Esse Maxim: Deliberate Existence

Esse Maxim: Deliberate Existence

Samuel Bird

1. Introduction

A pure white light beamed in through the front door of my family's humble home as my two-year-old mind came alive and locked in my first memory. The past seemed to fade into this moment, and yet, existence came too suddenly to understand. This massive and daunting fact hood of being all at once, filled me with wonder at the gift of existence and a deep horror for all it entailed. It seemed so peculiar how it operated. There I was, thinking, and here was the world around me existing. Between each blink, it remained the same, but also no matter how the light came through the window, warming my small face, I was still existing too. These eyes that I saw out of, these ears I hear from, this mind thinking, what were they? I wondered if they would have merited such that they would deserve the violence I had seen my parents inflict or not. More than that, I didn’t know what I was let alone if I had any value. No answers seemed to be clear from the facts or what I saw. What then was this world around me? Did it have merit? Was it out to get me, or a hopeful possibility? Furthermore than its merit, what was it? I began to use my mind to shift how I wanted to see things and found myself succeeding. If I felt scared, could the world prove me right? If I found the world beautiful, could I back it up? If I wanted to feel a sense of peace, could I believe that? With each flowing of my young emotions and thoughts, the world seemed to shape itself around how I saw it. This world was still a mystery and I was looking at it as a walking enigma, but there seemed to be something there, something to how I chose to see it. My tiny young mind moved itself from a desire to find how I should see the world and instead began to wonder at all the possibilities of how I could create. It was clear my existence was a fact and that this world was objective, but between this world outside of me, and the one within, I had room that seemed to excel into the exponents of the infinite on how I framed it all. My focus came back to the light streaming in onto my face as I was moved from this. It was clear that whatever this existence was, it was to choose to create and change this perception. This choice later had a name: Esse Maxim.

I have since lived a life that was full and rich. The publication of the story of which and its relationship to Esse Maxim, is my lifelong labor. This life became centered on the fact that I existed, the world around me, and the creation of a relationship between these worlds. These could all be brought to three questions: Who am I? What is there? What do I do about it? I found this choice to see the world as the answer to each of these. I built this idea in my experience, then my heart, then my mind, then into concepts, and finally, I found my love of philosophy and sought after a mind that spoke to this. I found many wonderful ideas that helped put this idea into language, but it became clear that if this idea was going to be brought to the forefront of human experience, I would need to ascend from my current level of ability and bring it out. It has since been the focus of all my passionate ramblings, ecstatic speeches, and the divine contents of late-night thinking episodes. This idea was brought into language via philosophy, but the concept predates the academic and comes from my active engagement with my existence. These experiences came from being a skinny little farm boy, a lonely and broken little child, a wild cowboy, a homeless person, a criminal, a disciple of God, a rebel against arbitrariness, and most importantly to me, my great love of all conscious beings. I have been asked by people confused why I haven’t adopted the sociological narratives for my life and kind. The simple answer is, I didn’t have to and I could choose otherwise. I didn’t have to stay a thief, an abused child, or a jaded citizen. My identity was bound up with this great creative possibility, and I found great art in what I chose to make with it.

2. Skepticism 

The day after I made my biggest mistake, I felt it was a dream and began to go about my day. Where I left my boots, how tired I felt, and a sinking feeling in my stomach alluded to it happening in reality until I was scorched with the dawning of the fact that it had happened. Over and over again, I will achieve my greatest desire of finding meaningful love or making a large difference in others' lives only to then wake up. Despite my surety on whether something existed outside of me, it failed to be so. This gets at the questionable part of knowledge. As it is justified true belief, the true part could be the case because the world outside of us has a structure such to allow for properties and facts. Belief works out because we can possess any thought we like. The issue comes from the relationship between self and world in the justification. Take any thought you hold dear and that seems to be true. Really pull it into your mind's eye so you can see its full scope. Now, ask yourself if there is an argument for it being false, or the exact opposite being true. Before you dismiss it as the pinings of fools, really ask what that argument is. Sit with it until you come to the appropriate conclusion that there is some modality of possibility that it could be true. This makes the fact that you initially thought was justified to be a true, contingent fact. This is a fact that could be otherwise. You may console yourself by saying that if you can assume a certain model or larger idea, then you can have this idea. That is fine, but this same exercise would then be able to attack the concept that holds up your concept. We could keep going until the very atoms of reason and thought fall apart in our hands. This leaves one in the fresh and unknowable horror of a doubt without end. Imagine yourself swimming in an ocean of these contingent facts. There is no absolute rope or definite boat to grasp, there are only waves of possibilities that crash over your head as you fall below them. As you fall below the waves, you find there is no bottom to feel to launch yourself from, no properly basic fact you can work with. The waves come over you with greater frequency and length until you wonder if you could ever keep your head above water, or if there was ever a reason to do so. Esse Maxim operates in this sea of skepticism. It is not that rope or boat, but it is the medium of teaching one how to tread water, and perhaps even propel oneself forward.

