulates the material body, itself an object, a vessel.
Science, chiefly neurology, has long retired Cartesian dualism (and with it the concept of the
extant soul; the essential Man; the luminous being, apart from this crude matter) to its place
among the other dead idols like astrology and creationism. Of course such a popular movie as
Star Wars would purport that defunct philosophy; popular notion is usually wrong. Arthur
Schopenhauer was the one of the first to import the necessary conclusion of material monism to
the West, thoughas Schopenhauer himself notesthe Vedas had realized the truth long ago.
This 19th Century German posited world as will and idea, a subject-object relation in which the
latter is wholly dependent upon the former. The world is my idea of it. All one can be certain
of is the existence of some subject by way of a mirror. As the Buddha put it, The foot feels the
foot when the foot feels the ground. This new understanding eliminates the object as a
metaphysical actor; there is only a subject, within which exist concepts and projections, images
producing a narrative for a certain teleology or raison d'tre.
Of course, nothing has a distinct identity, and the same goes for the subject and the
object. The false deity called Essentialism has long dominated human thought, and it was Plato

who first gave it a name and adopted it as a formal thesis, postulating that everything possesses
an essence, a definitive form that identifies it. This is this. That is that. This is the first reduction
that consciousness requires: the invention of the object, things, out there in the world, apart from
ourselves. William Blakes famous and astute observation, If the doors of perception were
cleansed, everything would appear to man as it isinfinite, is only partially accurate. What
does the objective world look like, divorced from anthropic biases? How does it appear? The
words look and appear are predicated upon an extant observer, who will always be
subjective. To view the world is to view a subjective idea of the world. The doors of perception
are inherently unclean, and this cleansing Blake speaks of is more accurately described as
destroying. If one wishes to experience the objective world, one must destroy the sensory
anatomyand that infinite world, Im afraid, is dark.
Psychonauts (explorers of the mind) like Aldous Huxley could also be described as
teleonauts (searchers for the object), and while their journey to know the objective world without
the constraints of the conceptual mind is noble, it is one that will never come to fruition. A brain
drowned in mescaline may seem to experience naked existence, but it is still a human brain,
evolved only to traverse African plains, where Newtonian physics still applies and the geometry
is functionally, but not actually, flat. The psychonaut aspires to be Adam in the gardento return
to when there was only one reduction from the wild, whirling nonmeaning of matteras
personified by Chaos in Miltons Paradise Lostand the second had yet to come.
The second reduction of consciousness is particular to the social animal, and is
understood most succinctly by way of the Judeo-Christian mythos. The tissues which produce
the illusion of ego and narrative (subject and object) are so complicated that a great deal of the
narrative, the qualia, are irrelevant to the immediacy of knowledge. Most of what the

nonconceptual mind experiences is ineffable, and most of the narrative must be cut away in favor
of a new, more reduced narrative that can be mutually understood by many members of a society.
This is Satans crimethe sign, the image. In short, language. Satan brings about the second
reduction that consciousness entails, the one called knowledge, which is the domain solely of
God, for to attain knowledge is to create, and to create is to speak. The so-called fall of Adam
marks the birth of the social animal; it provokes the birth of society itself, and all that follows
from it. Without language, one reverts to the quasi-infinitude of form that is naked
consciousness; and, once again, without consciousness, there is only Chaos. Knowledge follows
from language; without it, one can know nothing, because the acquisition of knowledge is a
conceptualization, the arbitrary ascription of meaning upon the vastitude of naked existence by
the social ape.
The growth of ones understanding of language coincides with the growth of ones
philosophy, as the two are the same (as such I am something of an anti-philosopherwords are
but another void). The realizations Ive made in the last few months which I have attempted to
articulate have further cemented my admiration for the scholars lot. I believe that a man sitting
in a windowless room studying mathematics and physics knows more about the world than one
who spends his entire life traveling the world and tasting the varieties of human culture. For
while mathematics is indeed just another language, a human proxy, it is the most universal one
we possess. When Newton looked at the moon and uttered, F = ma, he took part in the rise of
Adam and became himself a god. The moment humanity created the word, it placed Chaos
beneath its dominion, just as Adams existence placed Chaos beneath Adams dominion. The
recognition that society is make-believe does not mean one cannot play along. Studying the
language of gods is a noble path, but one that doesnt produce a living in a capitalistic society.

My own intended path and discipline is both financially rewarding as well as predicated upon
language. Liver, cecum, gyrusthe physician, who attempts to understand the most complex
matter in the universe, must, more than anyone else, memorize incantations and draw from the
abyss outlines by which to navigate the tissues. Though philosophy should not bend toward
justifying ones existence, mine happens to do so.