On The Origins of Novelty
Beyond the world of symbols, interpretation, and the cognized, there is another potential existence. This other existence is not a possible world; it is not an understood possibility that might be. Rather, it isn’t understood at all. It’s unintelligible, and that’s the whole point of it.
For it is a point of access into Unhuman Reality.
It is The Alien.
Consider: How does the human transcend what it is? It is not by exposure to Human Reality that we transcend, not by exposure to our physical or mental objects, because human reality is reproducive of itself. If you can think it, attainmebt is not true transcendence. If you can arrive at it by interpolating or extrapolating properties, it is not transcendence. To transcend is to be exposed to the inherent quality of Ontological Surprise that is the universe, to find yourself in an analytic stupor, your mind caught purposeless and out of its element, caught in a void of unfamiliarity – that is what it’s like to transcend Human Reality. To be shaken out of your recognition of the world, and find within it The Alien.
The alien is not an object. It is not a property. It is a serious nothing, insisting on becoming a something. It is the objectless before you attribute it objecthood. A piece of reality that is beyond you, but which upon contact, tries to find its way to you.
How you treat The Alien however, once contact is established, this decides what becomes of it. For you can choose to recognize The Alien, as a property, as an object, and in so doing, annihilate it in memory. That is how you reinforce an ontological finitude; the end to The New, and in so doing, bury yourself in Sameness; in a world of the limited and the bounded. In human reality.
There is another choice you can make though: to give in to The Alien. To let it in, and to let it be a something that is not a comparison to anything come before, but something wholly new. And by wholly new I do not mean a mere opposition to what already is, because that too would be a comparison. Neither, by any measure of guarantee is it something particularly profoundly new, for it is not termed wholly new due to some exceptional intensity of existence. Rather, it is wholly new because you let it be, and let it make itself, in you. Making something that was not a reproduction of you and yours, but an original conjugation of the human, and the unhuman.
That is the character of The New, which is The Real beyond the human.
In science, we study not the new, but the same. Science is interpolations, extrapolations, recognitions, comparisons – the activities for producing sameness. It is the humanization of reality. But, it could be more. Should there not be an inverse science too? Not the machinations for sameness, but the dissolutions towards universal alienation. The anti-explainer of the inexplicable, the anti-systematizer of the disjointed; the ontological transcender, a way of being for humans that bring to the world a sense of open wonder, a questionless unstructured wonder, that seeks only to widen the doors into unhuman reality, and make us wonderfully unfamiliar about its potential existence. In The Alien, which is the truly new, there is hope, there is a radical otherness to whatever is understood and to whatever is grasped and to whatever is. There is the potential of something often times more precious than knowledge. There is potential for The Surprising.