The phenomenologists method of discovering the in itself of an object within consciousness (any phenomena) isn’t properly explained through an empirical or rational methodology, but rather through using an eidetic (internal intuition) reduction to reveal the essential nature of an object. This is done through taking the known characteristics of a phenomena as they are understood by consciousness (science, philosophy, psychology aides us in discovering the attributes relating to an “object”), and discarding any attributes or perceptions or judgments which do not constitute the nature of the object so as to not alter its form. This means any characteristic that is able to be removed from or altered within the object, while the object is able to retain its structure and “Being” after the reduction, is removed, and the essential characteristics are what remains. By removing the transient, we can gain intuition into the concrete essence of a phenomena. We, in part, are able to do this through applied knowledge of the phenomenological method, in concordance with our developed logical and rational capacities, the data called into question acquired through our perceptive system selecting content through a value hierarchy structure. We must have knowledge of, and consciously employ a phenomenological method to properly carry out the eidetic reduction, and this, if carried out sufficiently, can provide us with foundational features which we can verify subjectively through experience. The ability to linguistically describe a process, and its accuracy in being a symbolic representation of that content, relies on our conceptual vocabulary and our ability to articulate the abstract essence into a relatable and meaningful content. Through the positing of a questionable concrete phenomena within the realm of consciousness, we are able to cognitively model the content and imaginatively vary its attributes until a limitation found within the object of desire is reached so that any further reduction or alteration would fundamentally not apply to the object, revealing the invariable, or essential necessary form or shape or pure essence of the content in question.
We must not mistake the Being of our own consciousness employed in the act of cognition with the content within consciousness, both are separate phenomena in which the phenomenologist is able to scrutinize. The mode of Being which is able to employ an eidetic reductionist method is itself an object which can be analyze by the phenomenologist, as is any other content that is able to be imagined by us. The conceptualization of objects allows us to properly bracket the content and organize it into our mental framework, allowing a ready-to-hand language in which to work with in our efforts. As we become aware of a content arising within consciousness (can even be the awareness of awareness in a meta sense) we can run that object through the eidetic reduction to be able to apply a description to the content in a fashion that reveals its essential nature in a way that is clear and objective, albeit, if experientially intuited then the content uncovered in the reduction is true to its nature, an symbolic representation is necessarily related to this true nature by degrees of precision according to our ability to articulate and preciseness of concepts in denoting their represented phenomena. This defining, or application of a description which relates the essence of a phenomena, isn’t a material or empirical fact, as science can discover, but more of a hypothesis into the nature of an “object”. This hypothesis can in turn be objectively validated in its externalizing through applying logic and reason, as well as philosophical argumentation, to prove its usefulness and beneficiality. This explanation of a phenomena produced through the eidetic reduction, due to its abstract nature, is discoverable solely by the philosopher in his ability to clarify an abstract phenomenon. It is the job of the philosopher to transmit a clear and articulate description, and must not, in my opinion, ever claim the depiction as being more than a hypothesis. While certain hypotheses properly discovered using this methodology are surely to be miscalculated, varied by biases and judgments, or wrongly concluded upon based on the limited perceptibility and the mental substratum’s natural limitations, we can conversely discover descriptions of essences which prove to be logically non-contradictory, as well as useful or beneficial within the philosophical realm of comprehension.
Thus the discoveries of phenomenology can be used to inform our belief and value structures, and reveal aspects of reality not able to be unveiled through a strictly empirical, deductionistic, inductionistic, or scientific methodology. This standard methodology, science of psychology, deals with facts and truth seeking of phenomena in their perception to us in the external world (also material phenomena constituting the foundations for our internal world – consciousness), what phenomenology allows us to do is take a lower resolution image of the Being which is engaged in scientific endeavors, analyze the theoretical explanations of scientific discoveries, methodologies, and allows us to conceptualize the makeup of scientific findings so that the content is more accurately represented to our human perspective, from the human perspective, to the human perspective. The perceptible system is the foundation for which datum arises in consciousness, the essence of which is discovered in phenomenology. This consciousness, therefore, is necessarily presupposed in any scientific endeavor, and always modifies the endeavor and interprets it through biological lens. The facts of science are truly external facts, while our conceptual representations of them are merely models. Phenomenology allows us to parse the data discovered in science while simultaneously analyzing the description which we apply to such data through the use of our language, or mathematical logic, in order to not only give a more truthful representation of it, but also to differentiate and isolate specific components in a way that gives insight into the specific nature of each separable piece, or as the whole (the totality of aspects which makeup the essentially of a concept if it has constituent parts).
While a particle can be scientifically and mathematically theorized to exist, and can be found in a laboratory to exist, the perception of such an object is always altered by the observer, not only in the conscious content arisen in experience, but in the very ability to perceive, and the necessary value structure through which it is filtered. The significance, or sense, that we don’t seek out, but for which we find to constitute the intentionality of our being towards the data, is posited in the revelation of the data, and we become aware of content through the system which selects for it. Aside from conceptualizing content discovered in the phenomenological lens, in the natural mode of being we also come across difficulty in parsing data and affecting it based upon the mode of being which we inhabit in our directedness towards it.The microscope used, the light interference upon the particle and upon the instrumentation used to record it, our own eye sight and mental reflection of it, our mental state of recognizing such data and symbolizing them consciously, is all variants in interpreting the particle. From every perspective, from every moment, the content of such depictions is altered, yet theoretically, the object exists objectively. To describe it as it truly is, being that we are humans located in time at which both us (our conscious mode of Being) and the object in its essential nature are constantly in a state of flux and impermanence, requires philosophical and grammatical cohesion with the application of logic to really nail down the underpinnings of what makes something what it is, the in-itself of an object thus can only be articulated, or the sense of it experienced, only in partial relation to the fullness of its actuality. The natural way of interpreting data, and thinking of scientific discovery, is by just taking the data as they are discovered at face value, without analyzing the aspect of human intervention which always is a variable in the perception of any content, being that we are limited to our human state. Recognizing the indeterminateness of our experience and how it relates to the analysis of scientific discovery, leaves us open to the normal way of viewing and describing phenomena, without taking into account the human experiential aspect which is side-by-side to the present moment awareness and creation of the object of inquiry. We ignore the essence of the content in our naturally progressing and transient conscious experience, and therefore lose our own possibility of deeper insight into the nature of the content of consciousness and the mode of Being which coincides with the awareness of such content. In science, this can amount to the improper conceptualization of phenomena, creating an obfuscated description (inarticulate, not properly described or defined concept or group of concepts) which misses out on the possibility of a more accurate representation, which would be, for us, possible through a phenomenological investigation.
The phenomenological conclusion, taken to its limit (the limit of an investigation with itself as object) produces a result that was discovered through a much less vigorous method – without our current understanding of logic and reduction (as well as a lack of science) – over two thousand years ago. The concluding remark upon the essential aspects of phenomena themselves prove to be unsatisfactory, as is the natural state of our conscious experience, by the very absence of integral essence to phenomena. All phenomena, outside of the bounds of our conceptualization, are at their core essence less, as they are interdependent with every other conceptually described phenomena. All phenomena are impermanent, transient, timeless, and lacking a core structure in their facticity. All phenomena as we discover them in our conscious experience are constantly in a state of change, and exist due to a causal structure predicated upon a conditioned nature. They appear as they do now because of factors which preceded them, and they are being altered within the present moment, and will be different in the future in regard to how they appear to us, as they are themselves not concrete entities. What can become a concrete entity, for us, in our experience, isn’t a truth about the content of reality (a phenomenon) but rather a truth about our mode of being as it represents phenomenon to itself, even if that intentioned content is itself. This is only stable in an abstract manner, about metaphysical concepts, such absolute truths appear foreign to the natural mode of Being, yet are discoverable through introspection and philosophical analysis – namely phenomenology. Such absolute metaphysical and representational truths are such as the statements “all phenomena are conditioned” “all conditioned phenomena are impermanent and subject to change” “all phenomena is absent of an essential nature” etc.
In conclusion, philosophy, and the phenomenological process, cannot produce a factual representation of the essence of a phenomena existing in reality or our experience, because by its very nature, it is a representation. That the representation works to provide a logically successful result, that is inherent within the structure, such as deductive truths, are rather abstract truths about logic, than being a phenomenon that exists in the world
What I refer to as the content that is unfindable as a fact in reality would be in reference to the essence or permanence of such phenomena such as the mode of Being which underlies the ability to produce the consciousness positing the logical truth aforementioned. The argument that a representation is factually in its alignment with reality is a perversion of the word fact, or truth, in the way I am using it here. While facts about the world do exist, their nature is purely abstract and general, and not existing in the conscious minds of humans. What this means is that phenomenology doesn’t produce facts, but logical descriptions in the correlation between conceptualized groupings of reality (into concepts, language, or mathematical formulations). These groupings or descriptions aren’t merely mental constructs, as their existence (such as mathematical numbering) isn’t merely a product of our mentality, but rather such things are merely to be taken as a mental construct arising in consciousness in the form of language and symbols which themselves (the symbols) are representative of an abstract way of perceiving reality. These symbols in their ordering and relation can produce a result that is logically true, but this isn’t the unfindable empty essence of a phenomena which phenomenological inquiry is aimed at discovering. Nevertheless, the inquiry isn’t fruitless, it can strip away the unnecessary and variable content to find an invariable shape of a concept which is representing a phenomenon, to better understand the phenomena, and how it relates to our picture of reality or how it relates to us in our lives, etc.
The mode of Being which is perceiving reality, must be understood as it is, as just that, a mode of our consciousness producing a perception using mentally constructed language (symbology) to represent a perceived phenomenon within the world. This is an accurate prediction. Now in the logical and seemingly objective venture of phenomenology to be able to produce conclusive statements as to the essence of a phenomena in its concrete invariable form, isn’t a fact, as all phenomena themselves are constantly changing, impermanent, and inherently “empty of an essence”, rather what phenomenology can profess to produce is the logical ordering and articulation of the symbology which is a mental representation as it relates to the phenomena as it appears to us in reality, to a greater or lesser degree, depending on its clarity and depth and scope of comprehension. This means that it can be beneficial and useful to us in our human endeavors, as we are a conceptualizing, experiencing, living, Being, with modes of consciousness that are able to use value systems and interpret reality in a more or less beneficial way to be better in line with its actuality. The phenomenological method aids us in progression along this path, and any deep inquirer can use it to better articulate the state of reality, but the point I wish to stress here is of the nature of its conclusion must not be posited as a fact, or as having concrete existence, but rather, its utility, or pragmatic usefulness, in aiding us in the human experience of understanding reality, which is great, considering were human.
If the contents herein seem to be contradictory, they are, as a progressive comprehension of the use of phenomenology itself is being presented. The contrast between our normal mode of intuiting (regular perception) and a phenomenological examination of a transcendent essence, necessarily refers to two different modes of Being, and consequently two different modes of Being, characterizes by different attributions. And thus different rules and conclusions support and follow from their exploration. The logical formulation of concepts which led to their conclusion is a building process, through which diametrically opposed beliefs are found in succession, and through a Hegelian dialectic, the contradicting truths are superseded to produce a picture which contains both truths within. This process occurs across the span of all conscious development, and this holds true for the process of phenomenological methodology and understanding, the discoveries found and understood through eidetic reduction might contradict the discoveries of other inquiries, and the summation of both contradictory “truths” may necessarily be transcended by a further conceptualization which in its formulation can include both aspects of reality. Thus in phenomenology we are absurdly (Camus’ definition) seeking the meaning to the essence of an object within a meaningless world, finding truths about aspects of reality in content which has no concrete immutable truths, without illogically being unreasonable in our discoveries. There is a place and a usage to these terms that is both deeper and more transcendental than immediately meets the eye. Phenomenology can find the essential structure to phenomena as to their representation in our consciousness, yet recognize the essence less of the actual phenomena themselves.