3. Two great facts

While there is nothing else to save you, a little bit of awareness will help you realize that there are two clearly demarcated entities at play, yourself, and the water. That is all you have to work with, but they is something to handle it. From the great mind of Descartes, we get a case for our own minimally solipsistic self. In addition, I posit if there is something to give us impressions, even if it is a simulation or an evil demon, there is something other than this. We now have the two great facts of the self and nonself or the inner and outer worlds. Both rival each other in complexity and mystery, but from the fact of their being, something to have properties and qualities, we can be sure they exist. 

3.1 Inner world

What then is this inner world and the core of self that lives within it? When I speak of the inner world, I do not mean the brain, but the mind, not the physical, but the conceptual. It is to us another great mystery that via Esse Maxim and a narrative with it across time, we can begin to get a sense of. We can however, make substantive delineations of what comprises it. If you were to meditate in such a way you could be aware of your thoughts, you would find them sailing past like fluff from a cottonwood floating in the breeze. You can sit and witness them as something other than you. As you watch them pass, they can come and go. There is nothing forcing you to engage with them, and as they fade from view, you are no less yourself. In this way, they are facts that make up the inner world, but they are not you in the purest sense. Then what are you? There is no mirror in the mind to look at this thing, that looks at all. What I can say about this entity is that it is a perceiver, judger, and director. I have named this thing which I am and you are too, if you are real, the “singularity of consciousness.” It witnesses the inner world and the outer world through the inner. It then evaluates what is transpiring and makes a call for its desirability. Finally, it can act on that evaluation. The inner mind has input on what to do, but this unit has the final say. Much of what is seen as morality is happening here. While there are enough philosophers who make ethical systems, the question of why we fail to do what we value is another question. Good is a messy word, but I can say a good character is one that acts in accordance to a specific set of values with the greatest precision. What are those values? That is a question for Esse Maxim.

3.2 Outer world

I can only say so much about the outer world as everything I know from it is from a series of lenses in my inner world. There have been many studies into biases such that people see the world incorrectly, but I think there is a little hubris to assume we do. While we have reason to doubt our senses, we can see an inductive case for some of the more basic facets of reality being the case. Spatial and time properties seem to be pretty obvious, but natural sciences battle their most simple elements. Causation seems to be a useful fact, but on further examination, it is nothing more than an assumption with utility. All the larger scale questions that seem to be obligatorily actionable or even essential crises to avoid, become something you can’t possibly be sure of, let alone know what or how to respond to them. One of the most fascinating parts about the world outside of our minds is that this is where all the things like us reside. Assuming they are all real, these other humans do all the same processes we do. They sense out of eyes, have thoughts go by, and experience the necessary fact of suffering from the friction between a finite experience and an infinite imagination. I hope this seems to follow and is not just a shameless insertion of something that is a part of me, but I think this is where love stands. From an effortful bridge between our inner subjective worlds via this objective outer one, I seek to know other minds. With this deep knowledge comes concern, ineffable knowledge often in the form of emotion, and a sense of evaluation toward your needs. 

