Humanity's Strings

Book excerpt: Humanity's Strings: Being, Pessimism, and Fantasy interrogates the nature of reality against fantasy as the two are presented to and created by the human consciousness-a consciousness that is in constant struggle with the omnipresence of misery and the inevitability of death. The book shows that being, pessimism, and fantasy as the strings which are made up of forces unseen, unknown, and ungoverned that control the human being like a puppet. Through a study of the metaphysical and existential philosophies of thinkers, such as Franz Brentano, Edmund Husserl, Søren Kierkegaard, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Jacques Derrida, the book interrogates not only how the self interacts with fantasy but why it does as well. It also asks why fantasy forces the self towards a unity that impacts existence in the modern world with its questions of justice, politics, and materiality. Furthermore, it situates the fantasy novels of authors, such as Stephen King, Brandon Sanderson, Douglas Adams, and Robert Jordan, as discourses which delineate the considerations above as ideas which modulate the existence of the human. Additionally, the book shows how it is not just the human that is affected by the machinations of the cosmos but also time and space-ostensibly a priori entities of existence-as these two interact with the human and its consciousness.