Here I wish to delineate several related terms to better differentiate their usage and respective attributes. The terms in question are that of mindfulness, philosophical phenomenology, and psychological phenomenology. Edmund Husserl pointed to key differences between psychological phenomenology and philosophical phenomenology, but here, for clarification and ease of understanding, I wish to additionally employ the use of mindfulness or Vipassana in the Buddha’s conception. These terms are used in the study of our own experience, and all are different possible states of Being we may enter into, and can potentially be used towards specific aims once they are unveiled to us within our own experience. They are Hiedeggerian “modes of Being” which can become open options to us (due to deterministic causality) in the exploration and truth seeking in the direction of comprehending and conceptualizing our own experience.
We begin with an analysis of the content of our consciousness, through introspective awareness, this is defined as mindfulness. Through mindfulness we can direct our consciousness to become aware of the contents within its sphere of awareness within the present moment (Basic Vipassana and Samatha Meditation). When we knowingly are aware (meta awareness – aware of our awareness) of what is happening within consciousness within this presentment, we can learn about the nature of consciousness, and gain insights into its fundamental nature (philosophical phenomenology) as well as its development, prior and post causality, what brings certain aspects into awareness and how we act and behave in response to them, and what effect that experience has upon us (psychological phenomenology). Thus we use mindfulness as a groundwork structure to gain insight into the two fields of further application. Mindfulness allows us to be aware of what content enters into our consciousness, and with enough practice in being in this mode of Being, certain insights can become clear to us (recognized as True).
Such insights available to be gleaned and recognized firsthand through the practice and training of mindfulness are broadly grouped into three useful, essential, basic truths about our inner experience. These are delineated by the Buddha, and while they are not comprehensive as to the content which is able to be uncovered, they are immediately intuitable, and beneficial to recognize. Those I speak of are the nature of non-self, impermanence, and the unsatisfactory underpinnings of our existence. The lack of a definite self, or ego, or non-self is to be discovered through the coinciding insight of impermanence, as their being no content or no phenomena to be found as being permanent. We find upon investigation that the content of our consciousness is in constant flux from moment to moment, and is characterized by its transient arising and fading away nature, as objects of consciousness (inner subjective content within the realm of consciousness within each moment) come into view and are replaced by new content. This causally led chain of content is discovered as modal changes to being without an anchor or headmaster, what we find to be its basis is simply Being as Being, rather than as Being as Self. Being becomes conceptualized, or experientially seen as, an active happening, lacking the “self” which we normally attribute as being an agent acting as the contributing subject to the content of our experience. Lack of “free will”, or, lack of control over what is the next content of consciousness, becomes apparent as a negative attribute of our experience. Mindfulness has the ability to allow the mindful practitioner to realize the suffering, or unsatisfactory nature of his being, through the experiencing of a consistently present desire, or craving, or clinging which propels the consciousness to become dissatisfied with its current state, and to be directed towards future states of the present moment. This is what Husserl terms intentionality, or the directedness or pointlessness of consciousness towards something. This intentionality, spurred by desire and dissatisfaction, is acted the content of our perceptual environment, including mental content, under the fundamental concern, importance, value, of what the perceived horizon presents as optimal to the totality of our Being. This directedness towards value is what Heidegger defines as fundamental to our Being, that of “care” (Heideggarian Terminology).
From the findings of mindfulness stems the scientific study of phenomenological psychology, which is a variant upon, and later rediscovery, of the very methodology which Buddha painted the picture of two thousand years prior. In psychological phenomenology, we take the experience of consciousness, and analyze them in a way towards an aim of giving description to the content found within. The describing of such content allows us to classify and arrange experiential content (psychologically phenomenological) in a cohesive and useful manner, in which to recognize and give a conceptual understanding to the causality of such states arising, as well as towards goal-directed states of optimization. This is the role of psychology within the phenomenological subfield, to identify states as falling into discovered groups of classification, and towards the arising of future states with a goal in mind towards the state of Being with which we wish to embody.
As to the nature of the Being which is able to experience mindfulness, we must employ a “science” of objective philosophical phenomenology to analyze and interpret its foundation structures. The role of philosophy is to describe the nature, essence, limit, scope, and characteristics of the Being which is able to experience, the being which we analyze, that which is necessarily most readily available to us, is our own, a “human being”, defined as “Dasien” in Hiedeggerian terms. When we seek to know what is universal about such consciousness, and its ability to experience, its ability to enter into different modes of Being, we seek the use of philosophy in its depiction. We find explanations attempting to attribute essential foundational, objective, universal, consistencies that form the basis of Human Being. Hiedegger finds our being inextricably linked to a tripartite temporality, as existing within a structure of time we didn’t choose to inhabit, the “thrown” of our existence (past creating a present creating a future). We are found within this period of temporality with the primary characteristic of having a foundational “care structure” (comparable to desire in Buddhism) which affects our entire existence. We find ourselves “thrown” into an existence which is unprecedented, and we have an anxiety towards death, a constant anticipation of future inexistence, and we embody the will to escape it (Buddhist dissatisfaction). The answer is to heed the call of conscience and to live authentically while seeking to understand our Being.
In Hegel we find that human consciousness exhibits a form of Being which is able to be in distinctive general modes, or forms of Being, which can progress itself through a dialectical method to higher states of more comprehensive knowledge and understanding of itself and reality. As contradictory truths are discovered in our experience, we seek to transcend them through forming a synthesis which contains opposing facts about our existence, allowing us to supersede our prior mode of consciousness. Subsequent philosophy is able to analyze and depict the Being which we are, Dasien, as containing infinite modes of Being which give rise to the experiences which shape these forms of Being, and which can progress.
Philosophy is able to generalize about the steps taken in the conscious development, or of a hypothetical ideal conscious development as derived from the objective nature of experience which itself is discovered through the use of reason and conceptualization within this consciousness, which is, the objective study of subjectively discovered philosophical phenomenology.
Heidegger set out to question what it means to “be”, what it means to be a Being, and what constitutes such a phenomenon. He took his approach phenomenologically, meaning from the approach of analyzing one’s own being, in what is commonly referred to as a subjective approach, analyzing phenomena as they appear within one’s own experience. He took this method and applied it in a broad ontological manner to the question of what is Being. Heidegger stated that we must develop a deep understanding of what it means to Be, what our Being is, prior to any objective pursuit, such as science or other intellectual activities. This phenomenological analysis, which seeks to give description and insight into the nature of our experience, and how it comes to fruition, what characterizes it, is necessary something which is presupposed in any scientific endeavor, without being explicitly stated. By continuing to ask scientific questions, in pursuing technological advancement, without clarifying the subjective mode, and the perspective and characteristics of it, we necessarily are engaging with material from a foundation that is unexplored. Heidegger sought out to explore this foundation, that which is the essential characteristics of our Being, in order to shed light upon anything which proceeds from it, which is all of our subjective experience, which, in reality, is all that truly matters to us. Heidegger discovered that our Being, the one we have access too, the one closest to us – so to say, itself is best understood through the many modes which are available to it, in general, the Being that we are, is a Being for whom his own Being is a problem for it, which is, what he termed “Dasein” or in general, the human condition, a Human Being.
The modes of being can be characterized as having distinct characteristics, arising, and being modified, by situations, environment, history, the present. In short, our experience is tempered by temporality itself, by time. Building off of Heidegger insight, Merleau-Ponty pointed out that this very being is deeply entwined with our perspective, which is primordially grasped and develops the contents of experience as an aggregation through time. The perspective which directly intuits and filters content of sensory input, through a signification structure, or a value structure, necessarily determines which information is manifest in consciousness. The development of datum in accordance with our inbuilt value structure, and modifications to the value structure, both from intuited pre-conscious perspective data collection, and conscious direction, mutually influence each other and reinforce the content which is manifest in our actions and conscious experience in the present moment. Heidegger makes reference to the nature of our being that of contained the threefold tenses of time, bundled up in the present. The present experience is tempered by historicity, the past, and is an intuition, and potentiality, of the future, both past and future, showing their modifications and effect within the manifestation of the present moment’s contents, in short, our being is modified by the unity of time, containing within it the past, present, and future.
The past isn’t following behind us, or a property making up who we were. It isn’t behind us, it is with us, it necessarily is us. This is so due to the past actively manifesting the future through our Being which is located in the present. Our past is characterized by humans thrownness, by us being here, in those times and places, in which we were thrown into, in which we existed without placing ourselves there. We relate to our present by being in a mode where we attempt to make sense of the world, where we try to feel comfortable, in satisfying desires, in short, we wish to be “at home in the world” in the present. Towards the future we are living as a projection of ourselves, we relate to the future by imagining the goals and aims wish we wish to accomplish. Now necessarily our present moment relation to each of these is contained in the present. This threefold nature of temporality is bundled in the present, and while there is a unity of the three, in the present, we, in our directedness, relate to each one differently. It is part of a humans very Being not in the conventional sense that we are using lessons learned through retrospective analysis or acting on habits formed in the past, but it is itself part of the becoming future, it is a functional perspective of making sense out of our being in describing our history as being us as we are, and even being within the present, as it not only causally produced this moment, but continues acting within every moment of being, in an abstract sense it is moved from implicit to Being to its truthful place implicitly located within the definition that we give Being.
Our fundamental mode of being, in general, is characterized by intentionality. This intentionality implies that consciousness is always directed towards something, or with an object, an idea, a thought, a Kantian “Idea”. In other words, our being is always in relation towards a content. Our conscious gaze is directed towards something, and that intentional directedness of consciousness, and the contents it points at, necessarily is predetermined by our value structure, or what Heidegger refers to as the nature of care. That which fills out conscious experience, is the product of inherited, nurtured, developed, perspectively tempered, systematically built up, content. This content which is the production of the filtration of the perspective system, based upon the significance, or sense of which we are in relation to content, and the hierarchy of importance discerned by our embodied Being, makes up that which influences our Being. Our conscious gaze, marked by the modification of temporality, directed by intentionality towards a content, is deciphered as containing content which we care about. In other words, we only pay attention to that which has been developed, systematically, by the entirety of our Being, as something that is important, as something significant, that has a sense, in which we “care” about. Our consciousness cannot be directed upon phenomena in experience that doesn’t matter to us. If we are conscious of it, it has presented itself as something with meaning which, in the present moment, is manifesting itself in certain significance, which is intuited an ingested by the perceptive system, displayed in conscious experience, and further modified by our conceptual linguistic system to be represented symbolically using language. Granted, this description isn’t necessarily all Heidegger, there is a lot of my personal connection between different phenomenological discoveries and their entwinement into a complete picture, but the discover of intentionality, and care, are fundamental to Heidegger, and displayed in this way, gives us an abstract description which is objectively true of our subjective experience, which, in short, is what phenomenology seeks to uncover to us.
Spatiality for a being such as we are, Dasien, is experienced not in the distantially of phenomena, but rather what is most proximally subject of our conscious awareness within the present moment. What is closest is not felt or seen or experienced as what is physically closest, but as that which is most ready to consciousness, as that which is occupying our present conscious state, or has the ability to be so. In this way London might be closer to the man who is contemplating England, than the shoes on his feet, phenomenologically speaking. We see our contact lenses before objects objectively speaking, but in analyzing our being and its relation to spatiality, we always see and experience entities farther away, and feel them as closer to our experience, than the glasses which we see, and objectively are much closer. This is what Heidegger means by the concept “closeness”.
Apart from the general characteristics which make up our Being, there are different modes of being, that are distinct and contain their own significations, apart from the generalized universal attributes described above. These different mode of beings are reflective of the way in which we inhabit the word, several of which, as described by Heidegger, I will out outline.
One such mode is what Heidegger refers to as ready-to-hand, indicating that being which we embody in relation to tools, or something which becomes an extension of our self, without much thought about it, the mode of being which pertains to me typing, is that the device I am using is ready to hand for me, I am not analyzing it’s being, nor questioning its composition, I am using it as equipment for a certain end, as an extension of myself. Its meaning as ready-to-hand is intrinsic in my relation to it as it fits into the broader structure of the purpose I have for it, for which I am directed. The object that is ready-to-hand is not a content which we are subjectively conscious of, or focused upon, it is like our shoes, we do not think about them while walking, yet they are ready at hand to us in relation to the action new have in “walking”. It is the primordial sense of the term, existing prior to any theorizing, and the object is seen in its significance towards us as something to achieve a theorized end.
