An ontological analysis of the human condition
Transcription
Dev Priyānanda Svāmī Bhagavān
Video Link: YouTube
Being in the world. The world is the only place where we can be. Being requires a place and a time. And our place and time is here, now, in the world.
Ontology, or the Buddha’s teaching, is not mystical. It’s not a matter of the imagination or visualization; it’s an experience: right here, right now. It’s not really a religion or even a philosophy, but it’s a way of experiencing life from a different point of view, that leads to increased abilities, increased skillfulness and increased happiness.
This video series presents an extended ontological analysis of a subject that concerns and involves us all: Being in the World. Each section of the analysis will be accompanied by detailed study guide and exercises giving directions for further self-observation and study.
We will analyze the ontic qualities of Being in the World according to the ontological criteria and phenomenological methods given in the previous series, Becoming Genius (Matrix Learning). Needless to say, a working knowledge and practical familiarity with the methods presented in our previous series (Foundation Series, Becoming Genius, etc.) is required background to follow the discussion in Being in the World.
In other words, if you haven’t watched our previous series, the Foundation Series and Becoming Genius (Matrix Learning), you won’t get much out of this discussion. You need that background to understand what we’re talking about, and especially the language that we’re using, because we’re using the language of ontology.
Most of us are overwhelmed by the world in which we live. We find ourselves thrust—unasked, naked—into a context we do not understand; surrounded by people, societies, conditions and situations that we do not create or choose. Nevertheless, we must act to survive in a competitive environment that is all too often opaque and baffling, and we will be held accountable for our actions.
In other words, it’s the Catch-22 of material existence. Here we are born into a world that is beyond us, yet we have to choose. And we find ourselves in so many situations that we don’t agree with, we don’t like, and we maybe don’t even understand. Yet we have to choose, and act on our choices. And we will be held accountable; we will be held responsible.
We find ourselves vacillating between mute acceptance and blind rebellion. Just when we think we understand the game, someone changes the rules. Stricken by uncertainty, we chase admiration, love and sense enjoyment. Sometimes we succeed, but far more often it inexplicably disappears, or we find ourselves betrayed.
Now, isn’t this the story of everybody’s life? Certainly the story of mine and of everyone I know. But there’s something beyond this. There’s something higher than this, and you can find it within yourself, if you know where to look.
That’s what this series is about: a way of looking at life that allows you to make it meaningful—just the way it is, without changing anything except your point of view.
What is wrong? Why do we suffer? Is there an exit? a relief? a cure? What is wrong is that we are caught in a trap of our own manufacture, like a caterpillar in a pupa. Unfortunately, we do not recall how we wove ourselves into this confining kārmik matrix. If we do not learn the structure of the trap, we cannot release ourselves, and we die. If we can understand how we are caught, we can unravel the threads and break free—a butterfly.
This is a little metaphor, a little point, but really it’s a serious situation and it’s a difficult problem. We got ourselves into this mess, and only we can get ourselves out. Nobody can do it for you. There is no savior, there is no Messiah. There is no transcendent God that’s going to come down and save you. I’m sorry. That idea may give you some hope. It may give you some relief. But that belief is going to be betrayed when you find out the truth.
We’re here on our own, and we have to get out on our own. But we can take advice. That’s really the way it is. It may be difficult for you to accept this truth. You may be used to casting blame on others or making them responsible for your condition. You may want someone or something else to save you. You may seek refuge in faith, anger or hope. But that will not help you to solve your problem.
The problem that we all share—being in the world, the meaning of our experience—is set by the context. And for most of us, the world is the context, but the world is not in our control. That means the meaning of our life is out of our control. What we are, and how we see ourselves, is being set by something more powerful than ourselves, and we can’t find it. We don’t know what it is.
This is the existential human dilemma. We feel like innocent animals surrounded by vicious predators. Our only chance to escape is to utilize our intelligence to out-think and out-strategize them.
Fortunately, a solution to the problem already exists. But at first we may be reluctant to accept it. Maybe we think we will find a shortcut or an easier path. In all this time, in all these lives, we have been unable to find a way out on our own. Now, isn’t it time we started looking around for somebody who has already figured this out? Isn’t a time that we started to take some advice from some people who are more intelligent than ourselves? I think so. That’s what I’ve done, and it enabled me to solve my problem. Now I’m sharing this solution with you.
About 2600 years ago, an extraordinary human being appeared, found the solution and taught it freely to others: the Buddha. The Buddha is not a savior or a messiah. His teaching is not mystical or esoteric, but an understanding of ordinary everyday life in an extraordinary way. From a unique point of view, the Buddha’s teaching doesn’t change anything. It doesn’t require another world, a heaven where things are somehow different. No. The Buddha’s teaching works right here, right now, in the world the way it is, simply by changing our point of view.
We continue the Buddha’s tradition today, adapting it to contemporary style and language. We have not changed his message, only its form. This series is designed to begin to communicate the Buddha’s message of freedom to you. The Buddha’s teaching is very high, but we can begin from where we are, so we start from Being in the World.
People in the Buddha’s time were more advanced in terms of consciousness and Self-realization. The society was already informed by the Vedas. And the Vedas, although they don’t contain ultimate truth, they contain a great deal of useful knowledge. I studied the Vedas for 40 years before I came to the Buddha’s teaching.
So I am almost like a person of the Buddha’s time, more than a person of contemporary times, because I reject contemporary society. It’s not built on anything substantial. It’s simply about somebody else making a profit, somebody with more money and power than us, and that’s what we’ve been conditioned by. We have to throw off that conditioning and come to the platform where the Buddha is speaking to, before we can fully understand his message.
That’s what our video series are all about. We’re trying to give you the information you need to elevate yourself to the point where you can hear the Buddha’s message as it is, without any interference, without any translation or change or alteration in that message. So what we are doing is giving you a gradient path, step-by-step, that leads from where you find yourself, where you happen to be today, to the beginning of the Buddha’s teaching, which is already quite high.
Ontology, the Science of Being reveals deep insights about the nature of human life and experience.
Our way of being shows that our every-day social relations give us a particular kind of preoccupation with the world. Our care for the world, and the people and other beings in it, involves us in a network of conditions and actions we do not choose, leading us away from our authentic self.
In other words, because we care about the world, we identify with the purposes and moods and the rules made by others. And because of this, we deviate from our actual purpose and being. When we’re born, we know why we came here, and we know what we want to do here; but we forget because of being overwhelmed by the conditions and the purposes of others. But this situation, if viewed in a certain way, also permits us to investigate our human condition firsthand.
Wise men down through the ages have taught that a properly performed phenomenological inquiry into human beingness can bring us to a unified ontological model of human existence in which we at last find ourselves at home with ourselves. This realization of authentic beingness is the actual goal of human life, toward which we are relentlessly driven by the anxiety arising from falling from our real self into the world.
So in other words, our original condition, our actual nature as a being, is still there, only we have fallen away from it into the world because we went into agreement with other people’s purposes.
Now you may say, “Well, I had to do that to survive,” and yeah, there’s something to that. But you’re not a baby anymore. Now you’re an adult. You can make your own decisions, and you can decide what your purpose is. You don’t have to listen to anybody else. You can find this out for yourself by ontological investigation. That’s what this is all about: getting you to look.
Each part of this series has two videos—a Reading and a Study Guide. Please view each Reading first, then go through the Study Guide, performing all the assignments. Then go back and review the Reading and note how its meaning has changed for you.
So we’re going to take a reading from an essay that I wrote called Being in the World, after Heidegger. Heidegger was one of the greatest philosophers and ontologists of the 20th century. He’s one of the founders of Existentialism. Pretty much everybody in the world follows Existentialism, whether they realize it or not. So we’re going to begin from that platform, which is pretty much where everybody is at, and we’re going to analyze it in terms of ontology. That’s the difference.
If you follow these instructions, including reviewing the videos in the previous series, Foundations and Becoming Genius (Matrix Learning), you will experience tremendous relief. You will finally understand that life is a play, the world is a stage, and that you have the right to write your part as you see fit. We went through this process ourselves.
When I was 64 years of age, my whole life fell apart. I discovered that the spiritual path to which I had dedicated my whole life was a fabrication, that it was built on something true, but then it had gone off into a complete speculative nonsense, basically. It wasn’t leading anywhere. It certainly wasn’t leading outside of human life. It wasn’t going anyplace higher, except maybe to a more advantageous material condition.
So when this hit me, I had to step back and take a good look at my life and see where I went wrong. Now in one sense, it was crushing. It was a crucible. I felt like I was on fire. But on the other hand, it was a tremendous opportunity to right the wrongs that I had made, to change the bad decisions that I had made to something better. And when I found the teaching of the Buddha, within a month of beginning the actual practices that Buddha recommended, my suffering was gone.
It was gone. The fire was out. And now I feel like I have benefited so much. My whole life has changed for the better. I want to share this with others and give them the same opportunity. That’s what this is all about.
Now, what makes us so special that we’re able to unravel and reveal the secrets of life so clearly? It’s simple: We got the message. We did the work. We didn’t complain, and we didn’t give up. There were so many chances for me to just give up and take refuge of intoxication or whatever, but I didn’t do it. I kept my nose to the grindstone until I reached results.
Results are what this is all about. It’s not simply a pretty idea. It’s not just a nice philosophy or a beautiful religion. Well, it could be all of those things, too; but it’s more than that. It’s a practical way to solve the problems of life. And I think this is what we’ve all been looking for: a way to stop the pain.
Now, you have the chance to benefit from our experience, but we can’t do the work for you. Please do yourself a big favor. Use these methods exactly as taught and recommended, and get their full result. Now it’s your turn. Click on this link to go to the first video. And good luck.
Being in the World, Part One: the Story of Everybody’s Life
Video Link: YouTube
Ontology, the science of Beingness, reveals deep insights about the nature of human life and experience: an ontological analysis of the human condition. Our way of being shows that our everyday social relations give us a particular kind of preoccupation with the world. This ‘care about the world’ involves us in a network of conditions and actions we do not choose, leading us away from our authentic self.
Look up ‘ontology’—not just in the dictionary, or not only in the dictionary, but also on Wikipedia and on some philosophy sites. Get some background. Ontology is not well understood, and there’s a reason for that. It is omitted from the curriculum of all government-sponsored schools.
Don’t believe me? Look up John Taylor Gatto, and he’ll give you the background on that: how the school system was designed, and why it was designed to be the way it is. They’re trying to train up compliant factory workers. That’s the program.
So you get trained to be a factory slave for over twelve years of your life, and you never looked into the design philosophy of the institution that you spent your childhood in? You need to remedy that.
Real beingness is based on experience. Real knowledge is not coming from external authorities. They will only tell you what they want to tell you, or what they want you to know, to benefit them.
Real knowledge is based on being—not knowing, not thinking, not doing, and certainly not having. For example, if somebody gives you a title, you are “The Manager of So-and-So Department.” That’s not your being, that’s something you have. And even if you do it well, that still doesn’t affect who you are. So you could be a success at it and it would not be at all rewarding because it’s not really who you are. So we have to learn about being. We have to learn about ontology.
Now, we’re using the word ‘care’ in a very specific definition here. Unfortunately, our Western language does not have a good vocabulary for talking about being. So Heidegger defined the word ‘care’ as our default way of being in the world. And a little bit later in the series, we’ll give you a definitive ontological structural definition for that term.
Our problem is that we give up, we actually sacrifice our authentic being on the altar of getting along in the world of the Other. And that means, we give up who we really are to imitate something external, to get rewards. It’s convenient, it’s easier, or we think it’s easier than being our authentic self.
But of course, it’s not satisfying. It’s not going to make us happy; and it’s not going to make us successful, because when we imitate, we become a slave. We become passive. And you can’t be successful, you can’t win in life by imitating. Real success comes from being—not knowing, not thinking, not doing, and certainly not from having.
There are so many people who have a lot of money, and they’re miserable. There are so many people who have so many degrees—lots of letters after their names—or who are big thinkers, and they’re miserable. They’re not happy. They’re certainly not a success as we define success, which means being all you that you can be.
So this seminar is going to be about ontology as a background for authenticity and integrity.
But this situation, if taken in a specific way, also permits us to investigate our human condition first-hand. Wise men down through the ages have taught that a properly performed phenomenological inquiry into human beingness can bring us to a unified ontological model of human existence, in which we at last find ourselves at home with ourselves.
This realization of authentic beingness is the actual goal of human life, toward which we are relentlessly driven by the anxiety arising from falling from our real self into the world.
You have to change your being. If you want to be a successful person, you have to change your being from being a slave, from being passive to creating. And you can’t do that by thinking or knowing, or even by having or doing. You have to be the kind of person that creates stuff, that makes things happen.
Nobody can do this for you. We can’t give you some information and then you just duplicate that information and suddenly you’re a success. No—it’s not going to work. We have to begin this process of phenomenological inquiry.
Look up ‘phenomenological’—again, not just in the dictionary, but in philosophy sites that specialize in these topics. Get some background on phenomenological inquiry. It means looking into our experience; seeing what’s really there. Not just taking somebody’s word for it, but verifying everything in our own life.
You have to look for yourself to find the phenomena we talk about in your own experience; otherwise it’s not going to be yours. Don’t take what we say as knowledge, as information. Take it as an opportunity to look in yourself, look at your own life and find what we’re talking about in your experience.
And if you can’t find it, then create it.
When you attain a unified model of human existence—an ontological model— that means you have attained complete self-realization. And what that means is eternal individuality.
We’re going to be explaining these concepts as we go along; these are very advanced concepts, we don’t have time to cover them completely now. But just know that without ontology, there’s no way to attain these goals.
We want you to feel at home with yourself. That means we’re grounded in our own field of consciousness and activities, grounded in our real being, who we really are, who nobody else could be. That’s authentic beingness: when you are something that no one can imitate.
We are not alone. To exist means to be in relationship. Even to be alone implies the possibility of being in relation with others. In being with others, we typically maintain ourselves in the being of the other. That is, we see ourselves in the mirror of our actions and relations with others in the world.
We lose our real self in this fundamentally inauthentic mode of being, because none of these mirrors are true. They all reflect a distorted and incomplete image of our real self.
If you exist, you are in relation—to other beings, to things, to processes, to the world. And the process is that we lose our real self in the world, because the world overwhelms us. It makes us passive. It makes us an object instead of a person. We lose so many of our actual capabilities—because again, we’re imitating externally instead of creating internally.
So you have to create your own prosperity by creating your being as a person who wins. How can you win if you’re not being authentic? How is it possible? If you’re not being your real self? You will not have all your energy available. You will not have your complete intelligence or all your talents. You will not be able to access the controls that determine who you are.
Nobody can do this for you. No one sees you as you really are. And in our default state of being, you don’t even see yourself as you really are. You see yourself in terms of the other, in terms of the categories and boundaries set by the others, who fill our space up with false claims about who we are.
So our everyday mode of being, as we actually experience ourselves, is being in the world. We are not spectators of life from some transcendental perspective, but deeply involved in it. We cannot meaningfully conceive of our being apart from the world in which we exist.
Indeed, the world is the context that gives our being its meaning and value. Yet we become overwhelmed, and lose ourselves in the complex relations and reactions of living in the world. In this condition, how can we recover our authentic being?