4. Why we need Esse Maxim

We now have these two great facts as far as you are concerned. What is wrong with their relationship naturally? Even if it is epistemologically messy, why should one want to expend energy to make their relationship more deliberate? Where did this natural relationship first come from? From when we are being raised, we see our world around us as impressionable beings. Our smaller family units, communities, and even society at large have powerful factors to form a framed lens of the world. I am sure it would not take you very long to think of a family, a community, or even a way that humanity warps thinking in what, at least you would call, a bad way. While I think this does happen, I don’t think it should be left alone. Perhaps we rely on trusty biology to guide us. However, doing this we will find some hedonism or arbitrariness that leads to things we might not like. What then can we use to make what we want? While we could still be off and pick the wrong beliefs, values, and facts, we can at least control that we address the world deliberately. I am constantly wrong in what I know and very possibly wrong in the values that guides me to act on what I know, but as we found in the inner world, I can control how accurately, exactly, and deliberately I act. Esse Maxim is then built on this final metric of a quality character, saying that if we are going to construct our experience, let us do so on purpose. Take a moment to see the scope of this assertion and its merit: If it is all we can assure, then what matters most is to live deliberately.

If we can grant this assertion, the scales of cynicism, pessimism, and nihilism may not completely fall from our eyes, but there may be some tears to work them loose. These tears of gratitude and joy will stem from the need that consciousness has been given power over the two worlds before it. This sense of actionality and agenthood removes existence from a conceptual category of something that transpires, to be a series of actions you makes it perhaps even culminate in something. As we begin to engage with our existence, we can ask these three questions with new vigor: Who am I? What is there? What do I do about it? This leaves three larger categories of questions to ask: The existential, the epistemological, and the ethical. Esse Maxim is a method for attacking all three in one foul swoop to avoid random and arbitrary picking and choosing of adoptable concepts that may not work together. We would need to know what Esse Maxim is to know how it can help with this. 

5. What Esse Maxim is

We seek to grow a tree of thoughts in your mind. These are thoughts about everything else and nothing you think is not on that tree. The tips of the leaves may be facts about society, the sticks the more core experiences you have and the trunk itself your most core values and beliefs. If we were to follow the tree down, there was one initial seed that sprouted into everything here. Esse Maxim is a single phrase, picture, vision, soliloquy, or ineffable sense of a notion. We seek to bring it as obvious, into our mind's eye, but there is no reason to not start digging the hole to plant it in until we are sure. This one idea or seed will then branch out into everything we think. Esse Maxim is then the culmination, or perhaps more appropriately, the deliberate origination of every other thought. It does all these things by filling a few roles.

6. Intermediary

The first role is Esse Maxim as the relationship between self and world. When I was younger, I had a perception of good, and a clear understanding that I was not. I worked the best I could, but everything that happened was in reference to the fact that I was despicable. Every good deed was attempted catch-up for this fact. I spent my whole life working toward this goal and breaking myself in the process. I have since found that a quality person is not necessarily one who has all good qualities, but one who shows up for the battles to get them. The human mind is powerful and has a distinct ability to find what it is looking for. When it fails, it often even claims that the world is lying to it, over letting go of its belief. When I would find I had done well for someone and made their lives better, that fact could never seep past my models for perception. It didn’t fit into this entire system that I assumed related me to my world, and when we receive data that threatens this model, we think it threatens us. I now have a specific and substantive Esse Maxim that has merit unto itself rather than just being a reaction and response to past mistakes. Now, when I am trying to decide what an event meant, whether it was good, or what was even true about it, I now have a different tool to use. Can I really say it is better if I only have a judgment of it after I have each model? How then could I judge it? I at least have something that I built and chose rather than a system that was given to me. When my senses meet the world each day, I now know what that relationship between self and world is, as I chose it. 

