The Self-Restricted Animal

The human is the only animal that is shaped by its own inventions.

Human beings’ possibilities are hence limited by their capacity (or courage) to imagine.

The human is the self-restricted animal.

Our awareness of death—our natural limitation—has given birth to a thousand artificial limitations.

The sum of these artificial limitations—and of human inventions—is called culture. The origin of culture is language, the original and ultimate human invention.

The irony of culture is that, while it pretends to offer new possibilities for the expression and realization of human aspirations, culture is the cage that prevents natural human expression.

Human aspirations (culture), rather than leading to their realization, are the means of their own eternal postponement. Imagining new possibilities has become a surrogate for experience instead of an invitation to it.

*

There is someone inside your house. How did they get there? You are witnessing the scene from outside, a passive observer.

The person moves around like they belong there. They make themselves at home. You want to call out, to call the authorities to come and remove this intruder. Instead of calling out, you stand outside and watch. You experience a strange, vicarious enjoyment in watching. Eventually you make yourself at home outside, and observe the intruder’s activities.

After a while, you recognize the intruder in your house. It is you, living your life. There is nothing you can do about it.

The cross-fertilization of worlds has occurred. You have woven a future out of imagined objects and now you sit inside a movie theater, watching your life unfold.

Culture has you.

A shiver runs down your spine; or it would if you still had one.

Voices from afar carry incoherent messages. Language has broken down. You have made a mess of everything. You are haunted by your own unborn children, trapped inside an echo chamber of reminders, watching gross particles of desire bounce off each other, float aimlessly into the past.

Trying to find the words to make it all come out right, the words shadow your every move. Without language your existence has no definition. You are somewhere before the beginning, embryonic. You are afraid to say the word that will announce your presence to the world. It is safer to let others occupy that space; the sideline is the safest place.

You have taken refuge in the margins of your existence. If you are never born, then you won’t have to die.

*

Words empower. The less power we have in our lives, the more necessary words become to us. Yet a reliance upon words robs us of our power. We cannot stop the word now, even if we tried.

Language is the human invention that has come to define what it means to be human. If we cannot put it into words, it no longer exists. Yet we only have words for what we have prior experience of.

We are self-defeated because we are self-invented.

The point the word took over was the point we became prey to our own conceptions. Life became synonymous with death because life cannot be conceptualized. Only at the point the word ends (with the words for “death” and “God”) does life begin.

Consciousness is infinite. Language is finite. Where there is language, there can be no consciousness.