A potential state of human inquiry is into the nature of our very being, and what it means “to be”. For many of us, if not all of us, this very being which we subjectively experience, the totality of who we are, that conscious experience of being a subject, that conscious experience of content as it arises and passes away, the totality of our psyche, our body, the unity of time, space, and consciousness, all of which falls under our synthesis of the unity of the Being which we are, becomes itself a problem, insofar as we don’t understand it, nor know how to modify it to the most optimal subjective experience. Our being becomes a problem for us, because we are able to recognize, first of all, that we are something. This something, insofar as it is unknown, unconceptualized, yet experienced, is altogether unknown to us. While our Being is that from which any action or content of the present moment is able to be brought into our awareness, we find trouble pinning down its process. Why am I experiencing one thing and not another? Why does my experience have a mood of dissatisfaction and suffering? How do I optimize this being, and why is it not the way I want it to be? Even if it was optimal, or is currently producing a mode of being which is content, or at peace, we know it won’t last, it is of the nature of our Being to be transient, alterable, subject to change.

 Given our desirous, transmutable, and altogether unreliable Being which is the very thing that we are, it is the source of our experience, and in the recognition of that experience, it becomes a problem for us, insofar as our experience is always lacking. Given the nature of our Being, that it is conditioned by prior causes, that it is always projecting itself into the future through the will for things to be otherwise, given the dissatisfaction and desire which are ceaseless, this Being becomes a problem for us. How can who we are, pose itself to be a problem? How could it be otherwise? If it couldn’t be otherwise, why do we still see it as a problem?

It is a problem by its very nature. Being biological organisms, in our corporeality, we are the literal survival machines of our genome, the very carrier that is tasked with propagation. This is the lowest core value that drives us, and as far as our Being is comprised of this body, which it is, the relative biological imperatives rise into our conscious experience, a manifestation of a mode stemming from the synthetic unity of Being, in whichever way they may be modified by our milieu, with the original desirous implications which are an expression of that core value. The complexity of our current milieu in which expression of the genomes wishes to be accomplished, and our ability to be acutely aware of the navigation of the milieu, and our place in it, gives rise to the complexity that arises in conscious awareness. Thus, based solely on the core value, we have a complex navigation issue that is further complicated by the more and more complex social environment and cultural conditions which we must orient ourselves around in order to succeed in accomplishing the survival machines task. This is the world “we”, as the subjective experiencers of this navigation, are “thrown into”. We experience the orientation provided to us by our embodied Being, that is modified by everything within our sphere of experience and influence. This constant modification, and our constant inherent desire, provides a large number of factors and potential orientations towards the world which we may find ourselves inhabiting. The problem with our Being is the dissatisfaction in not being properly equipped for the world we didn’t choose to be a part of, in inhabiting a body with a mode of Being that is sub-optimal in providing pleasure and contentment, as its instantiated final cause is that which necessarily must be driven towards. Our experience poses a navigation problem, that of seeking for the proper orientation, seeking the proper way of Being in the world we are thrown into. The problem is, it is never clear, it is never straightforward, we are always pushed and pulled, attracted to and aversive to the content which arises in our perceptually integrated directedness which presents itself in conscious awareness.

The directedness which comprises the gaze of consciousness towards perceptually filtrated content that is filled with a sense, a significance, a meaning, presents novel problems (novel in that every present moment is novel, always renewing itself) in how to orientate ourselves with the given content selected for. This continually updated system, itself continually updating, and our conscious experience “updating” in that it is mutable and constantly fluctuating, overwhelms the Being which believes it has the power, or the right, or the ability, to dictate the successive content, and our orientation towards it. While consciously directed Being is able to manifest actions in alignment with desire, those very desires, and the very perceptual system which injects content into conscious awareness, is itself outside of our will (The Causal Tethers Which Bind Us). As we are filled with choices, and “decisions” in regards to the choices, the entire enterprise is ran through by processes which go unnoticed in an unreflexive moment-to-moment experience. This dragging along into a world we are thrown into, for him who recognizes it as such, poses a problem, a problem of fatalism, that of being along for a ride which we didn’t choose to take, that we can’t stop, and we have no say over where it goes.