Dualism means a fixed way of being. Dualism has been the default philosophical model for at least the last 2-3000 years. Dualism leads us to accept the fixed way of being is us and the world. And who’s going to win? Of course, the world.
The world is bigger than we are. It’s stronger, it’s more complicated, has more resources. We’re involved in the world; we’re in relationship. And that means that we have to care about it even though we don’t get to choose the circumstances. That’s part of the horror of being in the world: that we don’t get to choose the situations. But we have to care and we have to make them turn out right, whatever that means to you.
That’s the context in which we live that gives our life its meaning and value. Unfortunately, the context is determined or controlled by the world. Thinking about it will not help. Thinking about it only makes it worse, because then we get a whole bunch of claims that aren’t grounded in anything real.
The only real solution is changing our being. Changing our being means coming back to our original self. And that requires a process, because in the world our default being is inauthentic. So we have to find our authentic being because we lose ourselves by identifying with externals.
You go to the movies, you see some hero, some action movie and then you walk out of there feeling like a million bucks because you identify with something external—but that’s not really you. You have to find your real self, and that’s only possible with a phenomenological process.
One of the meanings is: in the first person on the field, not in the third person or from the stands like a commentator. That’s how we can recover our authentic being.
The answer to this question begins from asking how relating to ourselves and others inauthentically—in which we fail to find ourselves, and so fail to achieve genuine individuality—shows up in our clearing: the space of consciousness that we are. Our ontological analysis of worldly inauthenticity focuses on three phenomena of being in the world: idle talk, curiosity and ambiguity.
The problem in recovering our authentic being is that we don’t know that we are being inauthentic. That’s the reason you need a course to remind you of all these things, why you don’t just realize them for yourself.
And the reason we don’t know is that we are identified with externals: objects and labels. We’re identified with our car, with our job, with our name, with our family, with our country, with our cause.
And this is inauthentic. And this relating shows up as phony. We’re all phonies because we’re not being our real self, and this shows up in our clearing.
We are a clearing. We’re not a thing, we’re a space. We’re an emptiness where everything shows up. The whole world shows up. Everybody and everything up to God shows up in our clearing.
So what are we? How big are we? Just try to understand what we’re capable of: we can create anything. But because we’re addicted to the various symptoms of inauthentic beings such as idle talk, curiosity and ambiguity, the convenience of inauthentic being outweighs the benefits of authentic being, at least in our warped thinking.
Idle talk includes any communication outside of the ontic conversation: the inquiry into the authentic nature of our being, as a discourse of phenomenological self-reflection. We examine our life, not according to some superimposed external system of values, but how we actually experience it. This essay is an example of a disciplined ontic conversation. Idle talk is typical, average everyday linguistic communication.
The ontic conversation—look it up! Ontic is different from ontological. Ontic means what can be, versus ontological, which means what is. So we have to have this ontic conversation, or begin this ontic conversation because idle talk obscures what is genuinely ours; what is our real being.
The ontic conversation is about the possibilities of being. Ontic means what can be. Right now we’re an inauthentic being, but we have a possibility for authentic being. How do we get there? Phenomenological self-reflection. That’s the process that reveals what is really there: in the world and in us. If you know how to use this process, your actual experience can teach you everything you need to know.
All communication displays a triple ontological structure:
Now we’re going to introduce a very important concept: the ontological triple. Look it up.
If you don’t look up these special terms, you will not get the benefit of the material. So go find a good source on ontology, and look up triples. The W3C.org—Worldwide Web Consortium—has a very good section on triples.
Ontological analysis means finding triples. That’s all there is to ontological analysis: the subject, the object, and the relation. All of our experience exhibits this triune structure: consciousness, the object of consciousness and the relation between ourself and whatever we’re looking at. To analyze your experience ontologically, all you have to do is find the triples in your own experience.
The unit of ontological structure is the triple, a triune entity usually consisting of subject, object and relation.
The figure at right represents an ontological triple with the vectors of subject, object and relation. The triple mirrors the structure of perception, and is the basic unit of ontological scientific notation: OWL, RDF and similar formal ontological languages.
Look up OWL. Look up RDF. Again, the W3C.org site is a very good source of information for this.
The world is based not on monism, not on duality, but on trinity, on the triple. The triple structure is necessary for existence, for consciousness and experience. Without it, we don’t have consciousness, we don’t have existence, we don’t have anything. So the triple structure is the basic structure of the universe and everything in it.
In idle talk, our concern for the claim eclipses our concern for its object. In inauthentic communication, rather than trying to achieve genuine access to the object as it is, we focus on what is claimed about it. We take it for granted that what is said is true, without taking a good look at the object—simply because it was said. Worse: we pass it on, disseminate the claim, allow it to influence other conversations about the object, and so on.
Idle talk obscures the reality. The more we engage in it, the less sense of what’s really going on we’re going to have. All worldly communication is idle talk because the world is superficial and inauthentic. As soon as you accept the claims, or what to speak of repeating them, you’re spreading the pollution of illusion. All idle talk—that means a conversation that’s not rooted in real phenomena—is simply useless abstraction, talking about words.
We thereby lose touch with the original object of the conversation. Our talk becomes ungrounded, empty of the authentic being of the object. We are no longer talking about the object, but about a linguistic abstraction of it. Because we seem to ourselves to understand the object, the convenience of talking about an abstraction seduces us into thinking we understand the object, when we actually don’t.
So idle talk is just a waste of time. Linguistic abstractions, and the models made from them, and the various logical processes that we can subject them to, are just fantasy. The reason we engage in them is that we are seduced by the convenience of abstractions. It’s much easier to talk about words than to get into the reality of the subject. So we think we understand the object because we have words about it. But actually we only know the claim.
By conveniently providing the illusion of complete understanding, idle talk closes off its objects rather than revealing them. It also discourages the possibility of future investigation of the object—because, after all, we already know all about it. This impersonal, uprooted misunderstanding, often characterized by frequent misuse of the word ‘they’, dominates our everyday relations with ourselves, the world and others, guaranteeing that we will remain inauthentic and far from actual individuality.
Everything we think we know is just a claim, because idle talk is just about words. Idle talk guarantees that you will not understand what you’re talking about. You will not be able to apply it.
It is not grounded. It’s not real knowledge. It’s simply speculation, abstraction. This leads to impersonalism—treating people as objects. You’ve been treated as an impersonal object; how did you like it? You’ve also done it to others.
So we have to see that it’s not ‘they’. It’s not ‘the world’ that is ‘doing it’ to us, whatever ‘it’ might be for you. We’re trained to do it to ourselves by schooling, by the pressure of society, and by so many other people who insist on some external standard for our behavior.
Such an uprooted understanding of the world is detached from any particular task that might focus us upon objects as they are in themselves. Thus the term idle talk. This type of conversation tends to float away from our immediate environment towards the distant, the alien, and the exotic. And if the focus of idle talk is the novel, its primary concern tends to be with its novelty.
All we have in the world is claims about claims about claims. None of it is based on actual experience or evidence. Any unverifiable claim is only curiosity. It’s just hearsay. It’s not a basis of evidence that we can use to actually get things done. That’s why it’s called idle talk. It doesn’t have anything to do with any real work. There are many false claims floating around, and they only benefit the persons and organizations that make them.
There’s a lot of propaganda in the world. There’s a lot of disinformation. You have to learn how to rely only on your own experience. Otherwise you get caught up in nonsense like conspiracy theorizing, which is a perfect example of curious idle talk.
Thus we continually seek new objects of conversation, not in order to grasp them in their reality, but merely to stimulate ourselves with their newness. So we seek novelty with increasing force and velocity. We become compulsively curious, constantly distracted by new possibilities, and lingering on each topic for shorter and shorter periods. Our attention span atrophies as we constantly seek new stimulation; floating everywhere, we dwell nowhere.
But we keep getting seduced by novelty. “What’s the news? Heard anything new today?” Facebook is a perfect example. Channel surfing on TV is another great example. It’s nothing but media sensationalism: the new, the novel, the alien, the exotic, the faraway.
But being seduced by media results in a hypnotic alpha state, where we’re detached from our experience and we’re seeing everything in terms of externals. Being systematically detached from our environment by a swelling tide of abstractions, we cannot distinguish genuine comprehension from counterfeit. The convenience of idle talk means that vapid slogans, pithy quotes and ten-second sound bites replace reasoned analysis and discussion of every subject.
Thus in the world, superficial understanding is universally acclaimed as deep, and real understanding looks eccentric and marginalized. This habit of curiosity sabotages in-depth discussion of any topic. But deep study is required for competence and excellence. You are not going to be a success unless you are very, very good at something. You have to seek out the authentic sources, because they provide some real substance, not just empty claims.
Unfortunately, we are trained by the media, by school and by other people, to reject deep knowledge—because they don’t want to see that they’re stupid. So anybody that shows up as being smart gets hassled. That allows them to retain the illusion that they understand; but actually all they have is idle talk.
This superficiality is not deliberate. What intelligent individual would plan such a monstrous misunderstanding? But in a social world dominated by idle talk and curiosity, it permeates the environment. It creates a general mood of groupthink, our inheritance from our fellows and culture, into which we always find ourselves thrown.
Do you think that the government is in control? Do you think that big business is in control? No. You think the bankers are in control? Heck no! They are all victims.
No one is actually in control. No human being, anyway. On the human level, there is no real controller—although certain people and organizations like to pose as the controller. This means that you can take control—of your life, your environment, your meaning, your identity—because everybody else is in illusion.
The whole world is just a big illusion machine, run by curiosity and idle talk. Everybody is full of groupthink. They’ve been trained—by school, advertising, news, entertainment, media. You can rise above this, you can become a success—but you’re going to have to change your being.
These three interconnected existential characteristics—idle talk, curiosity, and the ambiguity of superficiality—reveal a basic kind of everyday being common to all of us: falling into the world. We become lost in the public world of the Others. We fall away from our authentic selves, and lose the potential for being with integrity, wholeness.
These three symptoms of idle talk, curiosity, and the ambiguity that results from them, destroys real meaning. All we have is unverifiable claims. We can never be sure whether they’re right or wrong. So we lose ourselves in a jungle of meaningless idle talk. We don’t know what’s right, what’s wrong, what’s true, what’s false; it’s all ambiguous.
We have to find a new standard for integrity: and that means wholeness, being complete and whole as a person, a human being in the full sense of the word, with all of the qualities and activities of a human being. Integrity in this sense doesn’t refer to some arbitrary, external moral standard.
In short, our average everyday being shows up as inauthentic. We are uprooted from any genuine concern for the world and fellow human beings by our absorption in idle talk. We waste our precious time indulging in meaningless entertainment, instead of taking action to change ourselves and improve the world. In the process, we are also uprooted from any genuine self-understanding.
Thus, we cannot grasp which possibilities are genuinely our own, as distinct from possibilities that anybody can have. In the world, inauthentic being is the norm. If you try to become authentic, you’ll be punished. You have to have a support network. That’s what we provide.
People waste years of their lives playing computer games; and one day the company goes under, and that’s the end of the whole thing. It’s happened so many times now, you think it’s not going to happen again?
Don’t waste your time or you become an ‘anybody person’. An ‘anybody person’ means someone who only has access to possibilities that are available to anyone. Anyone can go down to the store and buy stuff. You have 150 different varieties of toilet paper lining the shelves. Is that really a choice? No, it’s not an authentic choice, because it doesn’t come from you. Anybody can choose them. Anybody can go down and buy a car. Anybody can drive on the roads. Anybody can watch TV or play video games.
What are the things that only you can be? That’s your authentic being. And that’s what we’re here to help you find.
Falling into detachment from genuine self-understanding permeates our philosophies, as well as our everyday life. Indeed, human beings, for human understanding of their own being as natural, often accept philosophical traditions that systematically repress any real understanding of authentic being.
Thus, instead of relentlessly pursuing the phenomenological methodology of ontic self-reflection that leads to authentic being, we content ourselves with convenient, prepackaged designations, and rules for being and action made by others, that have nothing to do with who we are for ourselves.
Philosophy is not going to help you, because most philosophy is inauthentic and it represses our authenticity. They want us to subscribe to some ‘-ism’ and give us an arbitrary set of beingness and rules: what you’re allowed to be and what you’re not allowed to be. Though people accept these rules, they were made by others—long ago, far away, in some completely different circumstance, in some completely different culture and time.
They’re irrelevant. They cannot guide our behavior today. They’re just authority, not real self-awareness.
Any real philosophy is going to be based on self-awareness and your experience. Otherwise it’s just going to lead you astray. Various philosophies tend to interpret human beingness as if people were non-living objects. Such ontological errors naturally emerge both from absorption in practical tasks, and from the peculiar necessities of philosophical speculation. In our everyday work, inanimate objects lie temptingly available as paradigms of existence. When things need to be done, it is overwhelmingly convenient to treat human beings in the same way.
Similarly in theoretical contemplation, both objects and human beings appear as abstract models, completely detached from their contexts. Such objectification and elementalism are simply convenient shortcuts to ostensibly practical, but erroneous conclusions about our beingness.
Look up elementalism and objectification—again, not just in the dictionary. For these two terms, we recommend General Semantics by Alfred Korzybski.
We accept the authority of different philosophies because of convenience. We don’t want to have to think through the whole thing ourselves.
But guess what? Thinking is not going to do it. Thinking is not going to make us successful in life. Being is going to make us successful. Anything else is just abstraction, just a convenient shortcut to a model that’s based on some impersonal concept.
So philosophy based on abstract models is always wrong. Why? Because it’s not based on our experience. It’s not personal. Because of our inherent relatedness and our tendency to lose ourselves in the Other, once such misinterpretations become established in philosophical discourse, succeeding generations tend to accept them unquestionably as self-evident truths, as tradition, ‘what everybody knows’, or common sense.
Tradition is idle talk. We accept it because it’s convenient. So-called common sense is the same idle talk based on convenience; ditto with ‘everybody knows’. What everybody knows is illusion. What everybody knows is inauthenticity. What everybody knows is a lie.
And the same with abstract philosophy: it looks good on paper. Like Yogi Berra said, “In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they’re different.”
Another type of philosopher rejects common sense in favor of ever more novel, even bizarre, hypothetical constructions. These philosophers who simply spin webs of complex abstractions—the more far out, the better—they make your head spin, but it’s not the truth.
Perhaps their theoretical convolutions confer upon their adherents a thrill of astonishment at the exotic products of their ‘intellectual advancement’. But despite their revolt against common sense, they are no less slaves to the consensual hallucination of the world.
And if you say, “Okay, I’m going to be a skeptic, I’m going to be a rebel. I’m going to reject everything.” Well, guess what? Rejection is a mode of acceptance. You have to accept and acknowledge the reality of something before you can reject it.
Authentic truth means it’s verifiable in your own experience. You first have to destroy the hallucination. That’s why we’re seemingly so negative here. It’s like we’re down on everybody, isn’t it? Well, that’s not exactly true. But what we want to do here is destroy the illusion that we think we know what reality is, or that we think we know what truth or authenticity or integrity are.
Because we don’t. Unless we find that truth in our own experience, it’s not really ours. It’s not really coming from our being. Real philosophy must be grounded in phenomenological ontological inquiry into human beingness in the first person—as lived, or on the field—rather than in the third person as a spectator in the stands, or as theory and speculation.
