The Parallax View (Short Circuits) by Slavoj Zizek

Author:Slavoj Zizek [Zizek, Slavoj]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2009-02-12T13:00:00+00:00

You cannot believe in it ... the SMT is a theory of which you cannot be convinced, in principle . . . this fact is the true essence and the deepest core of what we actually mean when speaking about the “puzzle”—or sometimes even about the “mystery”—of consciousness. ... If the current story is true, there is no way in which it could be intuitively true. (627)

In a strict analogy with the Marxian theory of commodity fetishism, theoretical knowledge does not abolish practical fetishism. Is there nonetheless, beyond the theoretical effort of thinking the unthinkable (a self-less world), also a possibility of living it, of living as “being no one”? There is one caveat that Metzinger allows: Buddhist enlightenment, in which the Self directly-experientially assumes his own non-being, that is, recognizes himself as a “simulated self,” a representational fiction—such a situation, in which the phenomenal dream becomes lucid to itself, “directly corresponds to a classical philosophical notion, well-developed in Asian philosophy at least 2500 years ago, namely, the Buddhist conception of ‘enlightenment’” (566). Such an enlightened awareness is no longer self-awareness: it is no longer I who experience myself as the agent of my thoughts; “my” awareness is the direct awareness of a self-less system, a self-less knowledge.

Metzinger’s position is most clearly articulated in his rereading/radicalization of the three standard metaphors of the human mind: Plato’s cave; the representationalist metaphor; the metaphor of a total flight simulator. As for Plato’s cave, Metzinger—as we have already seen—endorses its basic premises: we misperceive a phenomenal “theater of shadows” (our immediate experience of reality) for reality; we are constrained by this illusion in a necessarily “automatic” way, and we should struggle to achieve true self-knowledge. He differs on one very precise point: there is no self who is tied down in the depths of the cave, and can then leave the cave in search of the true light of the sun:

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