How Do We Understand our Existence?

Question

I apologize if I tag this post incorrectly as this is my very first post. I’m rather new to philosophical topics and I find myself constrained in a state of disassociation. How do I know I’m here?

I find that I am always viewing my life from a sort of “3rd person” perspective. I am curious as to how we know we are here, and not just some sort of unknown form that is just told to think this way. For some reason I find myself wondering if I’m actually myself.

It is hard to properly phrase this, however I’m hoping at least one person has struggled with something similar. I seem to be caught up in an almost ‘existential depression’.

Answer 1

As I just commented here, the world outside experience is a complete mystery. Given possible eternity there is a lot of scope for whatever is going on to be more complex and magical than mundane assumption. Carl Jung's synchronicity is a notable example. Keep your inner shrink on hand. As Buddha said: "In the seen there will just the seen, in the heard just the heard". How you operate does not depend on the necessity of knowledge of the underlying reality.

On the issue of feeling 3rd person, Heidegger observes that the 'I' we conject is not actually the self, (it is a construct). From Being & Time H. 11-116

In this context of an existential analytic of factical Dasein, the question arises whether giving the "I" in the way we have mentioned discloses Dasein in its everydayness, if it discloses Dasein at all. Is it then obvious a priori that access to Dasein must be gained only by mere reflective awareness of the "I" of actions? What if this kind of 'giving-itself' on the part of Dasein should lead our existential analytic astray and do so, indeed, in a manner grounded in the Being of Dasein itself? Perhaps when Dasein addresses itself in the way which is closest to itself, it always says "I am this entity", and in the long run says this loudest when it is 'not' this entity. Dasein is in each case mine, and this is its constitution; but what if this should be the very reason why, proximally and for the most part, Dasein is not itself? What if the aforementioned approach, starting with the givenness of the "I" to Dasein itself, and with a rather patent self­ interpretation of Dasein, should lead the existential analytic, as it were, into a pitfall?

Lose yourself in a jigsaw puzzle.

Answer 2

Solipsism, the uncertainty anyone else exists, is a classic problem in philosophy. See: What are the best Arguments against solipsism?

It sounds like you almost have the inverse problem, a distancing or seperating from your own enacted process of being. That might be related to conceptualising and verbalising everything, and things like mindfulness or Stoic meditations can help us resituate ourselves within our experiences, and shed distracting mental chatter like worrying what others think when that isn't truly relevant. In an age when people can share every activity on social media, there's the risk of putting yourself always in the place of audience, rather than participant, of creating content - never just being content... It is important not just to be a mind, but also to inhabit your body. Athletes have discovered the power of exiting verbal thought to allow the body to work best, which has been called the 'flow state', and that has surprisingly been found to have a lot in common with some types of meditation. Words are great, but they are tools and like all tools they can be used more skillfully if we know how to put them down - otherwise as they say, 'To a hammer everything looks like a nail'.

Existentialist and Absurdist philosophy focuses on how to grapple with our personal experiences of struggling to find meaning, of not feeling 'slotted in' to some big picture we accept (what you might call a metanarrative). I strongly recommend Existentialism Is a Humanism as a great short accessible text for someone with no experience in philosophy, grappling with the kind of thoughts you are. It's available free online if you look around.

Who you are isn't an idea, a thought. It is being, it is what you do, how you are in the world; which thinking is just a part of. You don't just stumble on to 'finding yourself', you have to make active choices. Philosophy helps us to analyse what it means to live a meaningful and worthwhile life, and so to make firm confident choices how to live. That means doing the work though, reading, articulating own ideas, and developing them through challenge. I think of it as more like growing a plant than making a building, you are collaborating with who you have been and what happened already, you can influence the development, try and listen like a gardener to what is needed next to cultivate yourself, but don't waste time wishing for a different plant.

"we must cultivate our garden.” ― Voltaire