Philosophical Rogues and Antiheroes of the Intellectual. Jean Baudrillard (part 1)

It's when we look at obscurity, in its compression of thoughts.  Narrowing process of discerning reality.  You can see how relevant Eastern religious philosophy, namely Zen and Taoism from Asia assisted in the manifestation of a focused discipline (meditation) of removing the duality.  Which, at times can be paradoxical and puzzling from the different schools of Zen Buddhist philosophy, yet seen as an essential element to accepting the reality of life with, of course, the uncertainly.  The indifference and connection of maintaining the moment within the nature of reality.  Is seen as simple in its purpose.  The West, particularly Europe, throughout the ages, has, and still does to this day have an obsession with structuring an ideology, purpose through political encroachment for order and control.  That has been on the most part implemented by class division with monotheistic religious influence attached.  A structure that is not solely confined to the West, the East over thousands of years  also maintained rule with oppression and division. Except democracy as the essential ingredient to Western political thought was a devised concept from Ephialtes's Greece, over 500 years ago.  And this is were the Western ideologies are far more layered and implemented than the Eastern idealisms, which it turn makes them the most corruptible. As a country's political system, overtime, may move dramatically from imprints of Nationalist and Marxist viewpoints that can end up becoming fanatical and tyrannical motivated.  It is this constant layering of trying to develop a road map for civilization that philosophers, intellectuals and writers born of last two hundred years, who I would categorize as more of the Rogue and Antiheroes, actually railed against.  These ideologies that attempted to secure a reality, by over thinking its purpose, trying to enforce an understating at an attempt at structurally guiding the human condition. The assertion would then be: why not just leave it, observe or even reject it.

The Japanese have a word to explain illusion, it is Kanji, the Chinese phrase is huanxiang, meaning “False Idea”.   A building block of Buddhist teaching is attachment to a fleeting world, is to suffer within it, is to embrace its illusion.  This must be released to break the bond of suffering from birth and death. To transcend into Nirvana, which is a state of mind.  Not a place.  I have always been curious of how Western thought could also connected to the Eastern perspective of a fleeting world, to understand reality as an overladed array of ideologies, beliefs and concepts.  And as mentioned, to set down a map. To hinge one self to a template of purpose, offsetting the fear that one could end up lost within the function or structure of reality.  It then enters a confined geometric, with multitudes of ideas and ideologies, whether both right and left, capitalism or socialism - ending up as the same paradigm.  This course has been set, except, what if reality through visual consumption of media conceptualization begins to duplicate itself endlessly, regardless of the template.  The illusion becomes real and the real becomes an illusion.  Then the question is asked.  What if there was no map to begin with?  It has already been eroded.  Then we maybe entering a simulation of duplicated realities, or as the late French dissent philosopher Jean Baudrillard once wrote in 1981 it becomes the "Simulacra and Simulation."

"Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory - PRECESSION OF SIMULACRA - it is the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map."