No one can tell you the truth. The truth is bigger than words. So we’re not here to give you information. That’s not what this course is about. This course is about giving you examples of things that you can then go verify in your own experience. Because only you can find out the truth by looking for yourself.
And if you look for yourself, you’ll see the things we’re talking about. They’re real. So we need a real philosophy that gives useful conclusions—not abstract, not phony—something we can base our actions on, that’s practical, that works, that lets us win.
Because that’s what this is about. This is about being successful in a difficult time. The talking-head philosophers don’t verify their teachings by experience, because they can’t. It’s just a theory, designed to disempower you and make you a slave. You really need to see that for what it is.
I know it’s uncomfortable, but don’t worry. We’re going to give you some positive things that you can base your real being on. And you’ll see for yourself that those work.
Observe and verify in your own experience the following:
Video Link: YouTube
Falling away from our authentic self is thus experienced as a general phenomenon in life to which every facet of human culture is vulnerable. Its convenience, generality, and particularly its effects in the philosophical traditions are structural.
For if this falling is a consequence of our absorption in the other, it must be just as much a part of our ontological structure as the fact that we generally fail to find ourselves. Thus, the tendency towards falling is an existential characteristic of default human beingness.
Everyone and everything in the world is fallen away from its real being. It’s convenient. It’s easy to be inauthentic, just go along with the program. Everybody else is doing it.
Traditional philosophy simply describes our condition of being in the world and maybe offers some coping mechanisms to help us feel better about it. But it doesn’t really change anything because it doesn’t address our being.
The cause of all this is the structure of being in the world. It’s not anybody’s fault. We can’t blame them, can’t make them wrong for it, because that’s just the way the world is. We’re thrown into this situation and we have a tendency towards falling into it again every time we try to get out.
The ontological structure of being in the world does not make authenticity impossible, but it does reveal a bias toward the ontic states in which we typically find ourselves. We always find ourselves thrown into a world whose roles and categories are structured in inherently impersonal ways in which idle talk, curiosity and ambiguity predominate.
It follows that inauthenticity due to absorption in the other is our default position. The bias of being in the world is towards Impersonalism seeing other people as objects and other people seeing you as an object. Impersonalism is a mode of monism, which itself is disguised duality, and it leads to being thrown into this state where you’re simply treated like a tool.
We keep looking for ourselves in other entities and phenomena, but we’re not going to find ourselves like that. We have to do self-reflection in an authentic way to come to our real being. We can then find ourselves only by recovering from our original state of lostness. In practice, attaining authentic being always involves overcoming inauthenticity.
The world into which we find ourselves thrown inherently tempts us to fall away from ourselves. The most pernicious part of our fallen state is the assumption, due to the inherent ambiguity of idle talk, that our fallenness is fully authentic and genuine.
Look up pernicious any good dictionary will do. In this world, inauthenticity is the default. Without some process, you will not be able to reach your authentic being. Because the inauthenticity is the default, authenticity is considered ontologically as a modification of inauthenticity.
And if we think that we’re being authentic, we’re really just being phonies. Because if you really look into the matter, you’ll see that everything you think is you is something you got from outside—some possibility that anybody could have.
Being absorbed in the world of the other thus blinds us to our real condition. This blindness finds expression in frenzied activity. A constant curiosity-driven search for the novel and the exotic. Consequently, we remain alienated from the immediate environment and from ourselves. A self-alienation that sometimes takes the form of compulsive self-analysis, skepticism and doubt.
The errors of self-understanding in various philosophical traditions are simply localized symptoms of this more general ontological state. So the problem is that we can’t see that we’re falling away from our authentic being. We think we’re being real, but our reality is borrowed. It’s not authentic.
Curiosity is simply wanting to know about something, wanting to hear the claims about it, and not really inquiring into its being. So some people go into psychoanalysis, and they spend years in analysis. You’ve heard of the paralysis of analysis; that’s because simple skepticism without some process of obtaining authenticity will simply mask your inauthenticity behind a screen of so-called self-inquiry that really doesn’t go anywhere.
The same with philosophy. Philosophies that are not based on some kind of phenomenological process are not grounded in authentic phenomena and they can’t lead you to your real being.
Thus, our everyday state of being is finding ourselves thrown into inauthenticity. As long as we remain more concerned with the other than with finding our authentic selves, we remain thrust into the world and overwhelmed by the turbulence of the others.
We can achieve authenticity; but when we do, it is only a modified way of holding our everyday condition of falling. Ontologically speaking, authenticity is a modification of inauthenticity.
Our thrown-ness begins from our birth. The birth experience is tremendously traumatic. We’re squeezed out like toothpaste through a tube. We think we’re going to die. The pain is immense. The birth trauma encapsulates all the feelings and moods of that moment deep into our body. It’s actually imprinted on the body, the cells. So we’re overwhelmed by being in the world.
When a baby elephant is growing up, they put a big chain on, a big heavy chain, and the elephant can’t possibly break it. So at some point the elephant decides, ‘Okay, I can’t get loose.’ That’s it. And they stop trying. And then even when they grow up, the same little chain that they use on the babies will keep a big elephant in check because they think they can’t get away.
We think the same thing. We think, ‘Well, inauthenticity is the way the world works, so I have to be like that.’
So the first step of the process of recovering our authentic being is to hold our inauthenticity in a different way. That ‘Oh, this is only one way of being out of many, many possible ways of being. It just happens to be the way I turned out.’
One way of characterizing this average everydayness our inauthentic being would be as self-dispersal. We are scattered amid the constantly changing objects of our curiosity, caught up in the collection of impersonal selves that make up the Other, and fragmented by our skeptical philosophical self-dissections.
Then where is the doorway to overcoming fragmentation, alienation and inauthenticity? How can we attain a unified realization of our authentic being?
In inauthentic being, our energy and attention are fragmented, scattered over many different objects. We don’t ever have our full energy and attention on any one thing. That’s part of the problem. And the solution is to collect our attention and energy and focus it on our real self.
So where is the door to that process, to our real self? What is the process? How do we knock on that door and get it to open? That’s what we’re here to talk about.
It’s not a simple thing. It has a lot of aspects to it. It takes a lot of talking about it to get you to see it in your own experience, which is what this is about.
The goal is a unified realization of authentic being. But that’s very high. We’re putting the bar very, very high here. If you can attain that in the way that we define it, then you pretty much have life all sewn up in the bag. But this is very high and it’s going to take a big piece of work to get there.
So far, we have only analyzed the causes and symptoms of our inauthenticity. This narrow focus is needed in the beginning. Just as an authentic mode of existence requires overcoming our self-dispersal, so a genuinely integrated understanding of our being requires gaining a powerful perspective on our fragmentation that demonstrates our underlying unity.
Now, it might sound like we’re down on everybody. We reject traditional philosophy, we reject the everyday way of being in the world and so on.
But actually we’re not. We’re like a doctor who comes in and says, ‘You know, son, the problem is you don’t have authentic being,’ because we have to diagnose you before we can continue the treatment. That’s the problem: most people don’t think they’re sick.
Our underlying unity, if we can find it, is very, very powerful. If we can take all the separated, fragmented parts of ourselves and reunite them into a unified being, we’re much more powerful than in our fragmented state. So the first step of this process is being authentic about the fact that we are inauthentic, admitting and sharing and taking the stand that ‘I am an inauthentic being.’
It’s kind of like Alcoholics Anonymous: “Uh, my name is Dev and I’m an inauthentic being…”
Fortunately, there is a particular state of mind that enables us to solve these problems: objectless anxiety or dread. As a mode of existence, anxiety forces us to confront the true ontological structure of our existence. And as an object of phenomenological analysis it gives us access to a single unifying articulation of our being.
Anxiety is another big topic in our work, and here we see that it also has a triple structure, and we’ve put it on the triple diagram. Everyone is in anxiety and we go through so much trouble to get rid of it, but actually we can’t get rid of it.
And that’s a good thing, because anxiety leads us towards our real being. It leads us toward unity by counteracting the fragmentation of our being. This self-dispersal plus absorption in the world leads to oppression, and the oppression is the actual source of the anxiety.
We are oppressed by being in the world. So anxiety is actually the perfect description of our inauthentic being, because in inauthentic being, we are oppressed by being in the world.
Anxiety is often confused with fear. Both are responses to the world as unnerving, hostile or threatening. But whereas fear is a response to something specific, anxiety is objectless. The anxious person is not anxious in the face of any particular entity in the world.
Indeed, the distinctive oppressiveness of anxiety lies precisely in not being elicited by anything specific, so that we cannot respond to it in any specific way; for example, by running away.
Anxiety seems to be a problem without a solution. But if we encounter our anxiety authentically, it can silence the voice of the Other—all those things that pull us in so many different directions and focus our attention on our real self in the world.
We have so many problems without solutions. The news, gossip, conspiracy theories, politics, stuff going on on the other side of the world that has nothing to do with us. Why do we care about it? Why do we get ourselves in anxiety about it? Well, we’re already in anxiety, and the news and like that, simply provides convenient objects for us to project our anxiety on and forget that it’s actually part of our default being.
What oppresses us is not any specific group of beings or objects, but rather we are oppressed by the entire world, or more precisely, by being in the world. Anxiety confronts us with the realization that we are thrown into the world, that we are always already delivered into situations of choice and action that we did not choose or determine, but that we have to care about and act upon.
Anxiety confronts us with the determining and yet sheerly contingent nature of our own worldly existence. We are stuck with the way we wound up being, but we could just as easily be any other way.
Look up the word contingent in any good dictionary. We’re thrown into the world into a situation that we did not choose or determine, yet we have to choose one of the possibilities that is available in that situation and act on it. And then we don’t get to choose the circumstances into which we’re thrown. We don’t get to choose the set of possibilities that we’re thrown into. But we do have to care enough that it turns out right.
And of course, we’re always going to look back and say, ‘Well, if I had done it that way, it would have been better, or if I had done it this other way, then so-and-so would have been pleased with me.’ And you can’t satisfy everybody. That’s just the way it is.
So we’re oppressed by the entire world, or actually by being in the world. The thing that’s cool about the contingency of our being is that actually we could have been any other way, including authentic. So this idea that our being is contingent is actually the key to our freedom.
But being in the world is not only what we are anxious about, it is also that for which we are anxious. In anxiety, we are anxious about ourselves—not about some concrete possibility, but about the fact that our existence necessarily involves projecting ourselves upon one possibility to the exclusion of all others. Existential anxiety plunges us into anxiety about ourselves in the face of ourselves. So in our anxiety, we are anxious about the world, concerning the fact that we are thrown and can’t choose.
And we’re also anxious for being in the world because we want it to turn out according to the expected norms. When we look at ourselves in anxiety, we are anxious about ourselves, concerning ourselves in the face of ourselves, when confronted with our own being, because our own being is also something we didn’t choose the way we just turned out.
In this state of focused self-consciousness, particular objects, persons and the specific structures of the world fade away, as the world as a whole occupies the foreground.
Thus, when taken authentically anxiety can begin to rescue us from our fallen state, our lostness in the Other. It throws us doubly back upon ourselves as a being for whom our own being is an issue, and also as a person capable of choice, uniqueness and individuality. When we confront our anxiety authentically, it reduces our fragmentation because it turns our attention on ourselves.
Instead of being scattered all over the being in the world, we begin to confront our authentic self, that we are in a field of activity and we have responsibility for that field and that field has a boundary. Within that boundary we can be our authentic self. It reminds us that our being is actually an issue for us, that we didn’t choose the way we just wound up. It was because of circumstances we’re contingent.
Anxiety shows the claims of the Other to be insignificant, because even if we satisfy one or two of those claims, the other ones are still going to be unsatisfied. And because no one else can feel our anxiety, our anxiety is our own. We are an individual, we’re separate from all others. And we’re not responsible for other people’s anxiety, only for our own.
Anxiety opens the possibility of our showing up for ourselves in a distinctive way, for anxiety individualizes. This individuality brings us back from our lostness and falling, and makes manifest to us that authenticity and inauthenticity are both possibilities of our being. Our basic possibilities show themselves in anxiety as they are in themselves, undisguised by the entities of the world to which we usually cling.
So guess what? Anxiety is our friend. It brings us back to ourselves from lostness and scatteredness and fallenness. It reminds us that we’re in trouble in the world. Being in the world is not our real state. It’s not our real being. It reminds us that inauthenticity and authenticity are both possibilities for us, and it also distinguishes the Other as not ourselves by distinguishing our own individuality as the one who feels our anxiety.
Now, in the default state of being we hear idle talk, and it allows us to project our anxiety upon other objects; that’s inauthentic. So when we confront the fact that we are anxious about the world itself as a whole, that’s when we begin to feel our own being as a whole. And that is the next step of the process of attaining authentic being, by confronting us with ourselves.
Anxiety encourages us to recognize our own existence as essentially thrown projection and our everyday mode of existence as fallen and completely absorbed in the other. It emphasizes that we are always in the midst of the objects and events of daily life and typically we bury ourselves in them. We do this to keep from acknowledging that our existence is always more or other than our present actualizations so that we are never fully at home in ourselves or in the world.
Now, once we realize that we’re the ones who are feeling anxiety, we start to realize that we’re projecting ourselves. We’re thrown into the world and we care too much about the Other. We care way more than necessary about the Other, and we use the Other to distract ourselves from ourselves.
That’s what we means by burying ourselves in the other: we don’t want to acknowledge that we can be more than what we now are. And as long as we care about the world, we can never be all that we can possibly be. We can never be fully at home in the world and we can never be fully at home in ourselves.
The experience of anxiety about the strangeness and uncanniness of being in the world exposes the basis of our default being as thrown projection, fallen into the world.
Our thrownness and openness to states of mind other than our authentic self shows us to be already in the world. Our projectiveness, capacity for understanding the other and planning for the future shows us to be at the same time ahead of ourselves, aiming to realize some existential possibility. And our fallenness shows us to be preoccupied with the world.
This overarching triple ontological characterization reveals the essential unity of our being in the world to be what we can call ‘care’. So here’s another triple. It would help if you diagram these out for yourself; you can use our triple diagram, or you can use the regular RTF triple diagram that of course, you looked up in the last video, right?
In this case we’re talking about care. The subject is our thrownness, the object is our projectiveness and the relationship between them is fallenness. And the three of them go together to make up care.
You could also say that the subject is being in the world, the object is being ahead of ourselves and their relation is being preoccupied with the Other. All of those combine to take us away from our authentic self and make us absorbed in the world, scattered throughout the world, so that we are led away from our real authentic self.
The existential totality of our ontological structural whole can therefore be grasped in the following formal ontological structure. Our being is:
Now, the problem with our analysis so far is that it has been static. It doesn’t include consideration of time, and we’ll get into that in the coming sections. But so far what we’ve established can be an ontological basis for our analysis of being in time.
The analysis of care does give us a unified ontological structure of being in the world, and this is practical. If we can observe our own life and realize that to care means to be in anxiety about the world but actually this anxiety does not have a present-to-hand object, then we have taken a step towards our authentic being.
The triple elements of our everyday being are ultimately parts of a whole. By labeling that whole as ‘care’, we evoke the fact that we are always occupied with the entities we encounter in the world, concerned about ready-to-hand and present-at-hand entities, and solicitous of other human beings.