The theorized end, or contemplated phenomena for which the ready-to-hand is applied, towards which the gaze of consciousness is intentionally directed upon, is the present-at-hand. The being of the object is in relation to us, and our perception of it is modified by the state it is in. When the state is something to be utilized, it is present at hand to us. When the state of the object is perceived in a fashion that it itself is the object of conscious intentionality, then it becomes present-at-hand, or that which is the intentional object of phenomenological experience. The ready-to-hand object itself goes relatively unnoticed, until it breaks, or becomes un-ready-to-hand, and it is recognized from the perspective of another type of being, where it presents itself as present-at-hand. Meaning, it no longer is a working tool for an end, but it itself has been made into an end, that must be fixed to continue what is meaningful work for me (which writing happens to be). This present-at-hand device now becomes analyzed and inspected as a problem, and the mode of being which grasps and experiences such a phenomenon is another state which us humans, Dasein, encounter. The intentionality of our being, that of the which we are directed towards, becomes the content which is present-at-hand within the moment, to us, subjectively. The “object” or Kantian “idea” is that towards which we are directed at, and is denoted by the term present-at-hand.
Present-at-hand and Ready-to-hand are what objects are in relation to our conscious perception of them, and are altered as the contents of consciousness are altered. An object that is, at one subject moment, being used towards an end, if phenomenologically analyzed (retrospectively) it would be admitted as being ready-to-hand for us in that moment. If the next moment, our conscious gaze becomes directed upon the object, and thus it becomes the direct object of our intentionality, it moves from ready-to-hand to present-at-hand, for us, in that moment.
The modes of being which are possible for us are large and range in uniqueness to a scale which is hardly possible to be enumerated, at least presently, but what we can realize is that a range of experiences, of modes of being, are available to us, and they change situationally, I believe, due to determinate causes, which we can also work to uncover, as well as work to develop the characteristics which enable certain modes of being which we care more about, to be more prevalent in our lives. Say the mode of being which strives to overcome something challenging to the entity, becomes appealing to Dasien due to its rewarding nature in overcoming. One can learn the prerequisites and the modes of being which lead to such further entailed modes, and by a greater understanding and ability to recognizing circumstances and situations as having a potential value of initiating said desirable mode of being, better produce them in their own experience.
Heidegger’s had a conception of Dasein being in a natural state of “guilt”. We are guilty due to our thrown projection into our existence. We exist due to our thrownness, we are thrown into the world, into our present moment. We didn’t choose existence, choose this moment, we didn’t create ourselves, but we find ourselves here. Thus, we are indebted, naturally, to existence itself, to the universe, for an existence unasked for, undeserved, unwarranted. Someone who is in debt is naturally guilty. Thus, we are always guilty. Not only are we guilty of contained something which we did not ask for, namely, our existence, our very Being, but we are guilty in not living up to the call of our conscience in acting authentically,we are always guilty due to not being what we have the potential for being. Heidegger notes in his Being and Time that, “when the call of conscience is understood, lostness in the “they” is revealed. Resoluteness brings Dasein back to its own most potentiality for being its Self. When one has an understanding Being-towards-death – towards death as one’s own most possibility – one’s potentiality-for-Being becomes authentic and wholly transparent.” As our nature has us constantly living in front of ourselves, striving to future possibilities, we never are what we are, we always are living in and for the future, projecting ourselves into it, and we are at fault for not Being this authenticity which we should be, ourselves. Most of the time we are consumed by the they-self, a product of being part of society, of the mass, of the crowd, which shapes us. We are guilty of not being our true selves, as that which stems from the inclination of our own individualized Being, but instead, is modified in accordance with the masses, and seeks to project a false version of ourselves, and thus is inauthentic, and thus guilty of deception. This guilt, coupled with a realization of our finitude, an “expecting” or anticipation of our own annihilation, death, can produce a somewhat original conception of morality, grounded from this guilt. This is comparable to the Buddhist notion of morality being founded upon moral guilt, and moral dread. Thus, we are punished for what our conscience shows us to be bad and are forewarned and enticed not to commit it again, in dread, out of fear for the same suffering we produced before. In this way, guilt, time, conscience, death, and our specific type of Being, Dasien, all are tied together to produce morality. This springs from a resoluteness, or steadfastness, not to act contrary to our authentic selves (uninfluenced by society / norms) (which itself must be influenced and dependent upon such prior influences) but nonetheless is ourselves, not our immersion in a hive mentality, but producing activity that is in reaction to our own developed conscience. This resoluteness, or the ability to heed the call of conscious, to recognize our temporality, both in time and the eventual end of our individual time, and act in a way that accords with our own conscience, is what produces morality. This is all possible due to Dasein’s essential foundational nature as “care”, or the ability to attach importance to phenomena, in the sense of concernful solicitude – valuing / judging.
The idea of being-with-others in the Hiedeggerian sense is a distinctively different state of Being than that of Being-alone, in a sense of your state of Being when other humans or even life forms enter your conscious experience through their being environmentally close (perceived in consciousness physically) as well as mentally close (perceived in consciousness as a mental manifestation). The radical change is immediately recognizable, and I will not go into the details or characteristics of such a change, just that it is manifest in a way many people don’t naturally recognize as a distinct state of Being, which we most of the time, every day, are in. Those who say they do not like being around other people, or don’t like being around a lot of people, really mean to say, they do not like their state of Being-with which is only manifest among others. It is not the others, but it is your own state of being-with which you may find to become uncomfortable if you have aggregated a personality trait of unsociability. It is a mode of yourself which you are not content with, not the imposition of outside forces upon you. The mode of Being-with-others is modified according to the environment, our developed perceptual response, and the individuals to whom are in our company. Only those that are consciously or perceptively intuited as being in our presence are included as causal factors towards the modification of our being, those that go unperceived, or those not in our immediate vicinity, are not causally related to our mode of being-with-others. The unperceived, or unintuited physical presence of another Being, if consciously gazed upon cognitively, in thought or in recollection, modified our being additionally, but is not included in the sense of this term as Heidegger poses it.
Part of the fundamental problem we have as biological beings is the gap between our values and the production of meaningful solutions to the novel situations which we encounter. We know what actions are “good” yet the situations we encounter are difficult to discern as to what constitutes the optimal pathway for us to take. Our general mode of being and manner of operating in the world is dependent upon schemas of action that are responsive (adequately or not) to the multitude of situations we encounter in our environment. These situations elicit the manifestation of a schema through our assimilating the situation to the schema, and given that each situation (each present moment) is novel, we then have to accommodate that assimilated schema to meet up with reality in a manner that works for us. If we can intelligently adapt to novel situations, our schema likewise undergoes a modification that can adequately meet the challenge of the moment. Often times these schemas, which are always significant and hold our developed values in them, aren’t adequate, and for those situations, we have the ability to consciously manifest our values, in accordance with what we know, towards the production of a viable solution. In this manner we move through successive steps, albeit miniscule ones, in the manner Jean Piaget describes as genetic epistemological advancement. It is only when we reach an equilibrium between the assimilating and accommodating functions that our operations are adequately able to intelligently adapt to novel situations. This, as a requisite, is dependent on fleshing out the value structure that makes up the framework of the actions that are schematized.
Arising of the Existential question
Existential inquiry arises in every individual once he reaches the intellectual stage of being able to abstractly contemplate the nature of his own Being. This, for most people, begins at around the age of 12-14, and continues throughout life, constantly resurfacing. With the emergence of the problem of our own Being, and our place in the world, we seek for answers. We can find many of these answers in our values, which dictate those schemas which orient us in the world, and can prove of being better or worse at providing the fulfillment we strive after in life. The more effort, time, structure, discipline, and intellect one commits to the organization of one’s life towards a meaningful path will determine the amount of progress he is able to achieve in pursuit of the things he values, and the wellbeing extracted from such pursuits. Environmental factors, genetic disposition, culture, society, education, character disposition, all are relevant factors which contribute to the individual’s pursuit of meaning, and the amount of progress he is able to make.
Necessity of philosophy in evaluation
As always, we must live first, then philosophize. But in order to maximize our potential, in the directions we desire, we must philosophize, and we all do this, to a lesser or greater degree, whether it’s made explicit and regarded as such or not. Not only do we all philosophize, we can be better or worse at doing so, and the results of our philosophy are fleshed out in the experience of our lives, in the manner we live, in our subjective experience, in our relationships, and in how we tackle the present moments arising. We must seek to orient ourselves around a value system which can lead to the most desirable future, implying and necessitating an articulate defining, organizing, and implementing of actions in alignment with what we believe to be most important. Our time management and effort must be in accordance with the system of significance we place upon the values, rather than allowing ourselves to be carried along by the river of desire without receiving the potential wellbeing available to us through psychological integration and meaning optimization. While many values are inherent, those which we most seek to manifest oftentimes succumb to the temptations of others, unconsciously. The goal here is to philosophically uncover, organize, and optimize our lives towards the pursuance of a more meaningful life.
If Value’s Aren’t Regulated
If our value system goes unregulated, and we remain unaware of its effect on our lives, we run the risk of our lives being hijacked by things which serve to promote societal and biological desires, rather than the individualized desire which fulfills us. The assent to values which are of less importance and significance than those which we consciously can uncover as promoting wellbeing and providing meaning is the error we wish to correct for, for the benefit of our own psyche, and everyone else in our expanding circle of influence.
Given the potentiality of ideological possession, and the ever growing instantiation of ethics corrupting societally provided value structures, and the cultural importance placed upon material gain, our value system is becoming more vulnerable to the effects of powers outside our control, and less effective in providing the meaningful basis for a competent, efficient, creative, and fulfillment providing life. The question we must ask is whether we want our lives to be ruled by tyranny, do we want to be the slaves to our society and to our biology, or do we want to impose our will upon the content of our own lives, and by recognizing and optimizing the content herein, form a life which represents who we truly have the potential to be? Do we want to fulfill the potential we contain at being a competent, moral, beneficial human, or do we want to be swept along on the waves of misfortune produced by external and biological influences?
Conservation of the old
We should seek orientation of that which is available rather than throwing out the old system in its entirety, this problem of shedding off the traditional spiritual underpinnings was stated by Nietzsche as that which led to the nihilism and evil present in the 20th century after the scientific worldview become dominant and, in a causal sense, necessitated the potentiality of the “Death of God”. Novel explanatory conceptualizations of values aren’t impossible, just as novel “creations” aren’t impossible in any other domain, we just have to recognize that as with anything, the new necessarily contains the old, it stems out of it, in evolution and in technology, in morality and in science. The causal link between the datum of experience and potential values we have at our disposal is a link that cannot be sundered. As the value structure necessarily gives rise to what we place an importance on and what we pursue, it is an integral process of the mode of being which underlies all manifestations in our actions and experience.
Bottom Up Understanding of the Value System
One must first identify their value structure as it is built up biologically, in its embodied form, and secondly, in the conscious articulation of how it manifests itself consciously. We have an embodied perceptive system, that is built up from our genetic material upon conception. This perception seeks, from the first moments of an organism’s life, to “digest” and “filter” incoming datum through sensory receptors, which is mediated based upon, in the first case, genetic instruction. The schematic underpinnings that dictate our ability to do so, are encoded with reflexive abilities, and have the “ability” to perceive with the “meaning” of it being valuable to the continuation of the genetic material that instantiated it.
The perceptive ability of our Being is in itself our initial evaluation system, it discerns content in relation to the significance it has to us, and directs our nervous system towards mitigating and responding to stimuli, both external and internal. Two separate mechanisms take place in this initial evaluation of stimuli, on the one hand, our perceptive system is oriented around discerning content in our perceptible environment that has significance for us, which is one manner of saying that everything “naturally” has value to us. If things didn’t have value to us, we wouldn’t focus on them, and content wouldn’t ever be discerned and arise in consciousness. On the other hand, that very perception which selects significant content in our environment for filtration occurs based on our own perceptive systems modification by our value structure.
