"Are All Humans Hedonists?"

Before I settle into something different, read some Francois Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel and hope from the same or similar experience as when I read Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote, there's a question to be answered which sent me to sleep the other night with the question: Why speak? I had written elusively on this epiphany the other night whilst watching Oldboy, a film about repressed desire, desire repressed from the outside, through hypnosis and through diminishing the reality of the prisoner, this constant repetition of two dimensional television avatars suggesting escape, but actually reinforcing the repression, actually offering a sort of imprisonment. 

And why speak? was a question that seemed so significant, though it fades through thinking, especially with set vocabularies, rhythms of speech, even stylings that permeate the way the written word presents itself. But loosening its meaning is of incomparable value: before we speak, we think. We think and define loosely, with desire intermingled with the people that surround us. Our language, it seems, to create ourselves as thinking creatures, or at least animals that have filtered, through time laid down conduits to expressing subtleties within themselves that free desire, and make hedonism less painful, less marginal. From identity and the world of language comes a world that is not intermingled but one of multiplicities, and when these sketches unfolded with words that split like a cell meiosis, become interdependent rather than fused together.

It seems that our very realities oppose this fusion that has been the makings of ecosystems, dynamics that from the outside seem violent in their desire (the orchid and the wasp, the trappings of species whose relationship is violence to one another; death is life, and sexuality is abundant in nature, a sexuality grounded in cannibalism, violence and intermingled desire). Consider the words of Vasily Grossman in his life's work Life and Fate:

"The century of Einstein and Planck was also the century of Hitler. The Gestapo and the scientific renaissance were children of the same age. How humane the nineteenth century seemed, that century of naive physics, when compared with the twentieth century, the century that had killed his mother. There is a terrible similarity between the principles of Fascism and those of contemporary physics.

Fascism has rejected the concept of separate individuality, the concept of 'a man', and operates only with vast aggregates. Contemporary physics speaks of a greater or lesser probability of occurrences within this or that aggregate of human particles. And are not the terrible mechanics of Fascism founded on the principles of quantum politics, of political probability?

Fascism arrived at the idea of liquidation of entire strata of the population, of entire nations and races, on the grounds that there was a greater probability of overt or covert oppositions among these groupings than among others: the mechanics of probabilities and of human aggregates.

But no! No! And again no! Fascism will perish for the very reason that it has applied to man the laws applicable to atoms and cobblestones!

Man and Fascism cannot co-exist. If Fascism conquers, man will cease to exist and there will remain only man-like creatures that have undergone an internal transformation. But if man, man who is endowed with reason and kindness, should conquer, then Fascism must perish, and those who have submitted to it will once again become people."

- p78-9 Life and Fate (Vintage Publishing)

This is a response to the question of whether all humans are hedonists: there is no aggregate. Humans themselves have entered the world using desire as their means of loving, of expression and creativity. In aggregates and summations of what desire is, we enter this world that has made violence and abhorrence of desire possible, the idea that one desire is not compatible with another. The Jewish messianic faith has no time, and is a different experience of reality altogether. In being incompatible with an idea of virtue, of cohesive humanity, it is shrouded with suspicion and then silenced. Even the Stalinism of the thirties and forties repressed the very Jewish people that brought it to where it was, the steppe regions suffering catastrophically as the people were taken to violent, discrete archipelagos, whilst the land surrounding was flooded either with Fascism or Stalinism. 

There is no we here, and there are no aggregates without aggregates forming themselves willingly. Otherwise there is just blindness, cruelty. The very notion that desire must be shaped according to social understandings, that some desires are an affront to others, is of course a social issue and social aggregates form themselves against the dissenting types, whether through religion or a secular morality. Discretely, there is violence in every moment. In the perception, even, of a cohesive human identity, the question why speak? becomes of profound, ineffable importance; because we ought to be seen and not from a historical, experiential perspective, but in the way that there is only ever new emergences, new desires that are sometimes violent and sometimes creative. The landscape is never aggregate but pushed through with segments than must be allowed their position, or we are defeated by a single notion of what desire is, what humanity is. Accordingly, children hesitate to speak.