The point is that being in the world, we must deal with the world. The world and everything in it cannot fail to matter to us.
Look up solicitous in a good dictionary and check out the Latin derivation that links it with anxiety. There are also some other specialized terms here. Ready-to-hand means that an object is available for experience or use is right before us. Present-to-hand means that an object is observable for thinking about it—not actually ready to use, but it’s around, within our awareness.
The world and everything in it does matter to us. We’re not going to say we don’t care. That’s taking skepticism a little too far. But we do want to relate to the world from our authentic being and not our inauthentic being. So getting caught up in care about the world to the point where we get absorbed in the world is the way that we fall. That’s how we leave our authentic being and become inauthentic.
While being absorbed in the world is a fundamentally inauthentic state of being, acknowledging our inauthenticity is the first step on our path back to fully integrated authentic being. This stand is a platform from which we can begin the phenomenological process of ontic self-inquiry necessary to recover our authentic beingness.
So the way out of inauthenticity begins with being straight with yourself about the fact that you’re in anxiety, about the fact that you’re fallen, about the fact that you’re being inauthentic, and also being straight with others, especially those who are trying to help you out of this trap.
So authenticity begins from being authentic about our inauthenticity, because in our default state of being, inauthenticity is all we’ve got. Our process at this stage is looking into your experience to identify your inauthenticity and then being straight about it, being authentic about the fact that you’re inauthentic.
That’s where it starts. That’s how you begin to discover what you care about, how much you care about it, and what you’re willing to do about it that does not compromise your authentic being.
And we’ll get into that in the exercises coming up.
Observe and verify in your own experience the following:
Video Link: YouTube
Our ontological analysis of anxiety in the previous section also sheds much light on skepticism and nihilism. Philosophers again and again attempt disproofs of skepticism about the reality of the external world. Nevertheless, all such attempts to invalidate the skeptical attitude ultimately fail.
This is because any proper conception of our worldliness makes the skeptics’ doubts self-defeating, impossible, and devoid of significance. We cannot disprove an unprovable philosophy. Nevertheless, skepticism as a mode of being persists.
Look up skepticism and nihilism, not just in the dictionary, but in a philosophical reference. There’s a whole philosophical tradition behind both of these terms, and you should be familiar with it for this discussion, because we’re going to reference some of the typical arguments of skepticism and nihilism.
One of their primary arguments of skepticism and nihilism is doubting the reality of the world. Descartes begins from even doubting his own existence. But for phenomenologists, this is a non-issue. Obviously we exist. Obviously the world exists, and even skeptics and nihilists care about it. So the extreme claims of skepticism and nihilism are pretty much useless.
But skepticism toward the claims of the world is a very good idea because most of them are just idle talk, not based on any actual evidence, and they certainly don’t inquire into the being of the thing that they’re talking about, so they’re pretty much useless for our purposes.
In our default state, we do not have any being besides being in the world. The world is the context for everything we experience or can experience, just as water is the context for everything a fish can experience. We never experience the world as a thing in itself, only the things that exist in the world, including ourselves.
Thus, skeptical questions about reality or the world as separate and independent from ourselves are meaningless and unanswerable. It is as useless to attempt to prove or disprove such ontologically incoherent statements as it is to try to make sense out of nonsense.
From a phenomenological point of view, the only reality that matters is our experience. If we can’t experience it, then it’s not real. The problem is, there’s more than just experience. There’s also attitude, and the way you hold things, and the philosophical context and so on.
Now, in ordinary being, the world is the context that gives the meaning. In other words, when one is being in the world, the world itself determines the meaning of who we are, what we are, what we are capable of, what our possibilities are, and so on.
But skepticism toward the world as a thing-in-itself is unprovable. Certainly we can be skeptical toward the things in the world, the people in the world, the claims of the world, yes. But the world itself does not show up as an object in our experience.
It’s like the water for the fish. We never see anything outside the world, only within the world. The world itself is the context. So skepticism’s main argument is unprovable.n Therefore, it’s not refutable either; yet skeptical doubts about individual objects in the world are not only articulable but also irrefutable, and such skepticism is pervasive in modern thought.
From the ontological point of view, the skeptical impulse is certainly self-defeating, since its doubts annihilate the conditions for their own meaning. Yet skepticism is also self-renewing as a human possibility, affecting those possessed by it with a near unshakable confidence in their own conclusions.
How is this possible? The power of skepticism is derived from the fact that you can doubt anything. All you have to say is “I don’t believe it,” and nobody can convince you. You just hold your ground. And that’s about the end of the argument there.
But of course, skepticism is logically self-defeating because you can also doubt the skeptic and doubt skepticism itself. So it becomes a logical conundrum.
However, the skeptical attitude of “I don’t believe it” does find sufficient evidence in the world to nourish itself. You can analyze so many claims in the world, question them for their basis of evidence, find out that they’re false, and say, “See, it was wrong. I was right.”
So the skeptic finds plenty of evidence in the world to bolster his claim that actually this is not true. And we’ll see how that actually comes in very useful for our ontological investigations.
Since the skeptical attitude is a human ontological possibility, a way of understanding and grasping one’s worldly existence, it must be subject to ontological analysis. That means, among other things, that it should be inflected by a particular mood. We can easily observe that the skeptic is someone beset by gnawing doubts, someone in the grip of anxiety.
But more than that, anxiety is one of the most powerful possibilities of our phenomenological self-disclosure. In anxiety, we reveal ourselves as worldly beings whose being is an issue for us. Thus, we should expect skeptical anxiety to be very useful in phenomenological self-inquiry.
And so it is. We welcome skeptical questions of our views. For example, the typical skeptical comment of, “Well, this isn’t true. What you’re saying isn’t true.”
And we reply, “That’s right, it’s not true. Because anything we can say is just words, and truth doesn’t fit in words. Words aren’t big enough. They’re just symbols. They’re not the truth. The map is not the territory. We’re talking about your being. And if you are going to see whether what we’re saying is true or not, you have to look into your being and verify what we’re saying by your experience.”
The triple structure of skepticism is anxiety is the subject, claims are the object, and doubt is the relation. You can diagram this out. It’ll help you understand skepticism.
Skepticism reveals us as beings with a possibility for self-reflection, because of the point I made first here, that the things we’re talking about are not expressible in words. And we admit that from the very beginning, we’re talking about being. And almost nobody understands what we’re talking about when we say that, because being is a neglected subject in our culture.
But if you look into your being, you will find the things that we’re speaking about. So actually, you can verify the points that we’re making through a skeptical attitude. And that’s the beginning of our real work.
Anxiety finds its clearest expression when it has no particular object. Pure objectless anxiety is related to, and hence reveals, the worldliness of the world and the uncanniness or alienating strangeness of being in the world. Thus it helps to disclose our own inherently worldly being; it also reveals that our way of being in the world is that of being not at home in the world.
How does skeptical anxiety confirm this paradoxical perception? Look up uncanniness, it’s a very interesting word. It really expresses the feeling of being in the world. We feel that we’re not at home in the world because we can’t choose the situations and the possibilities that we’re thrown into. That means we don’t have any power. We’ve given up our power to external structures, authority structures and value structures of the world.
So we feel anxiety, but we usually project our anxiety on some object. And we made the point last time that the news, for example, is full of objects just ready for us to project our anxiety on.
This is a subject in art: The Scream by Eduard Munch; and there’s a Norwegian poem that goes along with it. They express this mood of objectless anxiety, and this is a very good feeling. We should open ourselves to this feeling because it reveals the fact that we’re not at home in this world, even though our being is very worldly.
This is a paradox for us, cognitive dissonance for us. And if we look into this, it reveals a very interesting point which we discuss in the next slide.
One aspect of anxiety is the sense of a disconnect between ourselves and the world. It gives a sense of a void at the heart of reality and a sense of ourselves as not at home in the world. Another aspect of anxiety reveals a disconnect between ourselves and others, as if their thoughts and feelings were unknowable. Thus we often experience ourselves as alone and alienated in the world in either mode.
Skepticism as an expression of anxiety finds itself opposed to common sense, to what everybody knows: the truths of average everyday human existence, being in the world absorbed in phenomena, and the opinions of others. When we use the word disconnect here we mean an alienation, a distance, a void. We feel a void between ourselves in the world and between ourselves and other people; and this void or emptiness discloses that we are a space.
We’re not a thing, we’re a process we’re a space where stuff shows up, and the whole world shows up in our space. Now, the interesting point about anxiety that I mentioned in the previous slide is that it causes us to doubt the other: “I’ve been going along with the program here, following all the value systems of the other, being in the world with all my energy and attention. But I’m in anxiety. Why should I feel anxiety? Maybe the claims of the other are not really authentic. Maybe somebody is leading me astray here. Maybe the world itself is false…”
And you see how this leads to the big doubts of the skeptic, that maybe the world itself isn’t real, maybe it doesn’t really exist. But that’s going too far. It’s going far enough to say, “Maybe the world is not really my home, maybe the world does not really have my best interests at heart.” And it leads us to question common sense, what everybody knows, the typical understandings and claims of the world.
And that’s very good because it leads us towards our true self.
In this opposition to worldliness, the skeptic discloses and falsifies the default realities of typical human beings. For although we are essentially worldly, we are also always more than any particular worldly situation in which we find ourselves. Although we are overwhelmed by being in the world, we are also individuated.
Hence the argumentative skeptic, in his denial of our worldliness, commonality and inauthenticity, also denies the truth of our being in the world. At the same time, the objectless anxiety, of which skepticism is the expression in its fear of accepting absorption in the world, hints at the hidden truth of our being, our innate possibility to attain true individuality, integrity and authenticity.
Look up falsification. Falsification is a philosophical and scientific term, and so is contingency, at least in philosophy. And look these up in a good philosophical source.
The skeptic does us a great service by falsifying the ordinary truths of being in the world, because they are lies, they’re not our real being. So being in the world is never going to lead us to become all that we can be, Army recruiting slogans notwithstanding.
So by revealing and falsifying the false claims of the world, the skeptic gets us to look at the possibility that maybe there’s another way of being, maybe there’s some other way to approach being in the world that doesn’t restrict our possibilities to those derived from external sources. And if that’s the case, then we might become something more.
And so this is a very wonderful idea, and we can thank the skeptic for pointing us in that direction. The skeptic is like the finger pointing at the moon. The skeptic cannot give us our full, complete being, but he can point the way and say that “We should reflect on this and consider this new possibility further.”
If skepticism repudiates the common sense expressions of ordinary being in the world, then they must be contingent, simply an accident of the conditions of our being in the world. Skepticism shows that worldly articulations of meaning can continue to affect us only if we continue to care about them.
The self-defeating character of skepticism—“This sentence is false.”—means the skeptic can effect such withdrawals of interest in the world even in the guise of the most passionate investment in it. In other words, the self-subversiveness of skepticism shows that caring about worldly discourse in which the issue of our own being is most fundamentally at stake is not automatic.
It is not that expressions of worldliness are part of the predetermined essence of our existence. Rather, they are a cultural inheritance that we can choose whether or not to take responsibility for, in and through our being in the world.
Skepticism is a particular type of projected anxiety. It’s anxiety projected on the entire world. In other words, the skeptic comes to doubt the entire world: “Maybe it’s just an accident. Maybe it’s just contingent. Maybe the way we turned out, or the way we wound up being, isn’t the only way that we could be. Maybe there’s another way that we could be that would be better.”
And so it is.
But skepticism, when it goes too far, undermines its own logical foundation. In other words unfettered doubt, doubt without limits, eventually eats itself up like the worm Ouroboros, that eats its own tail until there’s nothing left.
But the skeptic’s contribution is valuable because he finds a reason not to care about the world. He finds a reason to detach us from the world. We’re trying so hard to live up to the world’s expectations and standards, but guess what? We can’t, because they’re not real.
So the skeptic actually wakes us up that actually we don’t have to care about idle talk. It’s irrelevant. It’s just unproven assertion. And they get all passionate about this. And this passionate doubt of the world leads to a passionate rejection of the other. And that’s good because it throws us back on ourselves and it begins the process of authentic self-reflection that, “Oh, maybe I could be some other way.”
There is also a third aspect: that skeptical anxiety helps to bring out the uncanniness of being in the world. For the worldliness of the world to which anxiety is a response is a system or field of meaning, an ontology. Therefore, the sense or meaning of our existence is ultimately an aspect of our being.
If that is so, the significance of our lives cannot be derived from any external source or authority, whether that source is conceived as God, as a range of Platonic ideals, or as a structure of values encoded in the structure of reality by genetics or other physical or human laws.
Our authentic being must be rooted in the uniqueness of our individuality, and thus must be sought within ourselves by phenomenological self-examination. The skeptic wakes us up to the uncanniness of being in the world. Ordinarily we internalize and identify with the worldliness of the world. In other words, we bring it into ourselves because the meaning that we assign to things and people has to be internal to ourselves.
Meaning doesn’t live outside of us, our meaning lives inside. So when we internalize the world’s meaning we identify with its worldliness. However, the meaning of our life can never be external. It can’t be imposed by the world. We have to internalize it through identification.
And the problem is that we internalize the claims of the other without attempting to verify them by evidence or by self-reflection. So this uncritical acceptance of the claims of the world actually shows that meaning is a structure internal to ourself. And if that’s true then the meaning that’s given by external sources cannot possibly be our meaning. Our meaning can only be derived from inside of ourselves; and the skeptic points this out.
How then can the structures of meaning that give orientation and meaning to our being in the world have any genuinely objective authority, any real claim on us? Skepticism asserts that meaning must be an essentially anthropocentric construction designed to cover up the intrinsic meaninglessness of the world.
Anxiety’s disclosure of the world as a domain in which we are ultimately not at home, and can choose to accept or not, is perfect confirmation of the ontological truth that the meaning of our lives lacks any external ground. However, it does not prove that the meaning of our life is arbitrary or synthetic. Rather, it can only be derived from a deep ontological analysis of our being in the world as an as-lived experience.
The skeptic points out that meaning is internal even if it’s derived from the world. It’s actually ours because we have taken claim of it, we have adopted it, we have accepted it as our own and then it guides us from within. But skepticism goes too far in claiming that all meaning is derived or created by human beings, and that ultimately the world is meaningless.
No, it’s not. The world is real and the world has meaning. It’s just not the meaning that comes from within ourselves. So the value of the skeptical attitude is that it points out that ultimately meaning is an internal phenomenon; and that even if we accept meaning from external sources, we do so by making it our own.
And that means that we don’t have to do that. We have a choice about it. We can choose to reject external sources of meaning and derive our own meaning from internal self-reflection. And that is exactly the process of phenomenological investigation.
The uncanniness of our being in the world revealed by skepticism captures the ontological root of nihilism. Nihilism is an extreme form of philosophical skepticism concerning the reality or substance of value and meaning.
We must carefully distinguish between the truth of nihilism and the distortions embedded in its intellectual expression. The idea of meaningfulness wholly external to our being in the world is indeed empty of significance. But acknowledging the internal relation between idle talk and our ordinary being does not mean that we deny trivialize or relativeize the conceptions of truth and reality. Thus, an authentic response to nihilism acknowledges that life’s meaning lacks any external absolute ground, without denying its very real effects upon us.