The system of perception is modified in infanthood, and onward, through its environment, and the causal nature of that which is available to influence us. That which is available to be perceived, is filtered by what the biological system believes would be most optimal to the propagation of the genome, which is the starting point of our values, and generally what they are “subservient” to. Such imperatives hold background significance throughout life. While this is the groundwork of evaluation, in biological imperatives that imply the continuation of the survival machine towards puberty in which the organism can propagate the genetic material, the value and method towards which it achieves inbuilt biological aims is modified by the cultural, environmental, and interpersonal relations of the individual. These effects modify the value structure which modifies perceptions towards that which is useful to react to, and in such reactions, optimize the “wellbeing” or “beneficiality” of response in regard to novel situations. The biological system that is modified through life in filtrating perceptive data, is integrally tied up with our conscious experience, and its contents enter consciousness.
As we biologically intuit datum which sensory receptors “discriminate” as being useful to perceive, so too does our Being intuit which perceptions arise into conscious awareness, based on the same desire and imperatives which run towards the optimality of the organism. The contents of consciousness are in alignment with these desires, as they are modified by the environment and totality of our Being in relation to what the individual comes to understand, and believe, and intuit, or know, is the optimal aim towards which to guide himself. Whether or not it actually is, is irrelevant. What matters is that one’s values, regardless of conscious recognition or not, guide the individual’s moment to moment conscious experience, as well as his bodily reciprocity to the situation one finds oneself in in the moment. We always are operating under this basic low resolution conception of the value system, arising from the bottom up, from perception to consciousness.
Top Down Directing the Value System
Every moment is necessarily supported by an inherent biological value system, and the contents of consciousness as well as our embodied reaction to the moment are products of it. While the bottom up description explains the initial instantiation of our value system, it does little to aide us from where we’re at in top down influence. We ought to be able to give assent to our values consciously, and consciously direct ourselves towards values and aims which are our own authentic expression. What is important to you? What currently is taking up your time, mental space, and what are you currently actively pursuing? The answers to these questions may never have been made conscious, or we might not know exactly where they currently are at.
There is a concrete difference between what one’s actions show to be valuable to the individual, and what one believes to be valuable. Firstly, we wish to analyze what actually composes the individual’s life, and how it compares to what ought to compose the individual’s life. We must take an honest account of our time, and an honest account of our beliefs about what we desire to be doing, who we desire to be, where in our career we desire to be, where in our environment we desire to be, what kind of skills we wish to improve, what knowledge we would like to obtain, what character traits we would like to embody, and what psychological state we would like to have. In answering these questions as to where we currently are, we can find answers to what our unconsciously acted out belief system denotes as being our current value structure. In answering these questions as to where we would like to be, we can define what our consciously formulated value structure actually is. The gap between what is manifesting as an inherent value pursuit, and what we actually value will determine the difficulty in aligning the two. The goal, broadly speaking, is to bring the two into alignment so that our actions and time spent represents what our consciously formulated value structure is. In uncovering what is important to us, we can create a list of things we value, and in their evaluation, to the best of our ability, discover what it is that would provide us meaning.
Purpose of Uncovering Values
We must seek to uncover the values inherent in our deterministic biological nature, and in discovering their potentialities, consciously decide which we wish to embody and to which degree we wish to pursue their manifestation. The “creation” of values is necessarily a pursuit which is only possible with the addition of experience, and in fact, isn’t actually a creation. It is more a development, a modification, of inherent values imposed upon us through genetic and environmental influences. As far as our values as we find them in the moment, none can be created, but they can be altered through conscious direction towards novel experiences (all experiences). The prioritization, embodiment in actualization, and modification of what we value can be consciously directed. The derivation of meaning and importance allocated to the potentiality of value is what is “in our control”. While the values themselves are inherent, their discovery, and the systematic recalibrating of our actions and Being in alignment with them, or to modify them, is something possible to be directed consciously. The expansion of knowledge and experience exposes us to novel situations, of which we always are judging, and placing a value of importance on. This content of experience is the datum from which we have to work with in informing how to hierarchical order our values. We cannot value that which we do not know, or what hasn’t been integrated into our psyche as something holding value. This process ought to be done in a way which is optimal for you, and everyone else, now, and across time. The optimization process must be recalibrated as additional knowledge and insight into circumstantial navigation and our own nature become uncovered to us. As long as the value is in line with what is important to you, consciously, and is an accurate representation of that importance, then we can continue.
What Matters in Uncovering Our Current Value System
We necessarily find more meaning in the pursuit and attainment of the things which we consciously formulate as being of value rather than in the things which we unconsciously carry out in our daily lives (which still contain meaning and value, but they ought to become subservient to the higher goal). The reward system which manifests itself in pleasure and pride can aide the individual in determining if something is meaningful to them. If you gain a specific type of knowledge, create a specific type of art, make progress in a certain direction, and it feels good to do so, if it fills you with a sense of accomplishment, if it moves your psychological state to one of fulfillment, then it is being flagged through the reward system indicators that it is meaningful to you. That being said, every reward system flooding of the subjective experience doesn’t mean that it is a noble or consciously confirmed meaningful act, it merely can be analyzed in order to determine what consciously can be connected to something you value. If you find pleasure in food, sex, and alcohol, and the reward system floods you with a positive emotion which seeks to reinforce those stimuli, you must consciously analyze if they are in line with your value structure, if not, then they are not to be pursued in a goal oriented fashion towards the goal of a meaningful life.
If the activity is retrospectively analyzed as producing a fulfilling mode of being, as well as being in line with the consciously formulated conception of what your value system ought to be, then you can take that as datum towards something which provides meaning, and can be pursued in a goal oriented way. Pleasure and pain in this regard must be analyzed, in short, with discernment, in determining their potential for long term benefit, as well as to their usefulness and potential benefit for you, the people you care about, and the outward circles of influence with which we all are engrossed in (the chain of causality as it applies to relationships between sentient beings). This extrapolation and analysis can be carried out to a larger or shorter extent, but what is necessary before continuing on is that a number of values must be defined, even if it is rudimentary.
Prioritization Of Values
Once we have a list of values, we must hierarchically organize them in order of importance. This organization is predicated based on what we would spend the most time doing, and what would take precedence over the others in terms of effort. While philosophical articulation and elucidation may be high on my list, it always is superseded by people, in terms of family, friendships, coworkers, and any other human who needs help. In this manner, I’ve consciously chosen the value of compassion for people to supersede my most vehement interests. In this way we must organize our value system, in a way that is practical so as to be employable in our actual lives. The establishment of a hierarchy of values is crucial in future planning for how to organize time, and how to maximize the meaning and wellbeing provided to us by pursuing the values (and their distribution across our days/ lives).
Example of Value System Prioritization
The natural inclination toward hedonistic pursuits may result in overindulgence and a large amount of time loss as well as a decline in health. We may consciously and verbally state that we have a desire and find meaning in philosophical knowledge acquisition, in truth seeking and mental exploration, the pursuit of which would better serve to provide meaning in our lives than that sensual drive which could dominate the psyche. The value of power and dominance may fill the opportunity cost of pursuing competency in a skill we value. We find that our current value structure, that which is ingrained in us through society and our biology, doesn’t always serve to provide the meaning and wellbeing which we have the potential of attaining. We pursue what is less meaningful at the peril of our consciously formulated abstract belief system. We still may value the objects of sensual pleasure, and we can allocate appropriate time in their pursual and enjoyment, as well as continue to value ambition in our careers leading to a rise in our place in the dominance hierarchy, but the differentiation of the values, and assigning an appropriate role to them in our lives is here the mission.
Planning Value Pursuance
With the hierarchical organization of our values in place firmly, yet remaining open to further modification, we can then work out the envisioning of what their carrying out would look like. This is a contemplative visualization of what the embodiment, improvement, or attainment of our values ought to look like. With this in mind, we are better equipped to work towards something, and are able to consciously adapt our mode of being so as to be in line with what that visualized image appears to us to be.
Based on our contemplative image of what the embodiment of our values is, we can plan benchmark goals toward their attainment. These can be concrete material or temporal milestones, or abstract urgencies in which we seek to embody. These goals and aspirations we can separate between benchmark placeholders towards the attainment of a meta-goal, or simply as guidelines in which to follow in the progression towards the attainment of more concrete goals. This applies to character traits, virtue embodiment, career trajectory, familial planning, etc.
Habitualizing Values
We can use our ability to consciously direct ourselves to promote the advancement of values, in the form of reinforcing the actions and thoughts, the phenomena which, as manifestations of underlying modes of being, can be used in a reflexive manner to promote the underlying value. The habitualization is necessary to conscious value instantiation and reinforcement, and thus the transmogrification of our value system to that which we consciously assent to. Habitualization to those consciously assented to values has the negative tendency of reducing values which we consciously perceive as less significant, as less time and concentration is allocated to them, as certain things become more prominent in our lives, others become less. Discipline and conscious direction are used, and in turn, also gain from the positive feedback loop of their increased actualization. This adds to the advancement of our ability to consciously direct our experience toward such experiences which are more meaningful. Of course habitualization, whether consciously or not, is often enacted for other aims, and in pursuit of values which we may mistakenly lend our assent to. Experiential wisdom and conscious attentiveness to the process of change in our values and the mode of being which embodies it will serve to inform the individual whether he is on the right path or not.
The Navigation Problem
We ought to have an established image in mind of a future reality with which we look to pursue, which is in line with our hierarchically organized value system while systematically having definite goals in which to pursue towards the embodiment those values. We can then analyze how best to navigate our lives in the direction of the established system. This implies time management, dedication, distraction and entertainment reduction, effort and discipline. Morality comes into question here, and our morals, like everything else we do, will dictate our experience of life and our effect upon the world. Every decision we make can be better or worse at being “good”, if we take for our standard of “bad” the worst possible state of suffering for everyone, as Sam Harris explains in his novel the Moral landscape. In operating from a moral realist meta-ethical perspective, we hold that our actions can move the dial in one of two directions, and since we find value in our subjective experience, and presumably of those we love, those we come into contact with, and in extreme cases, all humans or sentient beings, it is essential that our morals stem from our consciously deduced evaluation system. As for a minor-ethical theory that is optimal to follow, we find that “Wisdom Ethics”, or moral particularism, is the only system that can account for the vast landscape we encounter in novel situations. Moral dread and guilt are our guide here, and our value system ought to be optimized to account for the effects our actions have on others, as it does more than impact their wellbeing, but has rational self-interested implications as well.
Moral Shame and Dread
A sense of moral shame, and moral dread, are the twin pillars in Buddhism of morality, and we can apply the concepts to shame and dread in the face of deviation from what is meaningful, so as to fuel us in the right direction. The negative emotion experienced in deviating from the optimal path we have outlined, denotes a flaw in our discipline and drive towards what is meaningful. This shame can be recalled, and transformed into a reminder of what it feels like to experience such negative self-image, and allows us to dread its reoccurrence in the future. In this way we can systematically forge our trait of discipline to be fueled by the negative reinforcing attribute of suffering when deviation occurs. In addition, the reward mechanism in pursuance of our values can be altered and consciously recognized so as to be inspiration for future discipline reinforcement, of a positive kind.
Structuring Time
How we spend our time, and the quality of that time spent, will be an integral factor towards our individual trajectory towards our goals. We can retrospectively analyze our current time usage, on a day by day, or weekly basis, in order to see which areas need to be modified, and which can altogether be cut out, reduced, or changed, to be in line with our newly established value system. The analysis of the current system and formulation of the ideal system will aide us in disciplining ourselves towards a pragmatic pathway and daily framework in which to pursue our values. While rigid order and structure of such a sort can be overwhelming and stagnating to the individual, as stated by an ancient philosopher, live first, then philosophize, we can find a medium between organizing the chaos, as well as instantiating novel conceptions towards the system we established. The discipline it takes to create a structured day, allows us the freedom to pursue what we value. Far from being rigid and entrapping of the individual, such a structured and analyzed time management plan actually enables the individual to cut out periods of the day in which he was pursuing things which he doesn’t value as highly as others and in turn replace them with things he values more.
