Do I Exist?
0:00 [Music] There's something so obscure about what it is for us to be. I could easily ask this question of anything: what it is for that thing to exist, what it is for this thing to exist, and so on. But the moment this question is turned inward, the question collapses.
The first things that appear before me are my memories—instances of times past with my mother and father, with my sister or friends from school. Each of these presents itself as though it were some deep ground on which I can stand, some certainty evident in the fact of the experiences I had. But as I further consider, I find that these things are little more than drops of rain washing over me, covering me in their thin residue without any content unto themselves. No, they are forms of stories I've told myself, show type tokens of yesteryear whose resonance in me sounded so that now, as my mind attempts to discover itself, it has only recourse to those moments of intenseness so great that they forever married—I
1:00 think of my mother's face and my father's clothes, my grandmother's kisses in my sister's nose. I think of one friend's words during a drunken stupor, and another friend's help when we studied together. Moments are all I find. And yet, when I look in me, as I turn the mind's eye inward, I suppose it only ever finds itself in these things.
Hence Descartes' world-famous aphorism: kojito ergosome, 'I think, therefore I am.' Hence also the Scholastics' dictum: nihil and intellectual quad nonprius and senzu—nothing is in the intellect which is not first in the senses. What I once lived and sensed, I now remember and think as a pale reflection of the past. I was in those places in those times, but I feel in me now nothing of the sort which indicated them as they were. As they were, I felt a strange otherness to them. In the sight of my friend was the sight of someone like me, but not me—someone whose difference from me was presented in all its truthfulness,
2:00 all its being other than myself but when i call him to mind yelling in the inner forest of my thoughts i find nothing but myself when i saw him i saw nothing but an image presented to me of him i recall as i saw and yet i feel not as i felt how is it so if i only remember secondhand what was given to me firsthand then is my memory of my encounters truthful to them the 20th century philosopher edmund husserl wrote of memory that it is in a continuous flux because conscious life isn't a constant flux it's not nearly fitted member by member into the chain of those memories each time i remember i remember anew never calling to mind that exactly called before i'm never experiencing even in my memory what i hitherto experienced everything new reacts on the old its forward to moving in tension is fulfilled and determined thereby and this gives the reproduction a definite coloring hence when i look inward i never seem to look at me but at something else for i do not exist as
3:03 I am when I attempt to see me. Rather, I am a thing hiding in the shadows, constantly running away from myself, doing nothing but ferreting and questing, keeping incessantly whirling around, building up and becoming entangled in my own work like silkworms, and suffocating myself therein.
Perhaps the task of self-discovery lies not then in a private withdrawal into our own stoveheated rooms, resolving to the Stoic truth that there is nothing that is completely within our power except our own thoughts. For even these seem to elude my grasp. As Kohalet writes in Ecclesiastes, 'vanity of vanities, all things are vanity' or in the Hebrew, havel hawalim ako vanity—or more precisely, wind, 'all is wind.' Why dare inherit the wind from the toil? Digging deep into my self-same soil, my hands will always be empty.
Hence the existentialist philosopher Martin Heidegger, an unfortunate man in his own life,
4:03 wrote that in so far as I am, I am dazing, a being in this world, and in so far as I am this, I emit sign, a being around others. It was only on the prompting of Socrates that Meno's slave arose to the task of geometry. So too, it seems, only when I stare in the face of another do I see myself. The expression the face introduces into the world does not defy the feebleness of my powers, but my ability for power. The face speaks to me and thereby invites me to a relation incommensurate with a power exercised, be it enjoyment or knowledge.
Perhaps it is only in friendship, then, that I find myself. 'For good men,' says Aristotle, 'consensing consensus feels sweet because they recognize the good itself, and what a good man feels with respect to himself, he also feels with respect to his friend.' The friend is, in fact, an other self. But here I find a dilemma: if I am to be with another and let our light shine on each other in the co-activity of mutual
5:04 self-discovery, how am I to know who the true friend is? I know my days are numbered, and yet I see around me nothing but attempts to hide this fact. In the face of eternity, I'm nothing; yet in the face of others, I seem to be a thing potentially worth pedestal, capable of being plastered with poses on places of ill descent, red light districts, and square timepieces showing fine signs of money, wealth, and artifice. Barely every man at his best state is altogether vanity, and I'm no better. Even in the act of saying, I only whistle wind. 'Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination,' says Wittgenstein.
Perhaps then the whistling is the saying, and in the act of writing there is nothing different from a display of self to others, the making of myself as I'd like to appear: thoughtful. Perhaps the search for myself is never over, for if I cannot step into the same river twice, perhaps I will never look at the same thing again in the same way. Maybe then the judgment
6:05 of all vanity is only provisional, and at some future time I'll find more meaning in my feelings and speak more freely of them as I feel them. 'The whole visible world is only an imperceptible atom in the amplism of nature; no idea approaches it,' says Pascal.
Maybe the task then is to go out into the world and to approach it head-on, to always find something new and to inquire into it as deeply as I can, to keep trying freely to progress in the consciousness of freedom. Maybe I'll make a joke out of myself and I won't always be as I'd like, but I'll take that as a sign of hope. Let men laugh at me with such delightfully happy smiles that as I look at them all gathered around me, I could well believe that they are tipsy with the nectar of the Homeric gods. Whether I exist or not, I don't care. I'm human, and I'll be damn sure not to forget it. 'Freedom and life are earned by those alone who conquer them each day anew,' says good to. Perhaps this is no final answer to my thesis question, but it certainly gets my job done. To exist
7:07 or not is meaningless to choose to be present at all costs to choose to exist here alone my meeting emerges this is mr amazing thank you for [Music] watching you
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