Nihilism is a very extreme form of skepticism that says the world is utterly unreal. And of course, this is going way too far. The world is certainly real and we are certainly real. There is no truth in the nihilistic extremes of certain schools of Buddhism. They say that not only are we unreal, but we’re changing from moment to moment. So the person who receives the results of our activities is not the person who performs them, and so on. That’s just ridiculous.
The ‘oneness’ that we often hear in Hindu contexts is also a form of nihilism; because if you have oneness, if everything is one, there’s no consciousness, there’s no existence, there’s no activity, there’s no beingness. We have to have trinity—the subject, the object and naturally their relation—before we can have existence, consciousness, activities or anything.
So the ontological truth is found in trinity, the trinary ontological structure that underlies everything that’s real.
Now, the truth about nihilism is that no external source of meaning can mitigate our existential anxiety. That’s the part that’s true. The intellectual expression of that is the part that we question. But we have to recognize that even though the meanings of the Other are false, they still affect us. We can’t just wish them away because they do have an effect on us.
If somebody tells a lie about us, it makes us feel outraged, angry, hurt. So even though the statement is a lie, it still affects us. Similarly, the meanings of the other affect us even if we know they’re false.
Any absolute external structure of significance would have to be constituted in ways entirely independent of the ontological structure of our being in the world. How could an external source of meaning provide us with internal articulation of being in the world? How could it constitute the worldliness of the world, and thus orient and motivate our practical activities within it? The transcendental concept that the world is meaningless or false, and only a wholly external structure of meaning can make any authoritative claims, is backwards.
Rather, the only structures of meaning that can possibly make claims on us are ones to which our worldly being is inherently open, and by which it is structured and articulated. Nihilism goes on to say that because the world is false, we need some external structure of meaning, some external authority, to determine what’s real and what’s false.
The problem with this is that no external structure can be constituted in the same way as our being in the world. It would have to be otherworldly, transcendental, an external source of meaning, also because it’s outside of our self. And whether it that’s being in the world or some transcendental source could not completely engage our energy and attention because it would be alien. It would be structured on some different pattern than our own being.
Therefore, the transcendental model offers a false alternative to worldly meaning by saying there’s another world, and it’s constituted completely differently from this one. And that world actually gives the meaning of everything in this world. That can’t work, because it’s not part of our internal ontological structure. It would have to be something external to us, alien to us. So how can it explain the meaning of our lives?
And actually, all philosophical systems require some external source of meaning, some unexamined assumptions, some a priori axiomatic truth. But in our phenomenological investigation, we cannot find any external source of truth that matches the ontological structure of our being, and of our being in the world specifically.
So the transcendental theory is completely wrong. It’s a false alternative, and we’ll find the real alternative later on in our examination of death. In other words, the idea of absolute transcendental objectivity that fuels nihilism cannot provide the authority and authenticity that our worldly fields of meaning could have, but unfortunately lack.
Nor can it be right to think of the structures of significance in which we exist as merely internal. The ontological structures of being in the world are all the meaning there is or could be for creatures whose being is like ours. Such meanings are the limits or conditions necessary to determine any being whose being is worldly and hence finite.
The truth in nihilism is that our being is essentially finite or conditioned. We are not unconditioned, infinite or Godlike, nor are we entirely reducible to our determining conditions. We are not possessed by an external ground of meaning, nor are we wholly self-grounding either.
Accordingly, to say that our worldliness is uncanny means that it must be understood in relation to what it is not, and to that which is not in relation to nothing, and nothingness.
Real meaning must be rooted in our experience. That’s the only way that we get the full access to our complete being, energy and attention if we’re going to be successful. And remember, the context for all of this is a discussion of how to attain economic revival and success in a difficult time. For us to be successful, the meaning that we give must be rooted in our experience. That gives us access to all of our resources.
So one of the points we want to make here is that nihilism and monistic impersonalism are inherently identical. The Impersonalism of the world, of being in the world, is already a form of nihilism. It says that ‘Nothing is true, everything is permitted.’ And especially if you’re a member of the ruling class, you can get away with any kind of lie, and so on and so forth.
We don’t accept that: we do need a transcendental source of meaning. We do need an a priori assumption or an axiomatic truth, a ground of being to give our life meaning. But it’s not nihilism. And it’s not any transcendental world that’s beyond our experience, because that splits us inherently, and we can never get access to our full energy.
When we get a little bit further on in our analysis here, we’ll discuss the actual transcendental source of meaning in a phenomenological context.
The skeptics truly suffer the reality of ordinary human existence, for they give philosophical expression to the pervasive mood of anxiety in being in the world. However, from an ontological point of view, skepticism does not properly articulate that reality, or how best to understand its passionate anxiety. This is a vital task of authentic phenomenology.
Phenomenological investigations of being must be informed by some particular mood. We are open to skeptical anxiety, not only by subjecting it to serious phenomenological analysis, but also by allowing it to guide our sense of what matters in the field of practical activity. Then we become sensitive to the most far-reaching and primordial existential disclosure of our being.
What else could better facilitate our attempts to grasp our being in as transparent a manner as possible, to make the existential possibility of investigating our being, truly our own?
Skepticism goes too far in doubting everything; it becomes only a negative influence on us. It can’t give us anything positive. All I can say is that “This is wrong, that is wrong, that’s a lie, this is an illusion,” and so on.
So the value of skepticism is that it can reveal the objectless nature of anxiety. If we disbelieve in everything all the objects and assertions and claims of being in the world, then we can allow the world as a whole to show up in our space. And that will also delineate our true individuality by combining all the objects of our attention into one and focusing it on ourselves.
The other value that skepticism provides in the phenomenological context is that it reveals what really matters. What are we truly anxious about? What are we really concerned about in life? And of course, the answer in our context is ourselves, our being.
Our being is an issue for us. Of all the creatures in this world, only human beings can inquire into their being. If we don’t inquire into our being, we are not being a human being in the full sense of the term. Therefore, we do not have access to our full capabilities, to our full energy, to our full attention and intelligence. And if we want to be a success in this world, we have to be everything that we can be.
But it is critical that we adopt a moderate attitude toward the skeptical mood. Especially, we should not take skepticism’s interpretation of its own significance for granted. We should not accept the skeptics’ over-anxious claim of knowing that the world is not knowable, without acknowledging that the world cannot therefore be doubtable, either.
Authentically skeptical phenomenology distinguishes the disclosures made possible by its mood of anxiety from that mood’s self-concealment and self-deception. We must overcome skepticism from within by being skeptical about its self-distorted misunderstandings. We must dwell in the mode of being in the world without making ourselves at home in it.
Only thus can we discover what is truthful about skepticism and the actual value that skepticism can disclose to us. Skepticism is an important tool in phenomenological inquiry. But skepticism in and of itself goes too far; it undercuts itself.
If the reality of the world is unknowable, if actual truth is unknowable, then how can we doubt it? We can only doubt something that we know. So if the reality itself is unknowable, then doubt is also invalid as a process. Skepticism thus conceals itself as a rational argument.
But actually it’s not a rational argument; actually, it’s an attitude. And the skeptical attitude is a good way to falsify claims. But it is not an ontological system. It cannot replace true ontological analysis or phenomenological self-inquiry.
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Our ontological analysis of our default Being in the World so far has been static, without considering its relation to time. Continuing our analysis of the underlying ontological structure of being, we will connect the concepts of care and temporality. As before, we will forge that connection through a methodical process of phenomenological self-reflection.
Up until now, our ontological analysis has been static; in other words, we haven’t been considering the effect of time. But time is the ultimate ontological constraint, in the form of death. It delimits the span of our life, our existence. And even while we are alive, the qualities and possibilities of the current time limit what we can do, what’s possible for us. And time provides the ultimate object of care: our death.
So the phenomenological process regarding death discloses the relation of care with death; that death is the thing we should care about the most, and that death is actually where our anxiety is coming from.
Our anxiety is not exactly objectless; but then again, it’s an object that has very special qualities. As we will see in the current analysis, our analysis of being in the world so far has been restricted to the negative.
First, we focused upon inauthentic modes of being by concentrating on our average everydayness. Second, we downplayed the general structure of life as a unified whole by concentrating on the ontological structure of specific moods such as anxiety. We now reconsider these topics to demonstrate the fundamental relation of a being in time.
The triple ontological structure of this section and those immediately following is authenticity, totality and temporality. In our phenomenological process, the analysis of inauthenticity comes first because that’s where we find ourselves thrown. The entire world is inauthentic, and we have been driven by that inauthenticity and we have also become inauthentic.
So we find ourselves in an inauthentic condition; and to get to authenticity we have to perform some kind of process. And of course that is our process of phenomenological self-reflection.
When we say temporality, we mean being in time. And in the beginning, our being in time is going to be in terms of the moment. But ultimately it has to expand to embrace our entire existence, including death. Authenticity then begins from being authentic about our inauthenticity because in the beginning that’s all we’ve got. We don’t have anything that’s authentic because the way we wound up being was determined by outside forces, outside influences, idle talk, being in the world, care and so on.
But we have to become aware of our being in totality. In other words, if we want to be successful, we have to have access to our full energy, our full intelligence, our full attention. And to gather all these things together, we have to be aware of all sides of our being, beginning with the inauthentic and gradually approaching the authentic being—that part of our being that is unique and that no one can imitate.
It would be natural to see this discussion as deepening the understanding presented in our previous claims by drawing out their implications. We began this series from a provisional concept of the human as a being who questions his own being. Unfolding the articulated unity of the worldly existential structure implicit in that conception led us to a deep understanding of being in the world as care.
Look up articulate—a good dictionary should do. But if you want to research the philosophical background, that would be better. A human being in the full sense of the term includes the process of ontological inquiry. What is our being? How are we being? How can we improve our being in ordinary life, in being in the world? Very few people take up this inquiry and that means they are not human beings in the full sense of the term.
When we say the implication of a static concept, we mean its realization in time. For example, we might say ‘The price of gold is such-and-such today.’ But that’s a static concept, and it doesn’t give us much information to go on. But when we graph the price of gold over a long period of time, we get all kinds of information out of it. We can see if it has any cycles, if it has any periodic or seasonal variations. We can see its response to other market factors and so on.
So if being in the world as a static concept is care, then being in time is authenticity. In other words, there’s a lot more information in the dynamic temporalized concept of being than there is in the static one. Care is something that we can define in a moment, but authenticity requires time. We measure authenticity by how much integrity a person has, how well they can honor their word. And that takes time.
A person has to give their word, then we have to see if they keep their word. And if they don’t keep their word, how are they dealing with that? Are they honoring their word? Are they making up the difference to the people that they let down? And so forth? Authenticity is a temporal concept. Care is a static concept.
Here we begin again from the conception of being as care, and unfold the articulated unity of temporality implicit in it. This will reveal that the structure of care reveals an internal relation between our being and time.
The sequence of our presentation does not imply that time is a secondary or consequent factor in being. Imposing a sequential structure on ontological inquiry would imply that each new stage of ontological discovery presupposes its predecessors. But such a linear presentation is merely an artifact of the nature of our language and systems of representation. It cannot capture the full, richness, complexity and simultaneity of the internal ontological structure of being.
Our study of death, guilt and conscience does not simply deepen our understanding of the arguments advanced so far; summarizing the characterization of our being as care provides an uncanny context or horizon against which to articulate the topic of death. However, this topic will also destabilize, even subvert our previous understanding. This creates a deep but creative and revelatory tension among the concepts of care and death, guilt and conscience.
In the context of authenticity, guilt means diminished integrity. How much integrity does a person have? They gave their word. Did they keep it? Did they honor it? How much integrity do they have? If they have full integrity means they’re a human being in the full sense of the term. And that’s a very big thing. Conscience will be explored extensively in The Call of the Friend.
Uncanniness—if you didn’t look it up before, you should look it up now. It provides a context for the discussion of death because uncanniness means the strangeness of being in the world, the fact that we’re not really at home in the world. We feel like strangers in a strange land in this world, because this is not really our home. Yet we can be very successful here, very effective, if we hold our activities in the context of uncanniness.
The apparent tension between the static and dynamic models is simply a presentational artifact. It’s simply a limitation of our linear language. When we put concepts in prose, we have to put them in a linear sequence. But as you go around and around, listen to these videos and study them again and again, you will see that actually all of these concepts exist simultaneously, and interpenetrate one another.
Any philosophical attempt to grasp our being as a whole faces the ontological difficulty that we are oriented towards the future and so are incomplete. However, once our life is over and the whole is available for examination, we are no longer here to examine it.
We always already project upon possibilities. So we are oriented towards the not yet actual. That structural incompletion is overcome only when we are no longer here. Thus, grasping our existence in totality seems to be contradictory. For us to be whole is for us to be no longer, and so incapable of relating to our life as a whole.
In being in the world, we are always projecting into the future: planning, thinking ‘Which is better to do this or that?’ looking over the different possibilities of life and choosing the one that we best will be able to actualize, letting the rest go.
We are actually incomplete, and our life is at complete whole only when we die. So grasping the meaning of our being as a whole automatically invokes the topic of death.
It’s not like we like to talk about death. Death is a difficult topic for everyone. But if we’re going to understand our being as a whole, if we want to become all that we can be to be a success in this world, we have to grasp this topic of death.
But this gives us a problem. If we are using the phenomenological method, does death mean that we can never grasp the totality of our being? Do we have to wait until we die before we can have a complete view of our being? It’s a huge problem, and we’re going to devote most of this discussion in this video to this problem.
Death is our ultimate problem. It brings our existence to an end, completing it. But we cannot experience our own death. We may experience dying, but our death is not an event in our life, not even the last one.
Thus it seems impossible for us to grasp our own existence as a whole. This is a huge obstacle for anyone trying to make sense of our existence. It is also a profound challenge to the understanding we have achieved so far and to the scope of what we can achieve with the phenomenological method.
One of the features of discussing the topic of being, and one of the reasons why people find it uncomfortable to discuss being and try to avoid it, is that talking about being automatically invokes its dialectic: nonbeing or death. This makes people uncomfortable, and rightly so, because it’s our ultimate problem.
But we have to deal with these uncomfortable topics to get a complete grasp of the subject of being. And if we don’t do that, we’re not being human beings in the full sense of the term.
The problem is that by the time we die, by the time the body actually dies, we, the self, are already gone. We’ve gone someplace else. We can talk about that where we go later on. Right now we’re still trying to understand where we are.
So how can phenomenology investigate death? Because nobody actually experiences death. They only experience dying, approaching death. When death comes, we’re already gone.
The earlier characterization of our being as care was intended to give us a handle on our being as a whole. But one aspect of the ontological structure of care is being ahead of ourselves. Our orientation toward the not yet actual hides the problem of death, concealing an essential incompleteness in our analysis.
Our phenomenological method relies upon our capacity to disclose phenomena as they are in themselves by direct personal encounter. But no one ever encounters their own death. Then how could there be a genuinely phenomenological understanding of death, and so a genuinely complete existential analysis of our being?
So we don’t like to talk about death; and we don’t like to talk about being, because being the topic of being invokes the topic of death.