Now such definite daily scheduling can be done to varying degrees, and is always open to re-evaluation, and to alteration by the ever spontaneously arising trials which we encounter on a regular basis. The general planning of how best we ought to manage our time gives us an idea of how we should spend the day for it to be optimal, the broadness of categories, and the designation in the day for ulterior pursuits, all can be part of the “plan”. An ulterior mode of pursuing goals and of planning for the journey to meaning can be used in a more practical prioritizing method, rather than on a concrete schedule. For example, a time expenditure modeled can be based on prioritizing interests in the hierarchically organized value system, so that each node gets touched upon at least for a short time in the day. Higher values in the system would take precedence over lower ones, and more time would be spent engaging in them. If I was engaged in progressing a lower value in the system, and some insight or issue or object which needs attention arises which is categorized in to a higher value on my list, then I would sacrifice the time in the lower for the higher.
The use of wisdom and insight into the pragmatic actualization of time management allows us to navigate how, and when, we should sacrifice values for each other, and in the ways in which we can compensate for the rectifying of time loss in a certain pursuant. Our moral system combined with the value system, combined with practical wisdom, experiential data, all are important factors towards the prioritizing of our values and the plan or framework we devise in the planning of the journey to a meaningful life. If a meaningful, fulfilling life, one of psychological wellbeing, pride in accomplishment, and beneficiality of our deeds to our own mode of being as well as to those we value, is something important to you, then the difficulty and time spent in creating an optimal path, the discipline required to stay on track, and the suffering inherent in the sacrifice of lesser values for higher values, will be surely worth it.
Instantiating a Consciously Formulated Value System
We can to a greater or lesser degree forge an abstract conception of what an optimal solution to the embodiment of our values are. The pursuing and embodying our value structure in our daily lives is meaningful in itself. The path is itself fulfilling as we are spending time and effort towards that which we most value. As a caveat, the discovery of values, creation of a list which accurately represents our optimal mode of being, and the organization of time and effort, is a difficult process, but when the groundwork is laid, and the pursuit becomes habitualized, the wellbeing supplied by such a process is worth the strain. What is a better way to live, than the way you consciously decide is the best way to live? Necessary to the continued progression in the direction of your values is the constant recalibration, updating, and optimization of the path as well as the goals.
Preservation of Value
As we spend time in embodying our value system, in instantiating it into our daily lives, in pursuing what is meaningful, we necessarily gain experiential data and feedback from the real world which we can use to modify the entire system. This is a constant process, as we gain experience, we gain in wisdom, as we gain in wisdom, how we navigate our lives, and the structure with which we abstractly create in which to navigate it, all are modified and can be improved. We should be disciplined, yet hold ourselves and our plans as fallible, we must remain determined, yet simultaneously never hold ourselves to be infallible. What we pursue, the method we use to pursue it, the knowledge gained and the application of that knowledge, must be constantly evolving, in order to better serve our wellbeing and better represent our true values. The abstract ideal values we contemplate often don’t serve the pragmatic utility we gauged them to, and the plans we make always will encounter room for optimization. This recalibration process is something the individual unconsciously undergoes as he moves through life, but here, being as we are phenomenologically analyzing our experience and existential condition, the progression and concrete conceptualization of such novel insights and experiential practicality of actions and time management can and, in my opinion (for our pursuit and journey to be optimal) be something we formulate consciously.
Care and Concern in Attention
The amount of time and concentration any content exacts from us is in exact relation to the amount of “care” or “concern” it has to the totality of our Being. Any phenomenal state that arises merely signifies its meaning to us, in some fashion or another, and we ought to manage the causal foundation from which it stems if we wish to alter our experience away from it. This can mean pursuance, integration, removal of dissonance, or reframing. One way or another, all content of experience is open to modification, and if it happens to be aversive to us, we ought to put forth effort towards its integration, and this doesn’t necessarily mean it needs to be carried out.
One manner of promoting our values is in a “negative” revelatory strategy. This requires analysis of those things which fill our consciousness, with which our attention is more prone to be consumed by, give a semblance of meaning, challenge, and desire by their very nature of our directedness towards them. These positive phenomenal states (not optimistically positive, but rather manifesting) provide a clue as to what we value. Whether it be a memory, a skill, a topic, a person, a saying, a thought or an emotion, if it is constantly arising into conscious awareness, and modifying our Being in accordance with it, it is safe to say that it is something we value, whether it is a consciously deduced value or unconsciously embodied. An undesired mental content that produces a conscious concentration despite our desire to remove it from experience, whether it’s a moment or a mode of being, or an archetypal pattern, is content that has “consumed” or “overtaken” the psyche, and it must be something we haven’t adequately overcome. If something is adequately overcome, then it is stored in the unconscious as the conquered bit of chaos which has become ordered. If something produces enough negative subjective experience in us, it is due to the value of that content being high for us. Its integration leads to the baseline of our development that we have moving forward, and while its temporal modification is still inextricably connected to us, our schematization of it allows us to accommodate novel situations to it, and simultaneously to assimilate the schema to those situations. In other words, it becomes part of our pragmatic toolkit.
Benefit of Dealing with Reoccurring Problems
By analysis of what negatively affects us, we not only progress towards the removal of accumulated problems, but we better equip ourselves, psychologically and on a neuroplasticity level, to be better able to deal with challenges that arise in the future. Thus we should seek to optimize our being towards the ability to deal with the totality of problems, through the progression of a fortified character that can do so, and we do this through the individual “problems”. Problems here are any content of subjective experience that we are aversive to, that create dissatisfaction in us, that aren’t consciously desired. Even a deficiency of a conscious desire can be seen as a problem, the rectification of which would be the overcoming either of the desire itself, or of the fulfillment of the desire. The overcoming of the unconquered and the progressing of character enables us to be wiser in our dealings with any problem in the future, and thus is well worth our time in pursuing.
Hardships in Value Pursuance
The silver lining in the case of a meaningful life, necessarily entails hardships, tribulations, unknowns, and their confrontation and conquering. Such potentialities of misfortune or loss should be clearly visualized, even in the extreme case, so that if they arrive, we can be prepared and have an idea of what it would look like to best handle them. This is encapsulated in the Stoic concept of “momento mori” or “remember death”, in which the visualization of the worst, and the ideal way in which to handle such loss is consciously clearly presented to the individual, so that he can embody the virtues and the mode of being he deems most appropriate towards the handling of such challenges while remaining faithful to the developed belief and value systems which give his life meaning. The strength of will to be supportive of family, rather than to be traumatized and a burden in time of a loss of a loved one, or in sickness and in misfortune, provide the individual and those he cares about the best version of oneself so as to aide in the alleviation of suffering. While this may not be a value inherent to everyone, and this is necessarily making a value judgment which, to me, is real and important, yet may not be uncovered as the optimal path by everyone, but as an example this type of visualization enables the individual to embody that image when or if the worst so comes. The visualization of worst case scenarios enables the individual to be the least hindered from deviation of his value system in the face of adversity, as well as provides him the opportunity for character growth despite great tragedy. Our worst fears, the suffering and the undeserving pain which befalls all of us, can be navigated so as to be a positive and beneficial experience in the progression of moral excellence. Rather than view our challenges in pursuance of our goals as a hindrance, which they are, we can simultaneously view them as stepping stones to greater competency in their navigation.
While on this journey the difficulties and tribulations which we previously forethought of may not be the only difficulties to arise, and more often than not, novel distractions and impediments to our wellbeing will constantly prove to be challenges to us in the progression of our being towards the goals which we establish in line with our value system. Seeing as expected or unexpected trials are inevitable in the pursuit of anything difficult, and what is meaningful is never easy, their emergence and handling is of utmost importance to us.
The most difficult situations are opportunities for the greatest victories in our lives. There is no sense of pride, personal growth, and inner peace, without a necessary struggle to overcome difficulty. The opportunity for virtue grows in the face of adversity. When the going gets tough it is the most difficult to do what is correct, to remain virtuous, to sustain from indulgence or resist the urge to escape from reality and what is honorable, for this reason it is in those very situations which we are afforded the greatest opportunity to overcome, and by doing so to advance our wisdom, virtues, and self-image. The pursuit of goals in accordance with the predefined value system, towards those objects of desire which may include but are not limited to skill improvement, character trait growth, psychological wellbeing, career aspirations, relationship development, all are noble and worthy goals to pursue, and in their progression all require necessary hardships.
Once we have a well-defined value system, and goals have been established with a rationalized pathway towards their attainment, we must voluntarily opt to overcome any difficulty that is a necessary prerequisite toward the achievement of the goals, and any other hindrance which diminishes the progression must be dealt with. There is a necessary distinction between the potential hardships which stand as obstacles towards goals one is not inclined to pursue, and those which are directly in the pathway towards the values which one does value. The pursuit of unnecessary difficulty for the sake of difficulty itself, may be useful towards the development of confidence and discipline, and general ability to withstand pain and suffering, but we are not urged by optimality to pursue such tasks. Here I am speaking of only those obstacles which lie directly in the path towards our pre-established values. The unnecessary waste of time and effort to do something difficult in a field which holds no value to the individual, must be tempered by the individual’s intentions and overall insight into the benefit of such pursuit. If an endeavor is not beneficial and useful, yet it is difficult, the endeavor must surely be shunned and not pursued. This isn’t to say that there isn’t potential for personal growth, just that the aim of goal attainment and the difficulty here described are of those which directly hinder one’s progress to their established goals.
In not becoming aversive to sickness, misfortune, and disagreeable situations, we can develop discipline, temperance, and the equanimity to be better equipped at handling problems in the future. It is the meaningful journey of developing morals in alignment with our values that sustains and provides the meaning in which we are looking for in life.
The skills used and gained in merely confronting difficult challenges with good intentions and a firm resolve itself is enough of a reward for opposing them. While we cannot, as a determined being, choose our fate, we can through knowledge acquisition, habit, discipline, and consistent testing, improve the deterministic precursors which manifest action in a way to conquer fate itself in every moment. The voluntary forging by fire method is undertaken by the man who wishes to improve his character while at the same time prove to himself his character is worthy of being respected. The positive subjective experience felt after attempting to overcome a difficult situation in which we are uncomfortable is naturally produced in any situation which is “foreign” to our currently developed mode of being and subsequent experiences. In other words, the confrontation and voluntary decision to attempt to overcome an unknown or challenging situation, produces an inbuilt biological reward. There is something inherent in us which seeks to discover, to explore, to expand our horizon of knowledge and understanding, and it is made into an object of which we can consciously “desire” by the subjective reinforcement of positive emotion in its acquisition. Whenever we learn something new, adapt to a novel situation, become comfortable in an area of which we previously didn’t know how to handle, whenever we travel and discover new places, gain insight into better ways to live, we always are psychologically rewarded by a positive emotion. This can be explained evolutionarily.
Encountering the Unknown
Our emotional system evolved in such a way to promote survivability and reproduction. Ledoux states that “memory is first and foremost a cellular function that facilitates survival by enabling the past to inform present or future cellular function, whether in a single-cell of multicellular organism. The same is true of much of the rest of our psychological life and its manifestations in our conscious minds.” The expansion of memory, and thus the neuronal circuitry which underlies cognitive capacity, is expanded only in the face of novel situations, which gives us good reason to believe that the brain would develop in such a way to promote the experience of overcoming novel, difficult, unknown, situations. The emotional response system signals a positive emotional state in the achievement of such actions, improving the individuals instinctive drive to pursue such interests in the future. The memory of the emotionally positive state produces by the reward system was evolutionary developed to improve the organisms desire to repeat the action, in an operant conditioned way. Currently, we can consciously recognize this ability and, in self-directed conditioned way, seek to consciously direct our behavior with the “reward” of psychological wellbeing in mind as the outcome of pursuit of the unknown.
