David Lindley

The Freedom to Be Tragic David Lindley

We do not know how we came to be here and our lives, in a manner of speaking, are lived for us. We accept life because we are unable to refuse it. We suffer a given condition, and we ourselves are inescapably material elements of that given condition. All our anxieties about it, and all our attempts to redeem our condition by some solving word or idea never take us beyond the stuff of thinking, where questions and answers share the same uncertain and fictitious qualities. No answers come from a voice emanating from the external, objective condition, from the world into which we have been born (unable, as we are, to will anything different). Only our subjective experience of the world as an aesthetic phenomenon, and ourselves as its creator, can rescue us from the confines of the objective and the given, from arbitrary existence.