But that trivializes our life. It makes our life nothing more than a succession of events determined by the Other, where we get to choose between different forms of gratification, different forms of work, different forms of public beingness that are determined by someone else. And we never approach our own-most concerns. Our projectiveness hides our death by absorbing us in the Other, and it also hides our real being.
We can’t have it both ways; we can’t hide the subject of death and avoid hiding the subject of our real being. We’re going to hide both of them together. They both are part of the same thing: being and nothingness, existence and nonexistence. So that dialectic is hidden or confronted together.
And the problem is that we set aside our real concerns—the things that really matter to us, the things we really care about—because we care about the claims of the Other. The Other says, “You got to do this, you got to do that, you got to have a job, you got to wear a suit, you got to do that, got to get married, got to go here, got to watch TV, got to stay current with the news,” and so on. So many things that the others seems to care about, but actually we don’t care about them at all.
Our real concern is, how can we become all that we can really be? Our aim is to gain a proper understanding of the wholeness of human beingness. We can relate to the death of another, but we cannot grasp another’s life as a totality. We can only experience the transition of another human from being to no longer being.
To us, their corpse is more than just a body. It is a body from which life has departed. And we can continue to relate to the dead person through funerals, commemorative rites and the religious cults of burial or reincarnation. Thus we continue to experience the modes of being with them as no longer with us.
So we’re trying to grasp our life, our human beingness, in its totality. But death makes it very difficult to grasp our being in its totality. Yet we cannot grasp another’s life in its totality because we’re not them: We don’t die their death. We don’t eat their meals. We don’t live their lives. We are living our own lives.
So how do we grasp our life in its totality? This is a problem for the phenomenological method we use. Or maybe I should say we misuse traditional religious functions to continue to be with the dead person. And of course, we’re being with them as being not here, being absent, being dead. So it’s not very satisfying.
But the real meaning of these rituals and observances is, of course, to comfort ourselves. We do find our meaning in this life by viewing it in the context of death. But not the generalized context of death, not the death that happens to somebody else, not the concept of death, not the abstraction of death; but the fact that our death is a definite possibility at every moment.
When we view our life in the context of death it acquires a special meaning; it becomes very distinct. And when we view our existence in the context of nonexistence is the only time that it acquires its real significance.
But these aspects of this person’s dying and death apply to us who are still living. They are modes of our continued existence, not theirs. To grasp the life of the dead person as a whole. We must grasp the ontological meaning of his dying. And death to him for the totality or wholeness of his life, is the issue.
The loss and suffering a person’s dying signifies for others brings us no closer to the loss of beingness that he suffers and so no closer to understanding what it is for an individual’s existence to attain wholeness or completion.
So thinking about another person’s life is a third-person point of view. It’s from the stands, not in the field, not as-lived experience. So it doesn’t count as phenomenological inquiry. It’s more like philosophical speculation about death or life.
So we have to think about our life from our point of view, and we have to think about death from our point of view. Thinking about another’s life as a whole or thinking about another person’s death cannot really help us understand our life as a whole—unless, of course, it inspires us to contemplate the certainty of our own death.
This false trail nevertheless yields a crucial implication: no one can substitute for another with respect to dying and death. Death is, in every case unavoidably individual. To pursue this, we must uncover the existential significance of death and its role in our lives.
Death is the end of a person’s life that in which our distinctive lack of totality finds its completion. But what kind of completion is that? So of all the possibilities of our life, death is the most personal possibility.
Our death is the one thing that nobody else can have, nobody else can do. Our death cannot belong to anybody else. It’s non-transferable, non-relational.
But what is its existential meaning? In other words, what is its significance in our phenomenological process? How do we relate to death as an ever-present possibility? That can happen at any moment, but actually we never get to experience it because it always remains just a possibility. And by the time it actually happens, we’re already gone.
Death is not a limit in the way that a frame is the limit of a picture. The frame ends the picture, but does not annihilate it in the way that death annihilates a person. This reveals the futility of modeling any aspect of our being on another object. For example, we may think of a human life as an accumulation of moments, events and experiences into a whole. Death then appears as the final piece that completes the puzzle.
But when death comes to us, we are no longer here. Life is not like an incomplete archway to which death becomes the capstone. Death renders the claims of the world upon us utterly void. It really shows up the claims of the other for what they are. Death shows us that the things that really matter to us are those things that are wholly and completely our own, that are non-relational, non-transferable to any other person.
Therefore, ordinary analogies using material similes are impotent to model death. Death is a unique thing, a unique phenomenon. There’s nothing else like it in our experience. So we can’t use ordinary metaphors to model death because death annihilates everything of our being in the world. In the face of death, being in the world is reduced to utter insignificance.
Similarly, using the example of the life of a fruit, death would signify the natural culmination of our existence in the same way that the ripened state of a fruit completes its life cycle.
But death is not our fulfillment or ripening. We often die unfulfilled with many of our distinctive possibilities unexplored, our life purpose unattained. Thus, our greatest fear should be to die without discovering our authentic being. Most people die like that without discovering their authentic being. Most people die while still absorbed in the claims and activities of the world, while still trying to fulfill the possibilities offered to them by the other, without discovering their unique, authentic possibilities.
But we can’t fulfill our real purpose in life if we are always absorbed in the claims of the world. The world has unlimited claims, obligations and possibilities to offer us. The world can absorb our entire time, energy and attention without any trouble at all.
So, if we are going to find our real selves, if we are going to collect the different pieces of our being that are scattered all over the world and concentrate them to attain our real state of being, then we are going to have to become detached from the claims of the world. In other words, we’re going to have to stop caring about them. And the way to do that is to start caring about the fact that we are definitely going to die.
We have to lead our lives. We must make decisions about which existential possibilities we will actualize and which we will not. Death’s true significance as the end of our life, as its completion, thus depends upon the significance of our existence as throne projection, as a being whose being is care as we defined it earlier.
Hence, we must understand death experientially as a possibility of our being. But since no one can directly experience his own death, we must shift our analytical focus from death understood as an actuality, to death understood as a possibility.
Only then can we talk of death as something that a living person can experience. That is, we must recreate our relation to our death. It is not something we realize when we die, but something we realize, or fail to, in our life.
We can’t do it all. We have to pick one possibility out of all the possibilities in any situation. The unchosen possibilities in every situation are lost forever. We can never get them back. We can never go back in time and recover one of the possibilities that we did not choose.
So if we choose for others, if we choose for the world and not for ourselves, that possibility of authentic being in that moment is lost forever in that situation. We can’t go back and remedy it and say, “No, actually I meant to be my authentic being.” We can’t do it.
So the problem is we are attached to the unfulfilled possibilities because we care about them. We care; we think, “Oh, I let that one go. I couldn’t be what I wanted to be to please that person,” or “I couldn’t be the kind of being that I saw in that ad or in that movie, in that way of looking at life that I wanted to show to others because of my ego or my image or whatever.”
We’re attached to those unfulfilled possibilities and we want to keep them around, but we can’t because time irrevocably tears them from our grasp.
So our own death can be experienced only as a possibility. It’s always a possibility. A possibility that is always there but never comes. Because, as we mentioned, by the time you actually die, you’re already gone.
What then is the distinctive character of death? Death is the possibility of the absolute impossibility of our existence. Thus death reveals itself as that possibility which is above all, one’s own, the most non-relational and inevitable. Death then, is a kind of absolute by which we can measure the authenticity of everything else in our life.
So death is an impossible possibility. We know it’s going to happen, it could happen at any moment, but it never actually happens to any of us. We don’t experience it because by the time death comes, we’re already gone.
So death makes our existence impossible. Death makes our existence impossible, but death is a definite possibility. Therefore, death is the impossible possibility of our possible impossibility. The fact that death is irrevocably personal, our own-most possibility, the ever-present possibility that is born along with our birth. But it’s a possibility that never arrives within our experience.
Death is non-relational. Not only is it non-transferable and cannot be experienced in terms of a third person’s death, but it’s non-relational. It destroys all claims of the Other on us. When death comes, the business of the world is finished and it is inevitable. It will definitely happen, but we don’t ever get to experience it.
Our death is something distinctively, impending. It stands always before us as something that has not yet come. But unlike any other possibility of our being, it can only impend, it can never arrive. Other possibilities can impend, but they can also arrive, be actualized. But we cannot relate to our death as anything other than an impending possibility. For when that possibility is actualized, we are no longer who we are now.
Death makes our existence absolutely impossible. Therefore, one of the qualities of authentic being is an awareness of death, as always impending, something that can happen at any moment. If we think of death like this, like anxiety, this awareness throws us back on ourselves. We become more acutely aware of the significance of our choices in every moment.
We hold death in an authentic way to motivate ourselves, to complete our individual possibilities, those possibilities that only we can choose. No ‘anybody person’ can choose.
Anybody can go down to the store and buy stuff.
Anybody can watch TV, but nobody else can sing my song.
On the other hand, nobody else can make love like I do.
Nobody else can come up with a way of living that no one else can imitate; only the authentic being.
There’s a nice quote: “The prospect of being hanged in the morning concentrates the mind wonderfully.” — Samuel Johnson.
He’s talking about awareness of death and how it focuses the mind on the real self, the authentic being.
Hence, we can relate to death only as a possibility. Further, it stands before us as a possibility throughout our existence. There is no moment in which our death is impossible. Every moment of our existence might be our last.
Hence, unlike any other possibility of our being, death for us is always and only a possibility. This purely impending threat manifests the articulated unity of our existence as thrown projection, our being always already ahead of ourselves.
Since death is our impending utter nonexistence, and since we must accept that possibility in every moment of our existence, death stands before us as the potentiality for being that is most our own. It is the unique possibility in which what is at issue is nothing less than our being in the world.
We are certain to die. Death is an unavoidable possibility. And in death all our relations to any other person are undone. In other words, death is a non-relational possibility. So the phenomenological approach to death is only as a possibility—a possibility, nevertheless, that could become actualized at any moment.
So if we hold death in this way, then it becomes a part of our phenomenological analysis, our phenomenological approach to living. When we hold death as a possibility, it puts everything in our existence into its proper perspective. It gives life its proper meaning.
In other words, it provides a context that gives a view of our life as a whole. And that’s what we’ve been trying to do. We’ve been trying to get some way of grasping our life as a whole from beginning to end in its completeness. And in the beginning, death seem to be an obstacle to that because, as we’ve discussed extensively, it’s a possibility that we never get to experience.
So how do we experience our life as a whole in the moment? Well, we accept a context that gives our life as a whole a meaning in the moment, and that is the possibility of death.
Death is hardly unique in that respect. No one else can die my death, but also no one else can have my nose. However, my very being in the world is not at issue when I blow my nose.
The point is that the non-relational nature of death highlights an aspect of our relation to all our existential possibilities. For in making concrete our being ahead of ourselves, the fact that no one can die our death for us also emphasizes the fact that our life is ours alone to live.
So death, instead of being an obstacle to phenomenological inquiry into the meaning of our whole being, actually becomes the means of grasping our whole being.
Death is the most non-relational possibility. It belongs to us alone. Nobody else can die our death. It’s non-transferable. And we cannot experience another’s death. We cannot even experience our own death. So it’s only a possibility.
Death held as a possibility, though, puts us alone at cause over our choices. It’s very clear that only we can choose how we are going to live our lives. Nobody else can do that for us, and nobody else can distinguish those choices that are ours alone and that could not belong to anybody else.
It highlights that our stories about the other being at cause are inauthentic. The other is not at cause, as we discussed in the previous section on Skepticism. If we accept the choices and the meanings given by the other, it means that we have internalized them and are using them to make our choices.
But we don’t have to do that. We have another choice. We can be authentic. We can choose for ourselves. And that is the advantage that holding death as a possibility gives to us.
Another remarkable feature of death as an existential possibility is that it is not really an existential possibility at all. A genuine existential possibility might be made actual, but our own death cannot be realized in our existence. For if our death becomes actual, we are no longer here to experience it.
This means death is not just the possibility of our nonexistence, of the absolute impossibility of our being, it is also an existential impossibility. If death as an existential possibility is a contradiction in terms, how can we gain phenomenological access to death? By existential observation and analysis.
So the root of all our inauthenticity is hiding our death from ourselves. Forgetting about this possibility, forgetting about the certainty of death and making believe that we’re never going to die, taking up the claims of the other as our real life, which of course it’s not, and using them to screen our awareness of death from our consciousness.
And remember, death is the impossible possibility of our possible impossibility. So it seems to be a contradiction in terms. How can we hold death as an existential possibility when it’s actually not an existential possibility at all? It’s only always a possibility, it’s never an actuality in our existence.
How can we gain phenomenological access to death? And the hint of the answer is that a context is not necessarily a possibility that can be actualized, but it influences the meaning of our experience by allowing us to hold it in a certain way.
In other words, if we hold our existence in the context of nonexistence, it gives our existence a depth of meaning that’s unobtainable in any other way. We cannot understand our relation to our own death on the model of our relation to any genuine possibility of our being. We cannot fully grasp death except in the context of the difference between ontic and ontological matters, between what can be and what is. But we can present it as an ontological structure rather than an existential state that structure makes possible.
Then why consider death as an existential possibility at all? Doesn’t this terminology encourage misunderstanding? No, because it underlies a key insight.
Although we can’t coherently regard death as an existential possibility, neither can we understand our relation to it. Apart from our relation to our existential possibilities to our being ahead of ourselves. Our relation to death is manifest in the relation we establish and maintain, or fail to maintain, to every genuine possibility of our being, and hence to our being itself.
So death is unlike any other existential possibility in the sense that it can never become existential. And this means that the difference between death and other possibilities is that death is an ontological rather than an ontic possibility. Remember, ontological refers to what can be, what is possible; and ontic refers to what is what is experienced in life.
Inevitability of death is the essential context for our projectiveness. In other words, our looking forward to death is the source of our anxiety. Our anxiety is then projected on other possibilities to distract us from the certainty of death.
But death is our most genuine, inevitable and own-most possibility. And if we hold it like that, it reveals a profound depth of meaning in our life that we cannot become aware of in any other way, because it allows us to hold and view our life as a whole in the knowledge that it is finite, that it is going to end, and that we have only a limited amount of time to actualize our authentic possibilities.
Video Link: YouTube
Death can be ontologically characterized as the only non-relational and inevitable possibility. It is an omnipresent, inescapable, but non-actualizable possibility of our being. Thus it is an ungraspable but undeniable aspect of every moment of our existence.
It follows that we can only relate to death in and through its relation to what is graspable in our existence, namely, the genuine existential possibilities that constitute our daily life.
Graspable here means ready-to-hand. Ungraspable means it’s present-to-hand. This is terminology developed by Heidegger to talk about ontological characteristics. In other words, death is graspable only as a possibility, never as an actuality, because by the time death occurs, we’re no longer here to experience it.
Death can help us choose the authentic possibilities in our existence, because, after all, if one is faced with impending death, things acquire different values. They appear more immediate, more urgent than they ordinarily would. And so we can relate to death through other possibilities that are similarly unique to us and therefore our own.
Death thus remains beyond any direct existential or phenomenological grasp. But it is graspable indirectly, as an omnipresent condition of every moment of our directly graspable existence.
Death is not a specific feature of the existential landscape, but a light or shadow emanating evenly and implacably from every such feature. It is the context within which the existential features configure themselves. A self-concealing condition for our capacity to authentically disclose our own existence to ourselves.
