Shadow Self

Fair accoutrements
Ceremonial victuals
Excessive price

Late summer arrives and another State Fair is imminent. Photographing this annual venue is an obligatory aesthetic pilgrimage that has become rather problematic. I hope that overly aggressive police that enforce non-existent laws restricting artistic freedom will not blemish this iteration.

“They spent the next hour nibbling their way through the food stalls, sharing spiral-cut potatoes, pork sandwiches, and cream puffs.” – Amy E. Reichert

Philosophical reflections
Bathed in sunshine
Independent interconnections

All understanding rests upon the presupposition of observational validity. As a position of attention, observational evidence reveals the transience contingency of any sensation. This renders any understanding an incomplete penetration process.

“Philosophy is the attempt to make manifest the fundamental evidence as to the nature of things.” – Alfred North Whitehead

Structured fragments
Latent dispositions
Creative energy

Accepting the inevitable shadow elements as encountered, frees up uncharted mental domains. Identity is an amalgamation of thoughts, feelings, and possesses that come and go.

“What we call civilized consciousness has steadily separated itself from the basic instincts. But these instincts have not disappeared. They have merely lost their contact with our consciousness and are thus forced to assert themselves in an indirect fashion.” – Carl Jung

Thought and life
Arises at the intersection
At a given moment

The shadow self relates to multiple others at an oblique angle, as the concept of the subjective is not contained in that of the objective. Nevertheless, objects of existence are inexhaustible.

“Nothing sensible – whether it be an affective or perceptual quality – can exist in the way it is given to me in the thing by itself, when it is not related to me or to any other living creature.” – Quentin Meillassoux

Early morning
New Orleans
Side walking

Nature must exist even if there is no consciousness that is aware of its existence. As the shadowself and a close companion make their way down Poydras Street, the objective and the subjective are simultaneously united and mutually opposed.

“The intrinsic notion of everything merely objective in our knowledge we may speak of as nature.” – Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling

Actuality operator
Context dependent
Referential explication

For Schelling, the self’s life is not a mathematicized interplay of eidetic shapes within time, but rather time itself. From this view, the finite endures and resists inclusion within any arbitrary totalization.

“For on the basis of this very same perception our utterance could have sounded quite differently and thereby have unfolded a quite different sense.” – Edmund Husserl