7. Assumptions

The second role is our most properly basic assumption. The world is only facts and has no values, however, as value-laden beings, we need values. The fact of whether or not I eat food is just the case and has no preferential nature to the universe. However, I can say I do have a preference. For this reason, I find values that undergird decisions and morality as mind-dependent phenomena. We can make a case for this, and now we have a nice little morality possible for ourselves and everyone to agree on. How would we build it, however? As the world is built of facts, if we follow the facts down, we can quickly find that each fact is only a given from assuming something more properly basic. For example, it would be hard for me to apply a moral system, if I don’t even have enough reason to believe that other people exist. Every belief and fact other than the pure existence of self and world relies on more basic assumptions, and the fact of self and world tells us too little. No matter how we go about it, there will always be an assumption, and in a curious way, there doesn’t seem to be any assumption that is purely the case. Currently, two of the most prominent epistemological models are foundationalism and coherentism. The first says that we have a necessary starting place and build our facts from there, the second says as there are no first facts, we just relate ideas to each other. Esse Maxim is the willing of the initial assumed fact, and each subsequent fact branches out from there. Being the central point, we can at least verify and have a medium to ensure our system is coherent. This need comes from once again, something that we actually can control and therefore this is where we should focus. Consider the following counter-example. “This sentence is exactly false.” As you see, it cannot claim to be false and without being false in doing so. Right away we can see that it is not congruent with itself. On the opposing side, we can build epistemological systems that, while it may have faults, follows necessarily or at least not in opposition to initial assumptions. 

8. Narrativism

Finally, the third role is as the presently actionable method for what I call narrativism. One thing to always ask yourself when you or others speak, is: why am I saying this? I have often found I am saying something to gloat or shame and have seen others are trying to do the same. Esse Maxim as a concept resides in my mind, but why would I want to adopt the painful process of transplanting it from my psyche to yours? I have one specific goal in mind. I want Esse Maxim to give the most possible lives a justified case to look back over their lives on their deathbed and say: This was a life worth having lived. In related addition, I want each person who is currently voyaging through life to say that existence is worth it. Esse Maxim is the tool and narrativism is the process. Other theories of time aside, let’s assume a simple model with a present you and a past and future version. In this present moment, you can consider the past, but not change it. You can plan for the future, but not know it. Now is the moment that you seal up fate with every action you make. As the conscious mind handles the types of time it can’t control, it begins to fear and be shameful. While it is clear that the past and future do not seem to be lies, they have one property that makes them less privileged. You can’t act in them. For this reason, life is lived in moments of now and then made sense of, in memories of then. Narrativism is then the process of actualizing our lives from all its potential. The past is a thing to be revered and the future is something to combat. As we sit in the now, memories are things for gratitude and honor while the future is something we arm ourselves to fight reality. It is the classic idea of planning to fight, attempting to do so, and considering fate a worthy combatant as you love them. Narrativism finds its way into the realm of a metaphilosophy as Esse Maxim is as well. Along the way of life, we are not just trying to find out how to be more exact in our behavior, but trying to figure out what method to be exact to. When we focus on this process over time as one becomes better, we can make sense of failure and still say life is worth living. 

9. Possibilities

This idea would be revolutionary and crucial to existing well, but it is still unclear what it is and what it should be. As Esse Maxim is a simple concept we address the world with, what type of things could be an Esse Maxim. Every idea that is consistent with itself is an option to test as an Esse Maxim. In this way, Esse Maxim is a long-awaited tool to fling into the ineffability of metaphilosophy. Different existential, ethical, and epistemological theories can be a part of your Esse Maxim. It is the rest of the framework around your existence. For example, perhaps you want your Esse Maxim to be tuned such that you have virtue ethics as an ethical system. That is certainly doable. Perhaps you choose egoism for ethics or even pragmatism as an epistemological theory, all possible. You may say that if it can allow for anything, what is the point of it? Esse Maxim is about the structure, integration, and later changing of minds. It is not concerned with exactly what you should do, but how it is done. It is context to power in a world of content. It comes from the necessary facts of the world. Isn’t it unfortunate I haven’t solved subjectivity and we are back to fighting on concepts? This is where some discretion would be helpful. The world we share and its facts are objective between us. The perceptions of how that is, and certainly the more mind-dependent ideas of what the world should be like, only exist in minds. While this leaves room for variance, it can lead to the question of: can minds be similar enough to naturally share certain beliefs and values? Certainly, whatever comprises consciousness could have properties it tends to share, however I don’t think there is anything that every conscious being must necessarily share other than us being conscious. This comes from our incredible capacity to design ourselves and even break away from what is most common in our kind. Esse Maxim is then an attempt to choose a concept to slice through these layers of maybes and could-bes. Now a concept of truth, of morality, of deity, of meaning, of love, can shine through, even if that fact doesn’t exist out of the world, but in our minds where it was created. 