Richard Dawkins uncovered that the survival circuit (connections between different neuronal areas of the brain) is employed by modern humans, as well as our ancestors, in the promotion of the genes goal. The “method” to which our genetic material uses in its goal of reproduction and survival is that of employing a survival machine (our bodies) to defend, feed, and work towards the goal of the genetic material. Being that we have the subjective experience of consciously directing the survival machine entails that the greater ability we contain to confront novel situations, and overcome them, the greater chance our genes have in their reproduction and survival. For our ancestors, the expansion of knowledge was directed towards the goal in ways such as environmental adaptability, threat recognition, cooperation within groups, etc. The expansion of territory in the uncovering of unknown grounds, enabled the individual to have cognitive access (whether unconsciously habitualized and reactionary, or conscious, depending on which point in development) to more food and water, shelter and habitational resources within his “known” domain, which increases the opportunity of different choices better suited to different situations. This developed improvement in knowledge of the immediate environment, its predators, and in dealing with other individuals of the same species, contributed to a better ability to navigate life so as to increase the odds of the individual surviving and reproducing. This trait in uncovering the unknown, in knowledge acquisition, and the genetic basis for the ability to learn, in general, would naturally be a trait selected for, as those less equipped mentally would necessarily have less success in navigating life towards the age of reproduction, and their genetic material would be less likely to be passed down.
Dr. Jordan Peterson explains the neuroscientific literature on the subject of exploration of the unknown in his Maps of Meaning lectures in a way which also coincides with the experiential notion we gain by pursuing the unknown. He explains that the desire to explore and the optimization of the psyche in accordance with it has been discovered to be located in the hypothalamus, which, not coincidentally, is the home of the dopaminergic system which serves as producing an experientially perceived pleasurable response to survival related activities such as eating and sex. The relatedness between the stimulation of the reward system and the biological urge to explore are inextricably connected in our hypothalamus, and give sufficient ground in explaining the benefit of physical territorial expansion, which in modern life, can be expanded to the novel exploration of the unknown both psychologically and within different fields of knowledge which are connected to our biological value system, which we here seek to make consciously explicit and to consciously direct ourselves in pursuit of. The reward of meaning pursual is thus adequately expressed in the neuroscientific literature in this way. Thus we have a philosophic, evolutionary, and psychological foundation for which to explain why pursuing challenges is not only pleasurable, in their completion, but also to why it arose in us and how it is beneficial to survival for our ancestors.
An important distinction must here be stated, that the evolutionary system that drove our ancestors to develop these cognitive attributes was directed towards survival, but now, in the current zeitgeist, we have access to the same system and its benefits with the additional stipulation that they can be acquired without the direct pursuit of survival related knowledge. People find pleasure in gaining knowledge in the study of ants, or myremecology, which surely is not in any way beneficial to our genes. The areas in which we can employ our ability to explore and confront difficulty are not limited by those which increase reproducibility of the genome. That being said, our conscious goals have likewise evolved into a myriad of different interests and pursuits, and regardless of our current value system, the basis for growth remains, and is rewarded in the same way in which uncovering distant territories, or new food sources, which worked for our ancestors.
Given the evolutionary benefit of “uncovering the unknown”, “learning”, “desire to explore”, and its subsequent physiological change to the brains relational reasoning, and thus “wisdom”, we can likewise carry on the tradition in a novel way. The acquisition of improved mental capacities, and the expansion of knowledge, evolutionarily, would necessarily entail a greater survivability, but for us, in the modern era, it can entail greater psychological wellbeing for him who is seeking growth in any given area of expertise, or character improvement, or overall wellbeing. The application of diligent striving in pursuit of a value which we have personally developed as being “important” is the necessary “meaning” which can provide us with purpose and thus psychological wellbeing as we move through life, and here we have a scientific basis for why this is so. The philosophical school of existentialism has described many methods of which we might find meaning, but here we have a combined production of evolutionary, psychological, and philosophical factors which denote the reason why pursuit of further growth towards an object with which we value, can, and does, produce the meaning with which we can hold as a mitigating factor in the question of existential dread and mitigates the suffering of existence.
Purpose and its Inextricable Link to Difficulty
The fact that such a system exists within us, rewarding us with positive emotion after attempting and specifically achieving difficult tasks, shows that we are built with a source of purpose that is tied into exploration of the unknown, as well as tied to moral duties. This is both biologically, and socially explainable, and is a major reason why virtue ethics, and the continued effort to improve one’s own character and focus on the greatest virtue one might be able to embody in the moment, is so widely accepted and implemented. This is why the stoics make sense to us, and why people choose to embody stoic philosophy in daily life. There is an intrinsic biological reward for consciously carrying down this path, and in viewing the world from a meaningful perspective expressed in the ability to act virtuous in every moment. We gain psychologically the power and embodiment of the wise old man archetype (Carl Jung), as well as reliving an individualized version of the heroes journey (Joseph Campbell). The hero goes out to enforce order upon chaos, to confront difficulty, for the good of the people. He encounters trials and tribulations, he falls down, he stands up and continues. He faces the ultimate source of tribulation, chaos embodied, which in our case is a difficulty which we do not currently known how to handle. In the persistent conscious decision to overcome, and in the victory over the “dragon”, or that which symbolizes a pressing difficult task, the individual receives the treasure, the gold, the fountain of youth, the immortal elixir, the philosophers stone. In our situation, he progresses in the direction of the area which he wishes to pursue, he gains in virtue, expertise, wisdom, or knowledge in a specific area. The hero then returns the boon to the people, he saves the world, he shares his loot with the broader society, and is hailed as a hero. We take the knowledge, the benefit, the gain acquired through difficulty, and are able to manifest the newly developed benefit in our interactions with others, in a way which is beneficial (if the goal is noble). We utilize our psyche to attempt to overcome unknown. In so doing, we organize the chaos in our lives, and we experience subjectively the greater ability to exert our power and influence on the world.
Phenomenological Analysis
The meaning seeking mode of being itself is something which can be elucidated by a phenomenological analysis, as can the mode that attempts to overcome challenges based upon these values. By understanding these modes of being, we can both understand our own nature, as well as the necessity for us to employ them. When analyzed retrospectively using a phenomenological method, the mode of being which is employed in the pursuit of meaning through opposing difficulty is marked by its intentionality, as is every noesis. The noesis here, we will denote as “difficulty opposition mode of being” which is marked by a noema which is abstractly defined as the conscious recognition of difficulty and conscious volition to confront and overcome it. The noetic characteristics here implies directionality tempered by temporality, in so far as the present moment is characterized by the pasts values directed towards future overcoming. Care or concern is uncovered as being directed upon a content which is valuable enough to be consciously assented to in its significance in overcoming. Therefore, in any matter of meaning pursuance, we ought to be embodying the values that authentically represent ourselves in our temporalized care structure.
In encountering difficulty, and embodying the mode of being which is voluntarily inclined towards its overcoming, we experience a negative emotional response in the perception of the object, but the mode of being modifies the object so it is simultaneously something which we strive toward. This noesis is more readily available the more we experience it, and we can more readily experience it through the pursuit of such difficult objectives, the positive feedback loop between the noema and noesis is strengthened. The more difficult situations we encounter, and in reciprocal fashion confront and oppose, the more the noesis is instantiated as a response to future novel unknown or difficult situations. The benefit of this mode of being is clearly seen in the individual’s reinforced psychological state in encountering difficulties in life, a benefit which necessarily entails an increase in wisdom (the ability to navigate life regardless of the situation). The secondary characteristics influenced by such a mode of being would be psychological confidence in confrontation, discipline in maintaining a value system regardless of external factors, and wellbeing produced by the meaning derived through such pursuits.
Existential Benefits of Meaning Pursuance
As we become more competent and efficient at embodying our values our ability to consciously direct our Being towards that mode of being previously described as “difficulty opposition mode of being” becomes more desired and readily available. The conscious recognition of our own carrying out of difficult tasks creates a psychological influence that lends itself to the dopaminergic strengthening of meaningful actions. As we strive on diligently in conscious pursuance of our values, we become the person we had the potential of becoming.
Of course this whole structure of biological imperative, moral imperative, will to overcome, benefit of overcoming suffering and difficulty, the meaning inherit in all these claims that arises from the nature of our being, the nature of the universe, is arising within a universe that ultimately that has no meaning in itself. It is only due to our being humans, due to us arising as beings that have the biological inclination to transform our experience into one in which meaning exists explicitly for us, albeit for the transient lengths of our short lives, that enables us to uncover the meaning which we always contained, and continue to contain as a potentiality. The meaning created in this meaningless framework truly does matter, yet only to us, as the experience of pleasure and pain in sentient beings is the necessary precondition for meaning and morality. The modification of our subjective experience through the pursuit of overcoming difficulty is one that isn’t a zero sum, we have more to gain from it than to lose. The time, effort, diligence, in pursuit of a value which is important to us, fills us with meaning, and entices us to strive on through this life filled with the slangs and arrows of misfortune.
There is certain distinct characteristics unique to the sick man’s mind, which are deducible from a phenomenological analysis of the content of his experience, both while within the sickness, and in the mode of Being which follows its alleviation. Abstract functions and rumination on non-personal content are markedly reduced in the state of sickness, to be replaced with a predominantly selfish, life preservation concentration. We forfeit abstract relations for the purely practical alleviation of psychological suffering, based upon the physical condition of bodily distress. The brain, the totality of the organism, and thus, our own conscious intentionality, becomes pointed more predominantly upon the content of the present moment, and bodily experience, over the unnecessary excessive thought stream we normally find ourselves in. The normal anxieties and anticipatory reflections which plague our normal state of being, those thought patterns stemming from desire towards future states become effectively replaced to a higher degree by the death anxiety and the future state desired becomes almost universally dominated by the desire for health. The sick mind may attempt to distract his mode of being away from that directed towards health and alleviation of suffering, and may succeed in doing so, but it is only a layer above the mode which calls for intentionality to be directed towards alleviation of suffering. As physical wellbeing of the survival machine holds the most significance to the genetic material which our body is preconditioned to propagate to the future, the recognition of a problem in the survival machine and the conscious mode of being and its modification are in relation to the body’s interpretation of the threat to the system, and rightfully so. The perceptive bodily interpretation of an un-optimal physical condition thus arises into conscious awareness for the purpose of intentionality of the totality of the Being to be directed towards “fixing” the problem.
While our “normal” mode of being has been forged by the same biological necessities that are presupposed in the sick man’s Being, it oftentimes has evolved to desires and concentration on cultural and societally informed actions and activities, being, in themselves, deduced as being conducive to the wellbeing of the individual (also formed through a biologically grounded value system). While these “normal” desires, whether it be a pleasant emotional state, career advancement, fame, family, social dominance, or any other rising in societies hierarchies, it is one step removed from the closest to home biological desire or imperative, the survival of the organism’s genetic material. Thus, we may normally be absorbed in drama with friends or family, in career dilemmas, in bettering ourselves in terms of education, wealth, standing, or merely directed towards pleasure and entertainment. Sickness calls us, in fact, it pushes us, towards the recognition of our own Being, and its current state, whether we are engulfed in foreign content or not. This very push towards self-reflective intentionality arising in conscious awareness, necessarily is a change from the “normal” mode of being, which is conditioned by linguistic conceptualizations and societal influence, and is transmuted into the merely personal, “primitive”, self-awareness and desire for health. The marked change may be noticed in this way of highly unproductive, unindustrious, less conducive to conscious goals and values, a diversion from our dreams and aspirations, but, it holds within it the potentiality for further growth, is fully analyzed.
This growth I speak of isn’t merely the growth that stems from survival, in the immediate concentration of removing the sickness, but growth individually in virtue and in psychological health, in abstract thinking and philosophical improvement. But how can sickness produce this? How can the mode of being that distracts us from our aims move us further towards them? This sounds counter intuitive, but if the mode of being which follows the alleviation of sickness is adequately phenomenologically analyzed, the conclusion I have come to will be made clear.
