My friend and I often have philosophical disagreements. I'm overthinking it! He likes to tell me… our conversations often go something like this:
Self: I have a December 28th resolution! I'd like to smile more.
Him: New year's resolutions are special because it's the first day of a long year.
Self: I'd have so many more resolutions this way!
Self: It is becoming difficult for me to enjoy reading Kant.
Him: Assign yourself an hour a day. Take breaks. Take notes.
Self: but that's not enough. I want to want to read.
Him: … you'll never do anything with your life…
He, of course, has always been the pragmatic one. Consequentialist, practices the Pomodoro technique, staunchly bored of philosophy, especially existentialism. He calls me a dreamer, romanticist, a Micawber. I do not think that is exactly true.
I would like to propose what I think is a more accurate term: an Otherworldly. I do not dream in the typical sense. The Otherworldly does not seek possibility over actuality in the Aristotelian sense, nor do they inhabit their minds in imagined futures. The Otherworldly does not model the world they wish to exist upon objects, but rather, just as Plato's philosopher sees the shadow of Forms to exist more than the cave itself, the Otherworldly lives in their mind, which exists as ontology and metaphysics or whatever of the sort, in a sense realer than the Worldly consider reality.
Some of the Otherworldly, perhaps many, cannot bear the world as they see it, and thus reject it entirely for their dreamscape and fall into despair. Some exist in a grotesque, disfigured world, as punishment or trauma. I exist in a simple dreamscape: one where my will is free, and where nothing has been any way until I decide it to have been so.
In my dreamscape, December 28th is a special day. First, it is the birthday of my father, but that does not make it special. It is the day I decided to smile more, and thus the end of a lip-pursing, eyebrow furrowing life. My smiling birthday, on my 6,729th day-birth, a special day!
Kant is still quite boring to read.
The most lucid Otherworldly will notice the fragmentation between the two worlds they live in. Many of the most lucid Otherworldly will thus fall into despair at the expanse of their dreamscape. It may, as mine once did, contain dangerous indulgences: everyone shall love me, my will is as strong as that of God's, there is no purpose greater than my own. The greater the indulgence, the greater the rupture.
It is my turn, I suppose, to address this dissonance. If I truly lived in my dreamscape, where I could simply decide to read A Critique of Pure Reason, and that it had always been fascinating, why do I find it so ostensibly, irrefutably, unabashedly boring? I must then refer you to my Guide and Rulebook for the Otherworldly! To avoid falling into the Chasm of Despair, where you must confront the constraints of your mortal will in choosing which books to enjoy, the Otherworldly must form a thin tether between themselves and phenomena. The mature Otherworldly sees, in the phenomenal, a duty to their dreamscape. One's will is the strength of their tether; an Otherworldly who is not merely a victim of their mind obliges the phenomenal to uphold the integrity of their dreamscape. If the tether breaks– if the will is weakened, or if the dreamscape drifts too far from the phenomenal, the Otherworldly falls.
To exist in my dreamscape, where I can choose what I wish, all of which is at my disposal, I must read Kant as if it existed, phenomenologically, in the correct world.
Perhaps the promises of the Otherworldly now seem far too treacherous a path. It must follow that there are only Worldly and Despairers, as the Worldly are simply those with the closest tether between the phenomenological and the reality they live in! Simply look between the Worldly, who live where they stand, and the Despairers who refuse to stand anywhere, and you'll see the Otherworldly who live standing so that they may remain elsewhere.
In reading my above explanation of our philosophies, my friend laughs. He asks me, how much despairing would it take for you to finally come back down to Earth? I try to tell him how beautiful the world is in my mind. And somehow, in his snarky wisdom, he illustrates the most elegant reduction of our difference:
Haven't you noticed how beautiful the world already is?