A Modern-Day Diary: Notes for Future Humans

Abstract

Time and being can be seen as a space. A modern-day diary is a way of exploring that space or state of being. Outlining and shaping it requires word, image and imagination. The question is framed cultural-philosophically, and the mode of writing is poetic essayism. Otherwise, the creative untangling and differentiation of the poetics of lived space is not possible. After all, the goal is to combine science and art and weave them into the same reflective fabric. The essential aspects include thoughts about the fullness and filling of something, about its fulfilment. Then the present moment is not seen as marking a boundary in just one direction: it is not just an endpoint of the past. Nor is it exclusively the starting point of the future. The present must be seen as a boundary in two directions. The researcher's gaze can simultaneously focus on both the bygone and the future. Consciousness meanders backwards down memory lane and journeys forwards on a trip of anticipation. A moment of insight means the fulfilment of time. Time is right for a deepening of self-understanding. Simultaneously, it also means fulfilling the ideal of self-reflection: an overall picture, clear and enlightened, of the the self’s place in time and being. When humans long for the past or dream of the future, they are living in the impasse of a now-moment. It is not a boundary in any direction. It is, in fact, a dimensionless photographic moment. Its spatial self-containedness results in no more than semi-fulfilment. The present becomes irrelevant. In fulfilment, humans themselves are the boundary facing in all directions. The overall perception of the enlightened subject reveals a reality that includes freedom, space, and human existence. Then it is easy for each and every person to exist as their own self.