Immediately following the alleviation of the sickness, as the mind reorients itself to its aims and aspirations in line with conscious value structures, its reformulation necessarily rekindles from a mode of being that is no longer over encumbered by the anxieties and stressors that have built up consciously prior to the sickness. While problems still exist, and anxieties and aspirations that were held beforehand may still be held, their complexity and our anxiety toward them is effectively reduced by the acquisition of the aim of our previous mode of being’s desire, that of health. In the mode of being sick we are entirely focused upon alleviating sickness, almost to the exclusion of everything else. Once this singular aim has been reached, the mind becomes predominantly free of anxiety and “sees the world afresh” in that the problems beforehand that were perceived as “large problems” have effectively been reduced in size as the coming face to face with death, at least perceptively, has reduced their influence. It seems as if sickness has brought sanity from the depths of our unconscious to illuminate the distraught conscious. As sickness diverted our aims and conscious experience, it simultaneously provided us with the opportunity to pursue our aims afterwards with a reinvigorated, and “clear” consciousness.
Being sick is unfortunate and unpleasant in the subjective experience of its effect on the body and psyche, but the post product always presents itself as a mode of being whose previous concerns had been wiped away by the concentration of the welfare of the body, producing afterwards a “clear mind” of sorts which is able to produce novel intuitions and embark upon fresh explorations without being encumbered by the prior mental formations. The buildup of prior mental formations clouded the conscious experience in their range and influence, but upon their extended removal, it opens us up to a new mode of being. This new mode of being following sickness can be directed towards previous aims, but from a starting point that is better equipped to intuit novel solutions, to more clearly see, in new ways, which are unhindered by prior mental formations, towards the success of those aims. While we retain knowledge and memory, conscious experience itself has been removed of unnecessary anxieties. While these anxieties, and formations, are likely to be replaced by new ones as time compounds, we notice a renewed existence after sickness has been cleared up, producing a starting point upon which we left, yet is markedly more peaceful, and less distracted by anxiety and unpleasant emotion, as the health acquired in alignment with the desire to alleviate sickness produces the reward in its resolution.
The old thought patterns, worries, and ideologies show their insignificance any time we are confronted with an experience that threatens our existence, as sickness surely reminds us of our temporal nature. Thus, we become grounded, and renewed after the sickness, if only to be replaced by new thought streams and the ordinariness of everyday consciousness within days or hours. But in that window of sickness, and immediately after, there are subjectively unique states of mental experience which can be noted, and I have described here one perspective of their nature and how I experience them personally. Whether this is universal or not remains to be examined, but I tend to see the periods of sickness as a psychologically positive occurrence, in the cleansing of long ruminated thoughts, and the ability to be more concentrated on new content afterwards. From a philosophical standpoint, this is highly useful, in that sometimes thought patterns and goals can become overthought, over considered, and expounded upon till they become more of an impediment than progressive. Whether this effect of sickness in removing this towards the fresh conscious experience which can move in novel directions, not in direct alignment with previous formations, is unique, or solely beneficial in regards to scientific and philosophically minded individuals, remains to be verified externally. In the phenomenological analysis of different types of personalities, and in domains of different interests, it has yet to be reported that sickness has a similar benefit to the individuals who come out the other side, but for me, personally, in my temperament and interests I see a conscious benefit and distinct characteristics in the mode of being sick and its following alleviation, in which I intuit as being positive towards the creation and articulation of novel ideas, and the removal of long held “overthinking” of “less than optimal” anxieties and aspirations.
Consciousness developed to impose order on the increasingly complex and chaotic mechanisms at work in the human organism, and the chaotic environment in which we are “thrown” into – to improve the usefulness/survivability of the organism. It does this not only through awareness but more importantly through selection/suppression between a matrix of multiple stimuli and the direction of the organism to a calculated decision deemed most beneficial. This is systematically carried out through hierarchical relational reasoning, ordering desires and responsibilities – towards survival mechanisms – and enabling the individual to learn more optimal routes towards these ends. These “selections” are chosen through an environmentally, culturally, socially, deterministic lens, organized hierarchically in beneficiality to the organism (all factors included). Thus, even though consciousnesses may technically be what it “feels like” to be an organism, it really is just being aware of some aspects of the psyche within an organism, solely those aspects that arise from the brain and the vast matrix of external and internal factors into the sphere of conscious awareness (or the ego, or subjectivity, etc), which is of course a very small amount of the total stimuli received by the body’s sense organs, and a small representation of the activity of the brain.
This feeling of what it “feels” like to be a being, or consciousness, includes the thoughts to take a certain action, or the conceptualization of different situations, all which arise from the brain into subjective experience, all which have a deterministic cause preceding manifestation into subjective experience, i.e. consciousness. Also, because a number of thoughts enter consciousness, in reference to possible actions or answers to a particular problem, we feel like our consciousness chooses a solution, like “we” choose a solution, or we feel like we are in control just because a conscious idea ends up being selected and coming to fruition in the external world. In actuality, this is a mechanistic process in which the conscious awareness and selection is a cog in the chain of deterministic factors preceding events that seemingly “come from consciousness” itself, this is the very role of consciousness, it is a tool developed through evolution, just like eyes and ears serve the organism, consciousness developed for the same broad purpose in coalition with the material structure that it is. Consciousness may seem to be making decisions, and it may sometimes be the crucial element which does in fact lead to decisions, but what is unconscious or unrealized by consciousness, is the fact that everything that enters into its sphere is not chosen by it because that is NOT it. The number of external stimuli contacting the sense organs, relaying to the brain, the brain projecting conceptualizations in thoughts, release of hormones, manifestation of feelings, perceptions, as well as conscious instinctual reaction, accumulation of past volitional formations/habits, all funnel into what one delusionaly is coerced by the psyche to thinking are parts of consciousness, choices made by consciousness, by an “I” or individual in the sense of thinking they are choices of the being behind the eyes, the delusional “me” which is itself a manifestation of intrinsic neural pathways producing a delusional belief which appears to be a correct conceptualization, but doesn’t match up with reality except in its usefulness to the preservation of the whole organism.
It doesn’t seem logically necessary that this center for awareness of certain aspects of experience become subjective, and the hard problem of consciousness will always remain in the skeptics’ mind, but if we take what we actually know, and apply it to what we “think we are” we can deduce that it is, in fact, the necessary correlation to being that which it is, which is the higher nervous system located in the brain in the human. Consciousness is the material basis which we have, up to this point, assumed to underlie conscious formations. What matters to us here is the recognition of answers to questions we can ask, of what the nature of consciousness is, and how it manifests itself to us in experience, and of what content is thus arising. What we can effectively do is examine the role it seems to play, and deduce its necessity as an information filter. The bundles of content bodily perceived, whether conceptualized and transmitted to consciousness, or merely experienced in the present as sensory datum perceived through the bodies perceptive abilities, will here be generalized as “information”, meaning, information that represents underlying value structures reflecting what is important to the organism. That which the gaze of consciousness is directed towards to, apart from being culturally, biologically (bodily perceived), and environmentally determined, reflects what is important to the genetic material and thus the survival machine in which it has constructed (the entire organism), whether that content is what is consciously important to us or not is not here the point, it reflects what is important to the totality of the current state of the developed organism. Thus our predominance of sight and visualization in consciousness’ subjective experience is due to the large relevance it has to our survival in identification of our external environment, which we developed a plethora of ways to manipulate towards our genes benefit. Our body perceives content through the value system instantiated first and foremost by the genetic material, which is the initial blueprint for how to filter content, which develops due to the environmental factors that play a role on the organism through their life, further informing the value system – including, what content is bodily perceived and in what way, impacting, if the information is valuable enough, what content rises to conscious awareness, and what content doesn’t (Intro to Phenomenology of Action, Spontaneity and Conscious Directedness). This bottom up system can be influenced reflexively, through conscious direction towards the manifestation of actions and which serve to inform the system in a top-down manner, in short, they inform each other, and are, in actuality, one system.
In analysis of this content of consciousness which arises, we find information which is most crucial to progressing the individual organism’s internal desires are those contents which arise, implying a value structure inherent in us. As to why this content can’t be systematically deduced from the totality, and acted upon without subjective experience, a satisfactory response has yet to be posited, I here will attempt to provide the answer to the conundrum, albeit, it is hard to conceptualize, and I’m aware of the limitations of language, and the fact that language is an integral part of what it is to be what we think we are.
Our relational reasoning powers, and the ability to have the most viable content presented to the organism in the present moment is an evolutionary basis which must produce consciousness in direct proportion to the quantity of mental formations arising in the organism. We have consciousness in degrees to the quantity of content with which an organism’s nervous structure is able to systematically organize. The less psychic ability, the less sensory input, the less ability to rationalize and provide an internal representation of externalities, including our present notion of language in conceptualizations, the degree in which a life form has the physical “underpinnings” (which are, in fact, what we are) to these systems is the degree to which it is conscious, or able to have what is conceptualized as “subjective experience” – this ability to rationalize itself as “subjective experience” may currently be a strictly human ability, and problem, but the same goes for any other material in the natural world. The subjective experience is really just what it feels like to be that part of the organism which is presented as the most presently deduced (by the nervous system) valuable content in relation to the totality of the organism. It isn’t a subjective experience; it is an objective experience of that part of the organism, of that specific aspect of reality, essentially just like any other part of reality, but different in the material basis organization. Just as elements, and compounds, just like cells and multicellular organisms, all differ in their material basis, and thus their roles, and what they are, so too we can differentiate ourselves from reality, and thus the differences we easily can see between ourselves and other “things”. Perhaps it “feels” (please note the usage of this anthropomorphized word as representing the idea of “being”) like something to be any other part of an organism, or to be anything in material existence, just the fact that we (I mean we in the sense of our identity of what it feels like to “be” the organism) happen to be that part of the organism that is the information hierarchy’s representation system, which itself necessitates the “experience” of subjectively “being” the organism. If we were any other part of the organism, it wouldn’t have the tools (language / reason) which are the directly related correlates to the brain and thus the part of the organism which we claim “to be”.
Each thought that arises isn’t chosen by consciousness to arise, rather it is forced into the realm of consciousness by innumerable factors which rightfully escape our scrutiny. One should not identify oneself with this ego, or conscious awareness/conscious directing force, or the illusory conscious control mechanism, yet with the whole psyche, the whole organism, or more realistically with none of it. We should maintain the thought when thinking of agency of being the whole organism acting with all aspects of the psyche/body/universe coming into manifestation, and there being no center, no “I” which directs, just a feeling within, consciousness, of this process happening, just as any other material substratum potentially has this ability to “feel like what it is” it merely doesn’t talk about it, because it is not that part of the material reality which has language, which has neural structure that produces language, amongst other important factors. It is merely because we are that part of the material reality which IS the brain of a highly developed biological organism that we are able to experience and describe what it is like to BE IT.
Rather than ascribing consciousness to all forms of matter, and thus separating the duality between mind and matter, as panpsychists attempt to do, here we are making a distinctly different move. Panpsychists unknowingly ascribe consciousness because that word has been used to conceptualize our version of “Being” in its many forms, and thus generalize it across the spectrum to a matter in degrees. Our employment of the word “consciousness” is quite misleading in this context, as to the method in which we are using it is a great deal different form its conventional usage. What we here are recognizing is that there merely is a bias and a limit to the method of cognition which is available to us through what we are, and the “limit” is something which every effective group of matter and life all contain in relation to our conceptualization of the word consciousness. Consciousness here is a symbolic representation which fits into a pattern which is practical and useful for us to use in our daily lives, as the notion of “self”, “me”, “mine”, also are useful, but in an Absolute Universal Objective sense, they fail at accurately representing reality. Many aspects of philosophy hold this distinction, between practically being “true” in a “metaphorical truth” notion, as being in contradiction to Absolute or Objective Truth. Here the limit of Being which we find ourselves as containing can be compared to the process through which we recognize it. As in particle physics, specifically on the quantum level, we theorize that quantum particles have been known to fit into patterns recognizable to us when we observe them, giving them properties and displaying the effect of an observer onto the wave function, which, enables the separation of observable particles from the mathematical and theoretical wave which they represent. This is due to a limit in our perceptive ability, and includes the limit of perceivability in relation to time. We formulate conceptual frameworks and recognize patterns due to the nature of what we are. In a similar way, we conceptualize and differentiate ourselves into a pattern that we use to describe ourselves, the pattern, and method in which we do so, is limited and determined by the beings which we are. In other words, we shouldn’t ascribe consciousness to all matter, as our notion of consciousness is used as a practical description of the being which we find ourselves to be, rather we should recognize that everything is as it is, and the experience given to us in which propagates the idea of subjectivity is merely something individualized to the type of Being which we find ourselves as, as it seeks to attach a symbolic representation of itself (the description of subjectivity or experience itself is this symbolic representation which is useful, for biological and psychological reasons, as is the intuition of free will or “selfhood”).