Death is also graspable as a condition. In other words, we can imagine it as the absence of life or existence. It’s called self-concealing because it’s non-existential. It’s the absence of something, not the presence of something: the absence of life.
The presence of death, even as an impending event, increases the significance of every choice we make. In other words, it gives more meaning to our lives because of its presence. If we take death as a context, it adds meaning and distinguishes authentic being in our existence.
Just as death is a phenomenon of life, it shows up only in and through life—in and through that which it threatens to render impossible, as the possible impossibility of life.
Phenomenologically speaking, then, life is death’s representative, its proxy. We can overcome death’s resistance to our grasp in and through its acknowledgment. Death can be made manifest in our existential analysis by recounting that analysis in the light of the possible impossibility of that which it analyzes.
Putting it the other way, our being towards death is essentially a matter of our being towards life, of relating or failing to relate to our being in the world as utterly primordially temporal.
In this way, our life can be experienced as a proxy for death. If we can’t experience death directly, we can experience it through the impact that it has on our life.
Failing to relate to death, repressing it, or going into denial about it, effectively means that we’re hiding it with idle talk. Death can become a measure of the quality of our life and our choices in relation to its possible impossibility. It helps us choose what really matters.
If you think about how long the world has existed before our birth and how long it’s going to be around after our death, our existence is finite and limited compared to the period of our nonexistence.
What does this look like? For us to confront life as fully our own possibility is for us to acknowledge that there is no moment of our life in which our existence is not at issue. This discloses that our existence matters to us. And what matters about our existence is the totality of our life.
We thereby come to see that we are responsible for our life, that our life is our own. Death’s existence makes a claim on our life that is essentially non-relational, that cannot be blamed on the Other. This means our existence is at issue at every moment, any moment. Death can come and we don’t know when it’s going to happen, only that it is a certainty.
The real issue here is the quality of the totality of our life, the quality of the choices we make and the values that we maintain. The awareness of death’s inevitability reduces our fear of external threats, such as the threat of authority, the threat of public opinion, and so on.
Death is not something external to us. It’s a quality of our own being. And it helps us take ownership of our lives and be at cause over the quality of our existence.
To think of our life as fated to be rendered void by death is to acknowledge the sheer contingency of its continuation. The hardest lesson of our mortality is its demand that we recognize the complete superfluity of our existence. Our birth was unnecessary; the course of our life could have been otherwise; its continuation from moment to moment is no more than a fact, and it certainly will come to an end at some point.
After all, if our life is contingent, then we can be any way we want. We’re not limited to any certain way of being. It doesn’t really matter anyway. And very importantly, if our life is contingent, we’re not stuck with the way we wound up being, how we were shaped by the accidents of life. We can create our own way of being.
The point is, if our being is shaped by more or less random external factors, then it’s mutable, and we can choose to shape it by our own choices.
To acknowledge this about our lives is simply to acknowledge our finitude, that our existence has conditions or limits. It is not self-originating, self-grounding, nor self-sufficient. It is contingent from top to bottom.
But no representation of ourselves is harder to achieve or realize than this one. Nothing is more challenging than to live in such a way that one does not treat what is in reality merely possible, actual or conditionally necessary as if it were absolutely necessary.
Authentic being towards death is thus a matter of stripping out false necessities, of becoming properly attuned to the authentic modalities of our existence. So our being is not original or fixed, and it’s certainly not eternal, and our choices are not absolute or predetermined. What’s in the Astrology report this morning has nothing to do with what you actually do today.
The point is, our potential for self-determinism is much greater than traditional philosophy allows. Traditional philosophy wants to make rules for us to follow, but we actually have much greater freedom. The false necessities of the other distract us from awareness of our real being, including even death.
We get so caught up in what other people think and what other people want, that we forget what we want and what we really need. This last perception most clearly connects representing our being to ourselves as a whole, with including the possibility of our authenticity in our human everydayness.
For an authentic grasp of our existence as mortal inflects our attitude to the choices we must make in four interrelated ways.
In short, an authentic confrontation with death reveals us as related to our own being, so as to hold open the possibility and impose the responsibility of living a life that is genuinely individual and genuinely whole, a life of integrity and authenticity.
But we typically don’t relate authentically to our death. Instead, we flee from it. We hold death as something that happens to others to whom we relate as mere impersonal tokens. We encourage dying friends and relatives by asserting that it will never happen. When it does, usually hidden behind the closed doors of an institution, we often consider it a social inconvenience or a threat to our tranquilized avoidance of death. Although we may not actually deny that it will happen to us, we take actions to hold it off: fitness schemes, cryogenics.
We regard death as distant, as something that will happen, but not now and hence as an impending event rather than as the omnipresent possibility of our own nonexistence. That impossible but unavoidable possibility, without which our existence would lack its distinctive finitude.
We’re in denial about many things concerning death, especially that death can be a choice. One can choose the time and manner of one’s death. Instead, we try to hold it off as long as possible with heroic medical interventions and running away, putting our head in the sand and trying to make believe that death doesn’t exist.
But it does exist, and it’s going to get us anyway.
Hiding death, or hiding from death is not a good solution because it fragments us. It alienates the part of us that is the most our own. The thing that death shows up is that we are responsible for our being. Nobody else and nothing else. Shrinking from death makes us incapable of confronting oppression because all an oppressor has to do is threaten us with death, and we cave in.
Where is our nobility? Where is our courage? Courage comes from being ready to face death at any moment.
This tranquilized alienation is characteristic of our average everyday, inauthentic existence. It suggests entanglement in a misplaced sense of the necessities of finite life. Part of our everyday, inauthentic mode of being is that we regard the existential possibilities open to us and the choices we make between them as fixed by forces greater than or external to ourselves.
We do what we do because everyone does. We displace our freedom outside ourselves, existing in self-imposed servitude to the Other. We are unwilling not only to alter that fact, but even to acknowledge it.
The reality is that we alone are responsible for allowing ourselves to be lost in the range of possibilities that our circumstances have thrust upon us. And we alone are capable of and responsible for changing that state of affairs by coming to terms with death.
One of the consequences of inauthentic being is that we give up our ability to create new possibilities. Because to create new possibilities, first we have to be willing to die to the old possibilities. Avoiding death also shifts our focus from being to knowing, thinking, feeling, doing and having in the context of being in the world. And this is disempowering.
Our life is not our own. Our values are set by some external forces. Our condition of being alone and lost in the world makes us feel like we’re not responsible. But in fact we alone are responsible, both for being lost and for finding our authentic being.
That’s really the way it is.
Authentic being towards death is a mode of anxiously resolute anticipation. It is anticipatory because death, the impossible possibility, can only be anticipated. It is anxious because living in awareness of our mortality means to make choices in the light of an extreme and constant threat that emerges unwanted and unbidden from one’s own being.
Now when we say ‘anxiously resolute anticipation’, resolute in that context means ready to experience anxiety in order to attain integrity. Being resolute toward death gives us the ability to stand for our own choices—because, after all, we’re going to die anyway, so we might as well be real and have integrity standing before impending death.
And death is ours. Our death is born along with our birth. It is a quality of our own being, and it is the one thing that no one can take from us.
Authentic being means to choose for oneself in the face of the possible impossibility of the end of our own existence. Our natural state is to be anxious because we are oppressed by being in the world. Death as an ungraspable possibility reinforces the fit between itself and the essential objectless-ness of anxiety.
No object-oriented state of mind could correspond to an existential phenomenon that utterly resists objective actualization within our worldly existence. To state it the other way around, apprehending our worldliness as essentially uncanny, as a mood of being away from home, is to apprehend the mortality of our existence. Authenticity in this context means to choose for ourselves in the face of impending death, knowing its inevitability and making our life our own.
Death and anxiety are similarly non-objective. In other words, they don’t have a victim, they don’t have an object. Therefore, they are similar in quality. That’s why both death and anxiety give us a handle on our being. They make it easier for us to measure whether we’re being authentic.
The feeling of uncanniness, of being not at home in the world, is similar to objectless anxiety in the face of impending death. That’s why skepticism and anxiety are actually useful for us. The internal relation between ourselves and nothingness binds our analysis of death together with the analysis of guilt, conscience and temporality in the succeeding parts of this series.
Death is essentially implicit in the ontological structure of care, as well as in the anxious mood that reveals that structure. But it lies beyond direct phenomenological representation. It follows that to acknowledge death philosophically is to question our sense that the ontological structure of care gives us a grasp of our being as a whole, as well as whether such a grasp is even possible.
Guilt and conscience will be covered in the next series, Call of the Friend.
One of the attributes of the attitude of care for the world is being ahead of ourselves, looking into the future, anticipating the arrival of impending death. Care without a sense of impending death would only be care about the other, and that’s very limiting.
The question is, does death mean that we can never grasp our being as a whole because by the time our life is complete, we’re no longer here to grasp its meaning?
We can attain a proper phenomenological grasp of death only by conceding the impossibility of ever doing so. We cannot understand our being without understanding that it is internally related to something beyond phenomenological representation.
We thereby invoke a broader context for the whole of our existential analysis the requirement to relate every element of it to death, which is neither a phenomenon nor which, phenomenologically speaking, can appear as a phenomenon or as the object of a possible discursive act. For nothingness is neither representable nor unrepresentable. Hence it can be represented only as transcendental beyond the horizon of the representable, its self concealing and self disrupting condition.
So here is a paradox. Death is the completion of our life, and to understand our life, we have to see it as a complete unit. Yet death takes us away, so we can never really see the completion of our life. Therefore, death is beyond phenomenological representation. It’s something transcendental to all symbology.
After all, what can be said or represented about nonexistence, about emptiness, about nothingness? We can’t even say that death or nonexistence exists, because it’s not a being, it’s the absence of a being.
This is a very deep problem which is dealt with fully only in the teaching of the Buddha. As far as philosophy is concerned, death is a self-concealing and self-disrupting condition.
It’s a limitation, not a limit. In other words, there’s no reason why we can’t continue to be something beyond death; but whatever it is, it’s not what we are now.
Now, since this horizon is Emptiness, the Void, the Nothing, then to invoke it as a broader context for the analysis of our being, in one sense adds nothing whatever to that analysis, for it provides no specific analytical ingredient. In addition to the ontological structure of care, nothing in the analysis of death implies that our characterization of care is incomplete.
In another sense, however, introducing this relation to the Nothing as internal to our being means introducing the thought that every element in the articulation of care is related to the Nothing and so must be reconsidered in its uncanny light.
Thus, introducing this unthematizable theme of Nothingness alters nothing and everything in our existential analysis.
Here’s the major clue: nonexistence is not a thing, it’s a context. It’s a space in which we hold our life. Death adds meaning, not substance, to our being, because even though it’s a Nothing, it gives our being more meaning in the presence of its possible absence. Therefore, holding our existence in the context of nonexistence is authentic. And that’s why awareness of death leads to authentic being.
If the Nothing really is the self-concealing and self-disrupting condition of our comprehending and questioning relation to being, then phenomenological analysis can only allow it to appear as it is, by allowing the Nothing first to conceal itself; snd then to disrupt its concealment in the phenomenological analysis itself, by appearing within the analysis as that upon discovering which the whole analysis is turned inside out.
Only in this way could an existential analytic of our being achieve the completeness that its condition allows and its object discloses. By presenting itself as essentially incomplete, beyond completion, as capable of being completed only by that which lies beyond it.
Thus, our being is revealed as essentially enigmatic and paradoxical. We cannot conceive of ourselves as nonexistent. Our nonbeing is literally inconceivable. Nonexistence conceals and disrupts both itself and ourselves. In other words, nonexistence is a self-disruptive condition, such as death, such as nonbeing.
Nonexistence as a context changes the whole meaning of care, which is the basis of our being in the world. Our being reveals its true meaning only in the context of nonbeing, and that is the real meaning of the Buddha’s teaching of Emptiness. And we’ll cover that completely in a future series.
But right now, you need to understand that being requires non-being or nonexistence to get its complete meaning. Our analysis of death thus shows that the earlier analysis of being in the world, while lacking nothing, is essentially incomplete and beyond completion. This rejects the idea that essentially finite human understanding is always capable of further and deeper spirals of articulation. Rather, it suggests that there is something essentially beyond representation in the Being whose Being is structured by care.
Hence something about us is beyond the grasp of any conceivable supplementation or deepening of phenomenological analysis.
The ontological characterization of care lacks nothing to describe our being in the world, but it is still incomplete because it has not included the concept of emptiness or nothingness.
No logical analysis can fully express the paradoxical nature of being. Being that includes non-being in its nature is essentially enigmatic. So the Buddha’s characterization of being as being both being and non-being, as well as the existential characteristic of it being both life and death, is essentially enigmatic and paradoxical.
This nonexistence sets a limit to phenomenological analysis. But even though it doesn’t really fit, it has to be included to have the complete picture. The function of this analysis of death is thus to disrupt the apparent completeness of the concept of care, thereby allowing our ontological analysis to represent the self-concealing and self-disrupting condition of our being, and of its relation to Being itself.
The peculiar way in which this analysis of death alters nothing, and yet everything in our analysis successfully represents our essentially enigmatic relation to the nothing that is death.
Look up disrupting. It’s a very interesting term. Check out the word roots and what they mean, what they imply.
Now, nonexistence is self-concealing because it doesn’t exist. You can’t perceive it directly, only by the absence of something. Nonexistence is self-disrupting because it shows up functionally as a limitation of our phenomenological analysis. Therefore, it is self-revealing.
Therefore, our ontological analysis represents non-representational nonexistence as the possibility of the absence of being, the possible impossibility of death. Analysis of death reveals that even nonexistence can show up in our space. We can be conscious of it, and that is the essence of Enlightenment.
Video Link: YouTube
Our analysis of death is part of our search for a complete ontological description of being in the world. Mortality often seems to be an insuperable obstacle to grasping the ontological structure of human existence as a single, unified whole. But our analysis demonstrates that understanding our mortality is actually a precondition for any individual to attain existential integrity.
Our existence can become genuinely individual and whole only by seeing death ontologically as an ever-present impossible possibility that makes the possible impossibility of our existence inevitable.
Our whole discussion so far has been leading up to this topic because choice, as we have discussed, is the central point in integrity, in individuality, in exercising our free will and becoming an authentic human being in the full sense of the term.
In general, care for the world and the things in the world is an inadequate basis for choice. It always leaves us at the effect of external factors and in that way we can never attain integrity or authenticity.
Our discussion of death shows that the awareness of impending death provides a basis for integrity because it gives us a qualitative standard for identifying those possibilities that are uniquely our own.
It also shows that choosing for the world is completely inauthentic because the world as a whole never shows up in our clearing, only the objects and persons in the world. And if we do choose for the world, it robs us of our self-determination, energy, attention and authenticity because we can never be completely ourselves.
Integrity, the unity and wholeness of essentially finite enigmatic beings in their endeavors, has both a theoretical and an existential significance. Integrity is not just a fundamental quality of good phenomenological analysis, but the keynote of an authentic relation to both death and life.
