SELF-PERFECTION = SELF-TORTURE
Acrylic on canvas
200cm x 150cm (+ 2 cm tray frame in black)
Self-mastery and self-perfection are the undisputed focus of the Nietzschean triumphant will to power. Well, to me self-mastery & self-perfection have become the illness of our century, leading in some cases even to progressive cases of mass-depersonalisation. The vacuity of our modern claustrophobic life, has been strangulating our will to live, leaving us irritated at the heart of inanity. Frustrated by not deifying pictorial confessions, their appetite and effort has been directed at the creation of foolish puppets, insatiable of their own fakeness. In saying so, neither state idolatry nor discredited supernatural images can provide human beings lifelong consolations because of their unresolvable existential crisis.
Alternatively, a new image of human beings is of the highest necessity, right? Nietzsche would have agreed, so would have the social media armada. Nietzsche’s desiderata for higher types includes the capacity to marginalise but not eliminate negative and destructive impulses within oneself, and to transfigure them into joyous affirmation of all aspects of life. Well, our distorted self-perception would want to eradicate any blemishes big or small by the touch of a click. Photoshop or similar apps have become the new totem, a drug that will have bigger implications than anyone can imagine. Nietzsche asked for marginalisation of negative impulses, not their elimination. Have we become so insecure, that we stopped recognising ourselves in the mirror? Because our profile image has got nothing to do with us anymore, right? To understand and celebrate the radical contingency, finitude, and fragility of ourselves, our institutions, and the cosmos itself, is a first step. But it seems that nobody cares. The poison of individualism has been with us from the beginning, and we must acknowledge our pain and sickness since they are the very preconditions of our consciousness. Subsequently, one should regard life itself as fully and merely natural, as embodying no transcendent meaning or value. Well, we passed that stage of naturalness a long time ago, right?
Yes, one should harbour little or no resentment toward others or toward the human condition. One has forgotten the others, one just lives a narcissistic keyhole existence, hoping that the new digitally sculpted me will be liked. By whom? By faceless numbers that represent a robotic cold universe of people that have been stripped of their personality, with the only function to deliver a click. It feels like a total disjunction between self and reality. It represents a hollow falsified reality. The danger is that the contours between real and fake blur.
Next, one should confront the world in immediacy and with a sense of vital connection and refuse to avert one’s gaze from a tragic worldview. This is wishful thinking. Nobody cares. The lens of the camera is directed at a distorted image, devoid of any resemblance of the original I whatsoever. Morphing our faces and bodies to the point of annihilation or absurdity. We have become a prooftext of our self-ridicule. Consequently, one should find value not in eventual happiness (based on the accumulation of pleasure and distance from pain) but in the inherent activities and processes themselves. Nope. Finally, one should not forget, that his salutary perfectionism is grounded in his highest value, amor fati, an unconditional love of life.
I love Nietzsche’s salutary approach towards perfectionism, versus our tragic pathological approach. The goal of the good human life is a merited self- pride which arises from the precise conclusion that one has succeeded in fulfilling the Nietzschean trajectory of value. We live a life of anti-values, where the sole protagonist is simulating self-view that borders depersonalisation and in certain cases psychosis. A process of negative de-construction, re-imagination, re-creation that only focusses on the aesthetic values and not inner authentic ones. As such, one should have given style to one’s character, forged unity out of the multiplicity of drives you embody and learned to love oneself, this world, life, eternity, and others of one’s rank. Inept at living, one Is faking life; that is why, one’s cult of the immediate has been verging on ecstasy.
Reality shows, that we hide in our solitary hives, afraid to show our real self. This anti-Nietzschean way of living feels wrong. Having despoiled the present of our eternal dimension, all we have left is fakery and our apish anomaly. One’s alienation from ourselves harasses and saps. Once one must avoid the pitfalls of pity (being drawn back into the mindset of the herd and away from the hard path of self-realisation) one should be ready to frolic in the joys of salutary solitude. Ah! Pity is unfortunately creeping into the texture and fissures of our solipsistic self. Why do I not look like in my profile image? One feels ugly compared to it. One asphyxiates in its own distorted ugliness. Everything frays in the intellect's self-torsion, a kind of furious stupor. Finally doubt crashes down upon us like a calamity. Maybe one is not ugly at all, right? Hallo, have you realised only now, that you are living a lie! A self-inflicted paralysis? You can’t have your cake and eat it, right? This circular process leads us into more clinical pathologies than we can spare. Our self-imposed blindness reigns high, while our fakery takes on an autonomous existence. Nothing finds favour in our eyes bar the fake. Truth is, there is something real in the world, and that is us. One should be enthralled with the products of high creativity. The emphasis is on the word high, and not of low tweaking dexterity on sub-mental morphing apps. One should treat these apps with the contempt they deserve. Yes, our body morphing has so intoxicated us that our attachment to it offers all the characteristics of an addiction, a mixture of ecstasy and execration.
To live is equivalent to the impossibility of abstaining from the fake. The collective suspension of judgment seems unfeasible. To model ourselves upon the commonplace is all one hopes for at this point of our collapse, where we reduce wisdom to conformism and salvation to conscious illusion, to postulated illusion-in other words, to the acceptance of appearances as such. Our greatest artistic project is our ongoing sculpting of ourselves, right? Our real self, otherwise, your work of art will be self-exiled into an emotional waste land. Have we lost our primordial grace? Have we become shadows who project our images upon the mirror of infinity? Have we succeeded to neutralise our uniqueness by morphing into the endless repetition of the same? Swollen in the sonority of our fakeness? Are we not becoming jesters of our very own anonymity? We are incapable of capitalising even on what sets us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom, our self-image, language, self-consciousness and on and on. Having sought to be other, one will end by being nothing.
The Temptation to Exist is our penchant for critical diagnosis is our sickness, and that is precisely why it might be incurable. Reason, instead of serving us as a means of release, becomes an instrument of self-torture. Reason affords us arguments against ourselves, right? Reason justifies our will to fail, it flatters us, exhausts itself in making one’s existence intolerable. One waits for one’s final agony. The revelation of one’s face and body in its original honest nakedness. The fall of the angels of fakery. What now? Humiliation, torment or capitulation from the obsession, the mania of reputation? The desire for perfection is tantamount to self-torture. With it will go those torments which goaded one on, which impelled us to produce, to realise our fake self, and to leave ourselves behind. Unfortunately, we are not immunised against the agonising self-torturous desire for perfection. So deeply does self-doubt work in us that, to remedy it, we have invented a fake us. One suppresses one’s identity. One vaporises one’s ego. For what? One becomes a ghost. No longer to exist for anyone, to live as if one had never lived, to banish one’s existence. What can we do with a man who attacks himself for his very own blemishes, when those very blemishes are most worth having? Those blemishes make you who you are, whether you like it or not. No system, more than any man, is immune to the deceptions of technology.
Get rid of all morphing apps and gadgets and stand-up for yourself in the true image of yourself. Stop this torture. Advance into self-knowledge, find yourself, rediscover your true self.
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