Just because you have a perfect abstract knowledge of good and evil doesn’t mean you act from that knowledge. In our individual case we never have this perfect knowledge, but we often do have our conscience and rationality directing us towards a solution to a problem which is in contradiction with competing desires and emotions. Just because we have rationally conceptualized the more optimal path doesn’t mean we will take it, oftentimes we operate not under the intentionality of reason, and more so on the pressures of the moment, most notably due to emotional responses and instant gratification, but, I’ll argue, more subtly on the level of perceived bodily reactions, from which consciousness itself, and rationality, emerge from. To these situations, I designate the classification of “The Spinoza Effect” even though notably similar ideal conceptualizations of the situation has been recorded before his time, I think his conceptualization of it fully exposes the breath of the ideal.
To say that action stemming in contradiction to reason is necessarily bad, and that only action in accordance with reason is optimal, seems a reasonable claim to make, but I believe there is more nuance to be found in relation to our conscious direction, and the choices that “appear” to stem from it. It seems in line with rationality to suppose that certain situations may call for the relinquishing of reason in their optimal resolving, yet, to do so, necessary includes the rational interpretation of instantiating a non-rational approach. Would the action then be rational if it stems from a rational analysis? E.g. If I decide that given my next interaction with someone, I’m going to act spontaneously in the moment, so as to not overthink the best thing to say, or the best way to handle it, if I decide to relinquish logic and reason for spontaneity and emotion, then the decision to do so, is itself rational, yet the action in itself isn’t rational, but it stems from reason in its instantiation. So, in theory, there never could be situation in which conscious forethought antedated an emotional reaction in which the causal determinacy isn’t rational, by definition, yet the action itself, if characterized by emotion, or by lack of reason, in itself, is always emotional.
Conceptualizing a response to a situation that is predicated on emotions, is as much a representation of our Being as a response that is preceded by conscious contemplation attempting to reason out a logical explanation. This is due to depicting the degree to which someone has conscious awareness of situations, and their ability to have conscious forethought preceding their actions. The very quality of a Being of acting spontaneously or through conscious contemplation, in response to different stimuli, is itself a character trait. The discipline in restraint of spontaneity, the reluctance to move instinctual and habit formed responses to conscious cognizing, all tell you something about the Being which is the person in question. Any action that is manifest from an individual, regardless of its content, the situation presented, or the state of mind from which it stems from, will give a relational description that is always accurate in representing the individual. The conceptualization of the perception that enters consciousness in describing a person’s action isn’t the accurate description, as it is mediated by the perception and the developed biological system which filters and accounts for internal values in its representation into a linguistic account of which we are consciously aware, but rather, the action itself is the direct description, in the pre-conceptualized world. This action itself, regardless of its preceding instantiating cause, represents the type of Being which performs it, as much as someone would like to claim “it’s not me” or “if I had time to think, I would have acted differently” are impermissible excuses, as, it is you, and if things were different, of course things would be different, but they’re not, and therefore the action is descriptive.
In respect to the actual instantiation of any “action”, whether the motivation is predetermined by rational and non-contradictory forethought, i.e. conscious direction, or spontaneous embodied reaction, the resultant action is always, in any case, a reflection of internal values. Whether those values which are embodied are reflective of the consciously formulated hierarchy of importance, or not, is dependent on the action itself in comparison with the conscious values. To say that action which is preceded by reason is always reflective of these, also doesn’t follow. It is possible that spontaneous, emotionally driven responses to situations do, in fact, upon reflexive analysis, follow in alignment with our consciously uncovered value system. Any action, whether or not employed by conscious direction using our rational faculty, or motivated by emotion and perceptive embodied reaction, tells us something about ourselves. We are not merely our rational consciousness, nor are we merely our embodied reciprocal system, we are both, and both serve to provide data as to what it is we value, and to the nature of our character in general.
Are they the same thing? Our emotional and spontaneous reactions are built upon a biological system that has compiled “bodily perceived optimal responses” to the effects of situational encounters. These spontaneous reactions are the result of the biological system, built up by genetic information, which has incorporated perceptive datum, modified by the biological structure, in which forms the habitual response to situations and stimuli. Further experience serves to inform the optimality and development of these spontaneous reactions, which always present themselves in the actions our body performs within the present moment. Consciousness and its contents are presented to us, subjectively, under the same preconditions, resting on the formulations of our bodily perceptions in cohesion with the genetic instruction of evaluation and integration into the totality of the organism.
Our consciously developed state of mind and its contents are the active result of situational stimuli in the same manner that an unconsciously directed spontaneous reaction manifests itself. Both systems are created from the groundwork of genetic material, and modified through the perceptive lens that is outlined on the foundational structure. Body and mind are essentially undifferentiated in the method towards their state in the present moment, as the foot is conditioned to flex up or down in the movement of the body as it is “walking”, the mind is conditioned to manifest the content which it is currently manifesting, just as the heart pumps blood and the lungs inhale and exhale, our consciousness is also conditioned and tempered by the pressures of the world for which, like our body, being our body, is in the world.
We still make the fundamental differentiations in regards to parts of a whole, but we must acknowledge that the whole is more than the sum of its parts, and that, being a whole, the parts (only differentiated conceptually) are essentially modified in a manner that contains a continuity and homogeneity. We often make a hard distinction between consciousness and the body, between sensory organs and the subjective experience of them, when, if looked closely enough, there is no fundamental distinction between these parts. Sure it is useful to delineate the roles and physiological underpinnings which give rise to consciousness, but the scientific endeavor of separating, slicing, differentiation, and defining, doesn’t lend itself to an accurate experience to the subjective Being in which we experience the embodiment of the totality of the organism which we perceive to “house” consciousness. The distinction that “I am that which is behind the eyes”, that “we” are this consciousness which directs and controls the body as a ship’s captain steers a boat, is missing the fundamental connection that predetermines and presupposes the very tool in which it is using to suppose such a distinction. Consciousness and subjective experience have qualities in which we can describe as to their arising through physiology, and through the ways in which “stimuli” affects us and how to “deal” with said stimuli in the science of psychology, but both are missing the mark as to what presupposes even these conceptualizations, even before the descriptive element of linguistics arises to describe something, the bodily perceptions in response to the situation which calls for such a description, plays the role of producing the thought through its habitual, “seemingly spontaneous” creation of mental content that has been developed over the lifetime of the individual in his evolved state of Being. The bodily perceptions which internalize the stimuli of the situation perceive in using the “sensory” tools, but these tools are mediated and imposed based upon an internal value system of importance, all of which developed based on the genetic blueprint and subsequent life experience development of the organism, as a whole and his parts, which presuppose the action which is presently appearing within our subjective experience. This subjective experience is no different in essence to the other aspects of the body in their perceiving based on underlying values that have been created throughout the lifetime of the organism. While physiological differences, material composition, and the functionality of parts of the whole of our physical body can be described and are individually quite different from each other, in regards to the Being which we find ourselves, and the subjective experience in which we go through life thinking we are, we must make the necessary connection towards what exactly makes up and is this subjective experience, in which case, I argue, it is merely what the organism intuits as being “who they are” due to the divisive and separational nature of concepts developed using language, but in actuality, it merely is what it is like to Be the Being which you are, that Being which is, currently, markedly differentiated as a human, which developed language, and developed the ability to have a describable experience.
Being that we experience ourselves under a certain conceptualized differentiation than the body, we intuit that the rational faculty is entirely different than the spontaneous capabilities, and that the two are separate by a gulf, the former which is us, the later which is not. While they both describe different situations, one in which conscious thought is allowed to arise, conceptualize, organize, plan, and decide, taking substantially more time, and the other in which the perception of a situation fails to be modified and internalized through the biological system to the point of arises into conscious awareness, and reacts before any “Idea” enters conscious awareness, while these two situations are, in their facticity, different, they both are the representation of the organism to equal degrees. The developed spontaneous reaction can be consciously modified by the conscious direction to repeat certain tasks, conditioning the body in a way that is in line with the thought. On the other hand, the very thought to do such a thing, and in fact, the totality of consciousness itself, is modified and created by the bodily perceptions which are filtered and modified by the nervous system and its genetic coding before being filtered through the internal value system and arising into consciousness. In this way, both systems, being conceptually differentiated, create each other, and in actuality, prior to any conceptual differentiation, necessarily are the same in their cohabitation, their cohesion, and their co-creation. Spontaneity is merely conceived as such in consciousness, and conscious deliberation or rationalization is an instinctively driven response to stimuli in the same manner as a bodily reaction is perceived to be a habituated response, they are, in essence, one and the same.
The noema, or content of conscious experience as being aware of the thought “thinking about thinking” can be captivating and entrapping to a mind who doesn’t hold the proper conceptualization of the experience. The mode of being that is active in such an enterprise, that enables such a thought, is the noesis of “conceptualizing the present moment’s own noema”. In other words, not only is our conscious intentionality directed at the current moment’s thought, it is simultaneously directed at the noesis, the process from which the thought is arising from. In this situation, the process is that of directed thinking, the “object” or “item” from which directed thinking is gazing upon, is itself, thus the content of experience is the thought “thinking about thinking” which manifests itself in present moment experience.
The circular notion of such a thought arising can cause the consciousness for which it has arisen to remain stagnant as the urge to escape the circular thought nonetheless reinforces its emergence. With a desire to escape thinking about thinking, we can find ourselves continually, unfortunately, thinking about thinking. This often happens in youth before we are consciously able to direct our attention away from such content, or find a rational explanation for its existence.
The trick to escaping circular reasoning is to continue the experience in a novel direction that is, itself, linear. The awareness of the thought “thinking about thinking” in the case where we are entrapped in the awareness of its existence in the present moment, takes place under a mode of being mindful. If we are not aware that we are thinking about thinking, in the present moment, then we would not be thinking about thinking. Thus the noesis, or mode of being, which manifest such continent, necessarily must include the noematic content of being mindful. This produces a noema characterized by the conceptualization of a thought process arising in consciousness. We can view this merely as “a thought is arising that says “thinking about thinking””, by seeing the content in this way, we can chalk up the causal determinacy to an underlying mode of being which is aware of itself, and continue analyzing, at this point, phenomenologically, the experience as a reflective looking back towards content which already has faded. By so moving into the future by analyzing the content as a past experience, we escape the circular reasoning, and look to describe the noematic contents which applied to the experience. The problem why entering into this noema of circularity can be troubling, is that there is an underling “unknown”, that of understanding what is happening, or the inability to properly conceptualize the experience in a way that makes sense. By distinguishing the experience using a rational conceptualization, in this way, in putting order and making known that which is unknown, the problem of negative experience which pervades an entrapment of circular thinking, is relinquished, as proper compartmentalizing and structuring to the content of experience becomes known. Ignorance, as to the current moments manifestation, is troublesome for us, and knowledge which explains it sufficiently, at least in a way that we can believe to be explanatory, will diminish the cognitive impairment.
While the phenomenological examination of any present moment experience can necessarily move the experience to new content, the ability to consciously direct our attention to novel content that is arising in consciousness enables us to escape much more easily the circular reasoning, or redundantly appearing thoughts as they produce a negative state of mind that is altogether not pleasant to be stuck in. This is, obviously, easier said than done, and if such circular or reoccurring thoughts disturb us as we become increasingly mindful of them, we always have the opportunity to phenomenologically analyze the content as a reflexive object that has already arisen, and see new content in relation to that as currently arising. This ability of conscious awareness to describe content that is currently occurring, and has previously occurred, enables the escape from such reoccurring thought patterns that trouble our minds.
Seek Truth 