Plague Journal, Self-Made
This statue entitled Self-Made Man by sculptor Bobbie Carlyle is installed in front of Bar Evolution here in Batavia. I have occasion to walk by the statue often. The work prompts the sardonic thought that there is nothing that is self-made in this world. Homo Sapiens, humans are among the most complex and fragile of mammals, are the least self-made of all. We human beings are tentative organisms, physically, an undulating balance of organismic exchanges of which we understand just a little. The same is certainly true with respect to our psychological condition. A centered, mindful, appreciative outlook upon life is a difficult and precious “achievement.” Achievement must be in quotes because this desired state of affairs cannot be reached without help. I am thinking of the importance of a positive, supportive upbringing of the child and later in adulthood, of a circle of caring friends.
Contemplating the image of Carlyle’s work this morning prompted me to think of the idealism of Arthur Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer, a German philosopher who lived in the 18th century wrote a four volume treatise entitled, “The World as Will and Representation.” Schopenhauer argued there are two important aspects of life as experienced by Homo Sapiens. There is a life-force that asserts itself, prior to our exercise of reason, an emergent, current of being. Every element of “reality” is an expression of this will-to-be.
Additionally, our mental life, our thoughts, the structured “reality” that our senses and mind receives, is nothing other than a representation by the mind. This is the second form that the world takes for us: our representation of it.
The statue reminds me of the Schopenhaueren conception of reality, as both raw, unresistable will and the human constructs too, — a full spectrum from the first words spoken by a child to a great city filled with magnificent architecture and the arts.