Prior to any realization of the characteristics which compromise our being such as its necessary meaning structure, its directedness, its inherent desire and dissatisfaction with the present, its projection towards the future and its immutable connectivity to the past, comes the preliminary underlying issue of our own Being being unknown to us, of Being something which we do not know. While these characteristics seek to impose some order in conceptual form, or experientially realized pre-conceptual form, they are merely a way of our Being coming to terms with what it is. Any unknown which we are directed upon poses a sort of issue for us, a problem, insofar as it has yet to be put in formation, yet to be transferred from mere content to “information”. This presents itself in any content that manifests itself in a novel, or wholly unintuitable way, it invites us to seek a way of categorizing it, of putting ourselves in orientation towards it in a way that makes sense of it, that has meaning. While this is done subconsciously with visual, auditory, tactile, and in general, all sensorious content, the mental content that arises poses the same exact issue, but it requires an orientation that is more than just perceptually integrated and embodied – as it itself is the production of the perceptual filtration system – it requires an abstract orientation of the mind in being able to make sense of the content. We often attempt to impose order upon mental content through the linguistically developed capabilities we contain. We tie concepts to phenomena and use language in order to reference it, placing a structure of understanding within ourselves in relation to the content that is manifesting. When it comes to the unknown that is itself this very Being which is orientating itself in the world, we find the same problem, but amplified in its scope, in that it is the Being which orients which seeks to orient itself. We, being the totality of the system which does the orientating, experience the awareness of conscious content in its directedness towards something, and can reflexively conclude that it is the manifestation of conditioned phenomenal forces acting in the presenting of the present. In seeking to uncover the attributes, the mode of being which comprises the enterprise is itself directed towards that which is directing, towards the directionality itself.

This Being poses a problem in that it is unknown, and in seeking to order it, to tie linguistic representations and structure ourselves towards it, the very mechanism from which we are doing so is that which we are attempting to reflexively orientate ourselves towards. Thus we prose a problem for ourselves, in that we seek to uncover a way of organizing the chaos which we are, through the chaos that is that which is to be understood. Thus the fundamental human condition, that of operating from a presupposition of chaotic potentiality, the unknown that is known by the conscious observer as being unknown, and which fails to impose order upon it.

Thus the role of phenomenology arises from this deficiency, as that which takes this issue of Being, attempts to impose order in the formulation and comprehension of its characteristics, through the recognition of its manifestations, through the examination of its content and the ties which predispose our Being to act and Be in certain ways. It is recognizing the characteristics of this Being which we find ourselves as, that we are reflexively turning the gaze upon itself, and delineating its features. This Being which we are, is the necessary precondition to any enterprise that arises into experience, whether it is movement, sensation, mental aggregates such as thought, ideas, pre-conceptual experience, and, the way in which we are situated in the world, and what we do in the world. All human endeavor, whether it be scientific, technological, social, or philosophical, stems from the human Being which is a mystery unto itself. Yet we make truth-claims about these domains, we impose order in the form of descriptions of objects, and we know not from whence the description came, we know not why and how such manifestations of linguistic organization is produced, we know not the meaning, the sense, the significance that has orientated us towards the world in the way which produces the experience which we take for granted. We attribute agency, and conscious control, in the place of embodied orientation towards the world, we take ownership for conceptual abstract representations, knowing not why we are orientated toward such content, nor how such linguistic representations are produced, and why they are produced in a way towards content which we find enough importance to dedicate time to. We opt either for empiricism in regarding all that is experienced as being subjugated to the sensory received datum, or intellectualism in the conscious interpretation of all phenomenon. We ought to see the transcendence of both systems, in the unity of the totality of our Being, and see both perspectives as merely modes of interpreting ourselves, which need not be diametrically opposed, but rather two modes of interpretation which are themselves manifesting out of the same Being which seeks to orientate itself towards the world, they are two answers to a question which calls for the transcendence of both.

Why do we dedicate time towards the directedness of our gaze, and for what purpose? Why does our gaze move, and what drives us to orient ourselves in the manner which we find ourselves in the present? We ought to, in the first place, pose the questions. We ought to admit the unknown through admonition of its place as the unknown, and, if we want to find the answers that solve the questions we must look in the direction of solving the question of how the question itself is arising. In order to find the characteristics and order necessary to deal with existence itself, to manage Being in an optimal way, we must seek to understand it. In the process of understanding it, we must return to the thing’s themselves, to the phenomena as they are so presented to us, and work with the only tools we have, with the Being which is closest to us, that Being which we find ourselves as being. This is the task of the philosopher, of the seeker of truth, and more specifically, of the phenomenologist.