Hey, I’m back guys! I’m not dead, my life just got a little busier recently and I haven’t had as much time for DART/Debate Craft recently. I probably won’t be doing many debates or mafia, or anything time consuming really, but I might post in the forum from time to time.
Anyways, I got bored recently and wrote this short little piece. I kinda sums up my views on philosophy in genera, but more specifically, epistemology. I was inspired a lot by philosophers like Nietzsche, Camus, and Sartre. Tell me what you think…
The Diver
The diver dove because he wanted to find the bottom. As a runner sets out to finish a race, and as an architect lays the foundation to construct his masterpiece, so to the diver swam down to touch the ocean floor and to know that the entire sea rested upon it.
So down he went. He passed a school of fish swimming by, and he marveled at how soon, his discovery would explain the existence of the fish before his eyes.
So on he swam. The light began to disappear and the diver was cloaked in darkness. All forms and colors dissolved into the only black mass that was everything.
And on the diver swam. The cold of the ocean began to numb the skin of the diver beneath his wetsuit. After five minutes, he could no longer see or hear anything.
And still, on swam the diver. There was nothing in existence anymore, only the rhythmic motion of his body as he continued on, but even that became subject to skepticism, as the diver could no longer be sure that he was still making progress downwards.
Eventually, the only thing left to him, and possibly the world, was the idea, the goal of reaching the bottom. “The Bottom” was all the diver could think of, each kick down another skeptic, “why?”.
The diver stopped and looked around. Before, he hadn’t been able to see, but now, he doubted that sight itself ever existed, and then doubted whether he was really doubting. Surrounded by non-existence and the dead blackness of doubting doubt itself, the diver screamed into the abyss, begging for the ocean floor that had led him here those seemingly millennia ago.
He heard no echo, no response. He waited. Then gradually, he began to hear a voice. He could not tell if it came from within or without, but it mattered not as such definitions had lost meaning miles ago. The voice spoke to the diver, and said, “The ocean floor is there, you simply must have faith and look for it”. So the diver looked with the only eyes he had and the only eyes suitable to see anything of matter. He searched and searched with those eyes until they hurt from straining against the dark.
That’s when the diver realized something. The eyes he was using to look for the ocean floor could never see it, as they were the eyes of the mind. In the moment, the diver knew where the voice had come from. It had come from his heart, from his wanting to find the sea floor, a place that had never been in the first place, as he could see so plainly now. It was a place that could only be seen by the eyes that needed to see it, despite what the eyes of the mind truly witnessed.
The diver despaired. The sea floor never had been, and so with its collapse crumbled the whole ocean. The diver gave into the currents. He no longer felt and drifted along with the void of absurdity. He stopped thinking, but it soon became apparent that he never really had ended his thought, just gave it no effort.
With this revelation, he now had one thing to call his own, his though, and so he put everything into it. He realized that in this world of senselessness and meaningless his thoughts still came like the tide, and with that tide came existence, and himself. He thought of many things, and one day, he thought of the fish he had seen on his way down, back in the world of discernible form. Then it came to him. The fish existed separate from the ocean floor. Neither relied on each other for their being in the world, and both had beauty alone. However one was real, while the other was not. The fish with their brilliantly colorful display of choreography existed due to the eyes of the diver’s mind, while the sea floor was a hopeless wanting of the eyes of the diver’s heart.
So the diver swam upwards and he didn’t stop. In the world he was leaving behind, there was nothing, but simply by virtue of the diver’s conscious thoughts and being, the world above did exist, separate from any foundation of a sea floor, because the diver himself was the foundation. His eyes gave beauty to the fish merely by their sight, and his stream of thoughts created his world, apart from any sea floor. So the diver swam up, and the world came down to meet him, the world as created by virtue of the diver.
The diver sat on a cliff over looking the sea. The sun had nearly set, but before the soothing and calming orange, the sun released one last triumphant shade of brilliant golden light, that seemed to be beauty in itself. As seagulls flew overhead, the diver looked out at the most vibrant and powerful shade he had ever seen, and knew that he didn’t care anymore about a sea floor miles below him, because what he saw and what he felt was real. It was real separate from any God or simulation, meaning or purpose. It was real because of himself.
The diver said aloud, not as a shout but neither as a whisper, “This is it” and he was correct.
