I don’t know if many people think about the essence of thing. I wonder if most people just think of things that have meaning, which is, in essence, a modern subject of existence.
The modern world names an obsession, a type of preoccupation, but as all historical periods label such temporal preoccupations.
In the West at least, but I might argue in all the particular ways of the globe, ours still extends from a Being that is meaning, what we call the subject.
The effort and preoccupation with the meaning of the subject is what we call phenomenology.
It is a sort of strange activity, this modern Being. It so consumes Being itself that we can hardly talk about it without attempting to either prove to others or to clarify other’s talk the meaning we actually mean.
Further, this is so much the case that we cannot conceptualize events of history without pondering the meaning that they meant, as though for all times meaning itself was such a human constant that everyone in all human history and evolution was, in essence, meaning something and creating meaning at that.
It is a kind of preoccupation.
The Subject correlationalism, or, the Essence of Phenomenological Being
It is difficult to hold the truth of a subject in reality when we only are looking to meaning. What happens when this is our mode (indeed, we cannot escape it, which is why it is so difficult) is that Being itself becomes meaningful as a teleology, that is, as an extended purpose which inscribes a person into existence with value.
Because this is the modern mode, it is as Slavoj Zizek has said of capitalism: It is near impossible to imagine something outside of capitalism. But for our case here, it is very difficult to think that we are getting outside of the meaningful subject of modern Being.
What we know as the Western Philosophical tradition has been guided by this epistemological maxim, and so in the 20th century they were coming across and working through the end of that kind of Being.
That kind of Being is the Being that is trying to find itself as a meaningful object in a meaningful universe, but it was only in the mid-20th century that people began to realize and come to terms with that such a Being has no knowable basis. This even extended into the 1990’s with Richard Rorty’s Mirror of Nature, where he concluded that everything philosophical is socially negotiated by humans.
While there are some who are still trying to ground all knowledge in a single epistemological trope to establish Being is a meaningful way, other people have given up on this an have simply defaulted into just removing themselves by making meaning without any requirement for a reasonable ground. Hence, the “post-truth” political bifurcations and the questioning of science as a common basis of truth. This also supports the social media manner of creating social meaning by calling everyone to promote themselves as meaning makers.
In short, the modern Being of meaning is always an argument about Being, a recourse alignment of making meaning as the entirety of Being, to ultimately establish the philosophical object as an object of meaning.
So thorough and redundant this kind of functioning is – so correlational, I am not going into all the stuff here.
Suffice it to say that the modern method of Being is to make ontological arguments. And do the same thing over and over…
The Breakout is the Thing
The “Realism” of this early 21st century is mostly a meaningful rehashing of modern phenomenalism. It is taking meaning and making a meaning that supposes to get outside of the subjective loop by extrapolating and integrating intersectionality of subjects to its natural, meaningful ends. This is why we confidently agree with Zizek but further to note the quality such meaningful activity.
The modern method to develop Being is simply to make meaning and not think much about it. It is enough to simply have a great idea and promote it.
So it is, that it is. It is what it does.
For sure we have to make the best of it, and we do not require people to do any more that they can. Yet, it is not simply making meaning or resorting to the solutions of science. For, they both are correlational, part of the real modern method for Being.
Indeed, this is why mental health becomes so central to the essence of Being:
When we consider that is happening in contrast yet along with the effort of Being meaningful, we find things that contradict the modern method are indeed more substantial, but moreso, better able to explain Being for what it actually is as a universal aspect.
I call this The Object of the Subject.
The Return to the Thing Itself: The essence of Existence
Benedict de Spinoza was an early modern Rationalist philosopher. At the time, Rene Descartes’s philosophy of some 100 year prior, was the seminal thesis, and Spinoza and Leibniz are (arguably) two philosophers which have defined the modern world based on Descartes announcement.. Their ideas form the basis for the way we think to this day about Being, that is, as either meaningful/ spiritual, what was known as rational, or scientific what they called empirical.
While the shift that becomes noticeable is too large a discussion to be contained in this post, suffice it to say that we are able to read these early philosophers as saying something significant outside of the modern mode that is supposed catalyzed if not generated by them.
I say this is specific to mental health because there is no way to get outside of the modern subjective looping method by that method which seeks Being as a meaningfully reduced and socially defined object.
I say that mental health deals less in the reductive discerning of whether the Rational or Empirical methods are better – the Either/ Or method –but more both as the way to truth.
As elsewhere I delve further into the reason why modern science is only giving us a certain type of meaning (and valid as such but not encompassing) I will keep this one succinct.
I leave you with this, which appears at the beginning of Spinoza’s Ethics, what is considered a seminal work:
A true definition of a thing neither involves nor expresses anything beyond the nature of the thing defined.
I say this is significant for mental health.
Is the Modern Religion making a name for itself? Metamodernism