Integrity is required for authentic being. Without being a whole person, without being a human being in the full sense of the term, with all the functions and activities and qualities of a human being, then we don’t have integrity. And so how can we be authentic? Integrity is the subject of one of our advanced courses (Being Integrity) where we go into the definition of integrity, and how to maintain one’s integrity, in great detail.
And we don’t use the typical normative virtue model of integrity based on right and wrong, good and bad, in various domains; we use a positive model of integrity, and we will discuss that in part seven, in the conclusions.
And as I said, we go into that model in great detail in our advanced courses. We define integrity not as a moral quality or virtue, but as the state or condition of being whole, complete, unbroken, unimpaired, sound, in perfect condition. When our human beingness is in perfect condition, complete and whole, unbroken, unimpaired and sound, we have integrity.
But for that, first we have to recover our authentic being. We have to be the unique individual that we are without compromising with the world.
Our emphasis on integrity or wholeness may appear arbitrary, but it is not. Surely acknowledging one’s own mortality includes accepting death as a present threat to our existence. It highlights that what is at stake is not just the content of any given moment, but the entire course of that life taken as a whole.
If the quality of our entire life is at stake in our everyday existential choices, how can we choose to make our life into a single, integral whole? Should seeing our individual life choices in the context of our entire life demand that we should aim for narrative unity and continuity? Would it not be equally authentic to include as many different activities, achievements and modes of life as possible before death intervenes?
It’s not just the present moment or the choices or possibilities that are before us now that matters. Our life as a whole matters. To have completion and integrity to have authentic being. The quality of our whole life is at stake in each of our choices. Each of our choices has to contribute to our life as a whole and be seen in the context of our life as a whole.
And of course, that means in the presence of impending death, our phenomenological analysis reveals that our human life and activities comprise an unbreakable unity. We are the same person that is born from the womb in the beginning of our life, and we are the same person who dies at the end of our life.
So we need a basis for choice that gives us access to the already-existent unity and completeness of our existence. And the question is, if we simply choose based on our personal preferences, desires, habits or inclinations, then should we aim for a consistent set of choices? Or should we choose as many different varieties of experiences as we can to try to have a complete experience of human beingness?
We distinguish our ontological account of authenticity from traditional philosophy. Our idiosyncratic use of ethical religious concepts like integrity, guilt and conscience might seem to align our ideas with normative concepts of morality and ethics. In religion and theology, however, we view integrity as a purely positive realm, defined as the state or condition of being whole, complete, unbroken, sound, in perfect condition.
We can be authentic only to the degree that we possess integrity.
We model integrity as a positive value. Integrity as a positive value has the advantage of being measurable. We can measure how much integrity or what percentage of integrity a person has by how well they honor their word. And we go into this in great detail in the Being Integrity course.
Philosophy and theology, the traditional view is that integrity is a normative value. And indeed, there are normative values of integrity in the moral or social domain, in the organizational and governmental domain. But then the question arises: whose morality, which ethics, and what country’s legality we should use as the standard for integrity?
Because the concepts of morality, ethics and legality give us the measure of integrity, they should be consistent. But they’re not the only consistent measure of integrity that we can find to answer the question, ‘How much integrity do we possess?’ Is it only answerable when we consider integrity as a positive value? It’s just like saying, ‘How much money do you have?’ It’s measurable; it’s quantifiable.
The traditional view is that human beings continuously confront the question of choosing how we should live. So we must identify some standard or set of values to guide our choices. Moreover, if that standard is used to inform all our choices, it adds significance to our whole life. If each choice is made by reference to the same standard, the life that grows from that series of choices will manifest an underlying unity.
The question of ‘What gives meaning to one’s life as a whole?’ makes the same conjunction between authenticity and wholeness that we propose in our analysis. At this point, traditional philosophy goes on to suggest a religious answer to the question of life’s meaning. But is that really necessary? Or would it be an arbitrary superimposition of values?
So again, if we use an external standard to determine the quality of our choices, whether it comes from theology, philosophy or law, which theology or what religion or whose culture are we using as the standard? And these questions cannot be resolved because they are a matter of individual conditioning, cultural embeddedness and taste.
When we look at it from an ontological point of view, any system of choice based on an external standard means caring about the other more than about ourselves. And when we do that, we compromise our integrity. We lose our authenticity and we also lose an objective, measurable, concrete, positive standard against which we can measure our integrity.
The values based on external standards reduce our integrity because we become fragmented. We become split between our interests and the interests of the world. And the interests of the world are manifold, mutually contradictory and conflicting.
This reduces our integrity, and reduced integrity reduces freedom, energy, intelligence and ability. Our productivity, our creativity, our energy and our attention all are reduced by fragmentation. And we become much less productive than we are when we are whole.
How do we choose? Suppose that we begin by aiming at a specific goal or achievement to give our life meaning: the pursuit of power or wealth, the development of a talent or skill. Such goals have significance only because we desire them. In this view, our individual wants and inclinations are the source of the meaning of our life.
But such dispositions can alter our tastes, and desires may change. This means that no desire or disposition can add meaning or value to our lives as a whole. Our desires may change or disappear, but the question of how to live our life remains for as long as we are alive.
Staking our life upon temporary changing desires deprives it of meaning. This view actually shows that the foundation of my life is not whatever desires I happen to have, but my capacity to choose among them.
According to traditional philosophy we can avoid self-deception only by explicitly grounding our lives on our capacity to choose, transforming the conditional array of our desires into unconditional values. For example, we might moderate our sexual impulses by choosing an unconditional commitment to marriage, or commit to a certain vocation on the basis of a talent.
We thereby choose not to permit changes in contingent factors to alter the shape of our lives. This constancy maintains the unity and integrity of our lives regardless of fluctuations in the intensity of our desires, thereby creating a self for ourselves from ourselves.
So then traditional philosophy goes a step further and says “Well, if choice is what gives meaning to our life, then we should make a choice to commit to something greater than ourselves.”
That way the meaning of our life will become stable because now it’s not depending on our changing whims and tastes, but there’s some external measurable standard: how well did we maintain our commitment to something greater? Like a relationship, a group, a cause, a religion, a philosophy and so on?
Well, that is a better basis for choice than our individual tastes, but it’s still external. That means it will still fragment us and diminish our integrity, because a created self, any kind of a self that we make for ourselves out of choices based on external factors will always be synthetic, and therefore inauthentic.
This version of the traditional understanding of the ethical life implies a second reason for connecting authenticity and wholeness. If authenticity amounts to establishing and maintaining genuine selfhood, the fluctuations of individual desires and dispositions cannot form an adequate basis for it. The resulting multiplicity of unrelated existential fragments would not cohere into a hole that we could claim as our own.
But can holding unconditionally to a choice be an adequate source of life’s meaning? The capacity to choose is certainly an important part of a person’s life, but no part can give adequate meaning to the whole of which it is a part.
What justifies the capacity to choose as the basis of the meaning of our life? What gives choice its meaning? So traditional morality, commitment—let’s say to a country, a political stance or school, a religion, a philosophy or some kind of cause that’s greater than oneself is also good. But because again, choice is simply a part of who we are, the part cannot give adequate meaning to the whole.
Another point is that our choice can be arbitrary. The same person in a different circumstances might make a completely different choice, depending on the possibilities that are available in the external situation.
So if choice is ultimately more or less arbitrary, what gives choice its meaning? And how can something that has no intrinsic meaning of its own give meaning to our entire existence? The question of the meaning of our whole life is not answerable in terms of any part of that life.
Our life as a whole can acquire meaning only by relating it to something beyond it. Only such a transcendental standard could give a genuinely unconditional answer to the question of the meaning of one’s life.
Only by relating ourselves to such an absolute, relativizing the importance
of the finite, can we properly answer the question existence poses. Such an absolute standard is, for traditional philosophy, just another name for God. We can relate properly to each moment of our existence only by relating our lives as a whole to God and submitting to the moral standards of religious life.
Now, it’s true that our life as a whole must derive meaning from something beyond it. But what is there that is greater than our life that also has the same quality as our existence and will not force us to reduce our integrity?
Well, traditional philosophy suggests that God is this transcendental source of meaning; that God, by creating the Scriptures, gives a certain standard of moral activity, right and wrong. And then we have to follow that standard. And when we do, our life is given its ultimate meaning by this external authority. So this is traditional theological standard.
But the translation of that in ontological terms is that you must submit to an external standard of morality based on ecclesiastical authority. It’s still not experiential, it’s still not ontological, it’s still not phenomenological. It’s still not based on our experience. And although it’s something beyond us that has a similar quality to our being, it still translates down to an external standard.
Our phenomenological analysis of death gains significance against this background. We accept the conjunction between authenticity and wholeness. But we show that this conjunction can be properly forged by relating appropriately to one’s mortality.
Thus, authenticity and integrity are obtainable without resorting to theology, to an absolute transcendental conception beyond our as lived experience. By understanding death as our own most possibility and anticipating it in every existential choice we make, human beings can live authentic and integral lives without having to relate those lives to a transcendent deity or an arbitrary system of morality.
So we solve this problem in our analysis of our relation with death because we can relate our whole life to something that is beyond it, giving an adequate context for the meaning of the whole of our life, but that also shows up within it.
And the only thing like that that we know so far, is death. The authentic relation to death provides an absolute transcendental standard with which every choice in our life can be related.
In other words, death has the same quality as the authentic possibilities that are completely our own. Death is the own-most possibility. It’s a non-relational standard. It’s absolutely inevitable.
And just like everyone has their own nature, their own taste and their own style of doing things or they should, death gives us an absolute standard with which to compare our choices and our possibilities to determine which ones are uniquely our own.
So by relating our life as a whole to our death, this solves the problems of integrity and authenticity caused by requiring an external standard for choice, because although death shows up within our life as an authentic possibility, it’s also something that is beyond our existence.
Certainly the question of life’s meaning is an inescapable part of human life. It can be properly understood only by acknowledging the contingency and finitude of our life. But acknowledging our finitude does not require comparison with an infinite, unconditioned realm or entity.
Such a comparison implies that conditioned human life is a limitation rather than a limit, a set of constraints that deprive us of participation in a better mode of life rather than a set of conditions essential to determine the recognizably human form of any human life.
The problem with comparing our choices to some transcendental infinite standard that’s viewed as outside of the world or outside of our existence, is that it implies a limitation rather than a limit to our existence. It implies that we can never attain anything beyond our present finite being in the world.
If you think about it, if God is so much higher and so much greater than our human existence, then how can we ever rise to that standard? It seems like an impossible thing. And this is why religious people remain stuck in inauthentic being.
For one thing, they’re taking a standard that’s outside of their own selves as a requirement for their choices. And for another thing, they’re taking the perfection of God as an unattainable standard because it’s outside of the world in which we live. Our being is in the world, and as long as we’re in the world, we’re never going to be perfect.
But we can approach perfection by attaining integrity within ourselves. Without this integrity, religion and morality will always degenerate into ordinary being in the world. And we see this in so many cases where so called religious authorities, priests and gurus and so on start to act just like businessmen or politicians or ordinary people with ordinary desires and motives, and they lose whatever purity or perfection they have, because deep down they believe that they can never attain the standard.
Existential wholeness requires only an acknowledgment of human mortality. And only those forms of traditional theology that understand conditions as limits rather than limitations are compatible with a proper ontological understanding of human existence.
A proper grasp of conditioned human existence does require relating it to something beyond its scope, but it does not require that we relate it to some essentially unconditioned thing or being. The relevant context is not that of a transcendent deity, but nonexistence or nothingness.
Now, this doesn’t mean that we advocate atheism or agnosticism. We don’t actually we don’t accept nihilism either, or monistic and impersonal forms of religion. But we do accept the forms of theology and spiritual life that do not conflict with the individual’s freedom of choice, and that provide an objective, measurable standard of integrity that an individual can live up to in their practical life, without requiring them to surrender to some external standard.
In other words, we are creating an experiential platform for theism. That means direct personal experience of the deity. And this experience can be had by anyone who is willing to go through the process of collecting their scattered parts of themselves from the world into an authentic, integral whole, making choices based on their unique individuality and comparing them in the light of their mortality to their limitations, their finitude, the fact that they’re going to die.
And this opens up the possibility of a direct personal experience of God. And that is where we’re going with this. That is what we want to help people attain.
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The traditional model is based on a transcendent domain of the deity. The experiential domain is based on scriptures, ecclesiastical hierarchy, authority, morality, ethics and legality. In the ontological model, the transcendent domain is nothingness and death. And the experiential domain is choice, possibility, integrity and authenticity.
We have presented a rationale for choice and values that retains the authenticity and integrity of an individual’s life. The advantage of this model is that it gives unity to a life as a whole without requiring submission to a more or less arbitrary external authority.
To achieve this wholeness, we still require to relate our life to something transcendent beyond or outside itself. But in this case it is related to something that is one’s very own, that is, to death.
The ontological model presented herein is firmly rooted in philosophical rigor, yet fully compatible with postmodern sensibilities. However, it would be premature to conclude that we advocate nihilism or atheism. The purpose of the spiritual agnosticism of being in the world is to create an experiential ontological platform free from theological complexities.
Our phenomenological approach provides a new model for theism grounded in direct personal experience of the Supreme. Instead of authority, the succeeding series, Call of the Friend will develop this model in detail.
We have seen through a methodical phenomenological ontological analysis of our default being in the world, that the traditional approach to choice and values involves the superimposition of external authority upon our existential choice. While this approach may be convenient for practical purposes, it subjects human beings to objectification.
The current form of corporate organization in society, historically derived from ecclesiastical hierarchy, tends to treat persons as objects, limiting their being and choices. Hierarchy has metastasized throughout society in the form of corporate organizations. It compromises individual choice as never before.
But today’s technology obviates the need for rigid hierarchies in every conceivable application. Ad-hoc flat networks based on shared interests are now within everyone’s experience and reach.
The real issue here is not social but personal. Although we are all human beings, ontology, the science of beingness is almost unknown to people in general. Instead, the idle talk of the world concentrates on having, doing, feeling, thinking or at best, knowing.
These inferior parts of our being are often conflated with or substituted for actual being. For example, the answer to the question “What do you want to be when you grow up?” is most often expressed in terms of having or doing, instead of actual being.
The value of the various parts of our beingness to our whole being is shown in the figure. Knowing, thinking, feeling, doing and having are certainly parts or functions of our being, but they are clearly not our whole individuality. The part is never equal in value or function to the whole.
Thus, nothing can substitute for developing the integrity of our being by the phenomenological process discussed herein. The personal satisfaction and increased performance experienced by developing integrity as wholeness of being can only be provided by authentic being in its completeness.
The value of this process and the resulting state of being integrity can be fully appreciated only by experience. However, in general, the ontological viewpoint values, internal states above externalities of any kind.
One may certainly question the validity and practicality of a philosophy that seems to allow the individual completely free choice in every respect. There is no question that completely unfettered freedom of choice can be a two-edged sword. There is always a possibility that these powerful conceptual tools and processes could be misused for nefarious purposes.
But we are hardly libertarians or anarchists. Being in the World is only the first step of a long, complex journey from ordinary, everyday, unauthentic being to complete Self-realization of our eternal individuality and identity.
In Call of the Friend, we continue our exploration of the ontological phenomenological process, addressing concerns such as the knowledge of right and wrong, guilt, conscience, and how we can actualize this process to attain integrity and authentic being.