10. Evaluation

Now that we know what would be an Esse Maxim, how could we evaluate one such that we could choose to accept or reject it? This becomes tricky because most tools such as axiologies and value theory come after having it and even some questions of what is true. This leaves little to know what one must choose, but that is exactly the point. There is no way to know if there is a discovered way we must engage with existence, so I posit there is a created means that we can. This universe either has no values, or it hides them and their proof from us. Since it is our only option, I think there is nothing wrong with us willing something to be our “good.” Still, with much effort, I have found the following means to weigh a proposed Esse Maxim: Deathbed viewpoint, must be a positive assertion, can’t cause genocides, cannot cause a rift between self and world, must consider facts of self and world, and must be consistent. To the first point, it must reasonably follow from itself, a life that was worth living with all its pains. It can’t be a negation or a rebellion of something else, but must be something unto itself. It can’t end in the deaths of many innocent people for one reason, I love people and have seen intentionally good systems be used for evil and I would be sad if this one was. I know this one is completely arbitrary so I ask it tongue in cheek, and yet in all seriousness as something we just don’t cross, just because. Terrible philosophy, I know, but I have a soft spot in my heart for my kind. It can’t cause cognitive dissonance by pitting the self and world against each other. This will cause a variance from what we think and see that will certainly not allow for a life worth living. Esse Maxim needs to take in and be congruent with facts from ourselves and the world. A younger version of me sought to be something that this world and my mental functions would not permit. This would eliminate it as an option even if it seemed valuable. Finally, it can’t destroy itself. Esse Maxim is not seeing the world as it is, but seeing how we can’t see past ourselves, an honest look at it through ourselves and as we are. If it can’t even stand alone, it certainly can’t prop us up either. 

11. Action

This is not just a dead idea, but one with intention. What then am I asking you to do? I am asking you to join me in the process of deliberately engaging with your existence. You will find as you do so that all the existing models for thinking and choosing can be manipulated by your desires and hedonistic preferences. Esse Maxim is not a tool to get what you want, but a thing you build to decide what you should. While it has near unlimited freedom, one has to do away with the idea of doing the bare minimum to fulfill a rule. If one were to create an Esse Maxim that allowed them to do whatever felt good or they wanted to do anyway, they would fail at it. It is a feat of attaining values, but not lower abased values. It allows one the process of chasing after those things that matter most. Meaning, believing, beauty, and love are harder things to chase after than lust and gluttony, for example, but they would be something most would say have a higher value. I am not saying these specific things are what one should value, but whatever one truly doesn’t, I am asking you to seek after it with vigor, with passion, with commitment that borders on the obsessive and rageful. I am asking you to actualize the maximal possibilities toward a goal that our humanity affords us. Whatever this life is, it is not long. Live it then in a way that whatever it was all about, it was what you would have it be. 

12. Conclusion

A year after this experience looking at the door window, I was looking out the window above that door onto the street below. I had existed a whole year more than my first memory and with that had a chance to try and fail a few Esse Maxims. There was one that was most pervasive. Along with it, it led to a deep concern and love for others. This deep love had a strength that has since surprised me as fists and fury and spiteful words hurled could never quench its passion. I looked down over that street as people walked by. A child on a bicycle, a mother walking them, a man walking down the sidewalk. As the magenta sunset slipped behind the rocky mountains leaving the blue sky above to darken, a convicting idea came to my mind. To the facts, this was nothing more than a scene of events, but to me and what I chose to see it as, it was much more. I wondered if existing was as hard for those people walking by as it was for me. I wondered if they had something to live for. I wondered if they felt loved. This wonder turned to obligation as I swore to something sacred within myself that I would labor without limit to make sure that fact was known. I have since fine-tuned my specific Esse Maxim and learned much more, but I can say that though I won’t tell you what it is, it leads me to hope that Esse Maxim will bring about the fruition of the fullness of your existence.