The Invental Subject

**The Invental Subject**


Insofar as the Subject, within metaphysics, is the 'sujet', the topic, the matter, and hence also the substantive, in particular the material substantive of the Self, the Invental Subject is of an entirely different nature.

The Invental is in many ways the pure abstract, "the face we put on to meet the faces that we meet." As abstract the Invental is also //simple//. The society that each of us are, behind the mask, is simplified into the Invental agent that is able to quickly decide and act in response to the Evental within the specific situation understanding that most parameters are unknowable in themselves. The Invental Subject is the actor in the real Events that shape lives and societies. As such the Invental Subjects maintains the contradictory nature of being both the Real and the Abstract Subject simultaneously.

How the self invents and reinvents this Subject is the core of the notion of authenticity vs inauthenticity. In a pure everydayness of the workaday world the Subject is neither authentic nor inauthentic, in essence it is //missing//, it is only noticeable by its absence. As an Event of personal or societal magnitude becomes apparent an authentic or inauthentic Subject arises in anticipatory response.

The inauthentic Subject results from the identification of the Subject with the ego. The ego, the voice of insecurity, fear and ultimately paranoia constantly tries to assert control by spreading its fear and its insane need for an impossible security to the rest of the self, and without detachment from the ego it is very difficult to refute its claims to have the self's best interests in mind. Although the ego's own selfishness is the root of its ineffectuality in the face of the Event, in anticipation of the unknown nature of the coming Event its fears and insecurities seem rational and cogent. Its constant chatter, as well, is confusing and distracting, yet tranquilizing as well in an extreme way as it gives the illusion of constant presence and thus a constant present.

The authentic Subject, in distinction from this, takes into account reasonable worries and insecurities but allows the caring nature of the self to assert its ethical preeminence over the ego's selfishness in determining the view that 'one' will have and does have on the Event, and the corresponding decision and action to be taken. Dasein doesn't lose its authenticity due to 'falling'. The experience of falling is another insecurity of the ego, which feeling no ground beneath it is in constant delusion that it is factically falling. That the mode of authenticity arrives with much effort, and disappears leaving just the trace of its passing on the Self, is that it is a form of the transient, Invental, abstract 'one', while the Self is in itself always a multiple, its own society, that in a temporal manner grounds itself by a constant anticipation and a corresponding remembrance and repetition.

Subject, then, in this sense carries similar connotations to the way the term was used in the idea of the 'British Subject'. That Subject is subject to the Crown, which includes the government, civil and criminal law, and by extension society as a whole. It is this Subject that is the owner of rights, while freedom is the a priori of the Self's ability to comport itself to anything at all. The Subject is also the bearer of public duties and the recipient of public privileges. It also becomes the target of the moral law. The civil law was personified for the peasant through the Lord, generally the Lord of the Manor or other officiate. As the subject of the moral law, however, and within the ego-christian notion of right and wrong, the subject has no 'rights', only 'right'. The 'right' is the 'right to follow the law' and nothing more. The subject of the ego-christian has one duty, obedience to the Lord of imagination, the personified God of Jesus, and one privilege, that of eternally existing as the ego-personality it is. The ego of the ego-christian clings to this 'law', 'right' and 'duty' as its means of purchasing some form of security at the expense of a loss of contact with reality. The eschatology of the ego-christian is merely another facet of the ego's inability to face its own mortality, which it pushes onto the 'sinful' at the always-fast-approaching day of judgment. In the same way the extreme evangelism of the ego-christian (or the ego-sciencist for that matter) attempts to mollify the ego's fear, grounded at root in the knowledge that it is in fact mortal, that its beliefs are fictions. By spreading belief it can reassure itself of the reasonableness and thereby the truth of its ego-professed ideology.

Of course the evangelical, almost desperate figure of the ego-christian is by no means the only type of christian, or even the predominant one. Most christians, like other people, spend most of their time in an average everydayness of work and other concerns in a manner that is neither authentic nor consumed by ego. While at times when Events arise they may feel and temporarily succumb to the insecurity of the ego, they also recognize its selfishness as unethical, and thereby implicitly recognize the precedence of the ethical decision and action over a vocalization of a moral law.

The ego type also, of course, exists outside Christianity. The rise of a simplistic mechanistic scientism is one cogent example. While actual science left the mechanistic conception of nature behind in the 20th century, sciencists such as Richard Dawkins, antiquated as they are in their particular sciences, continue to loudly proclaim their onto-theologically based atheism and evangelize for the abolition of all religion. This is in the name of the myth of 'progress'. But the myth of progress itself is no more than the present infinitely extended, through which their terrified egos postulate some form of continued existence while simultaneously denying it.