Sole, Singular, and Separate

Sole, Singular, and Separate

Samuel Bird

Responding to a major issue in my time, all of human history, and my existent experience, I originally started this paper talking about loneliness. My partiality often comes from passion and allows me to speak to the heart of things. As this was a concept I was well versed in from the life I have lived, I assumed I would breathe new life into this conversation and have some helpful thoughts to say. The more I wrote, the more I seemed to struggle seeing out of my own experience and time. To focus primarily on my experience and then find objective shared facts of that experience with others would be fine, but I was struggling to even do that. The more I wrote, the more it seemed like the lamentations of a madman, more than it did a foray into the issue at hand. Implicit in the article was a blaming of the institutions and forces that I blamed for this immense source of pain. The more I wrote, the more I felt I was putting fury and rage to paper. When I had finished, I looked it over and found it to weep and wail, but to have no real avenues for providing power and engagement for those that read it. I have no qualms with expressing the horrors of the human experience, but I do so with the intent of helping the reader see their situation to respond to it better. I failed to do this, and I failed to give real substantive tools to help them respond. Someday, I think I will need to address loneliness again. This can only happen after I conquer at least a large enough territory in it, that I can have some authority on the matter. I could speak on forgiveness and gratitude, because I have waged war against reality and came out with something powerful. All I could offer you now on the matter was commiseration. There is however, one factor in loneliness that we can look at today. We can demarcate the self from the world around it to help define what sources we have for everything we experience. Much of how we relate to each other, owe and act on eachother, and handle our experiences will be aided by this distinction. This clarifying line is between the world and ourselves as sole, singular, and seperate. 

One word that I loathe is the word community. This is not because of all of its uses. I love the idea of having a village or tribe of people that care for me and I them. What I do have contempt for, is its contemporary use to bundle people together into baskets, and then consider coincidental shared identity means there are more shared facts. Let's take a few facts about me. My ancestors came from Norway, though I missed out on their tall genes. Due to their sharing of an environment and a social system, we can assume that there are shared properties amongst the Norwegians. However, what I have found is that outside of the properties that put people in a group, they share very little outside of that. The only thing that you certainly have in common with all the people of any group you find yourself in, is that thing that placed you in that group. Outside of that fact, you do not necessarily share any qualities with them and if you do it is coincidental. This phenomenon I just described is not by chance. Internally, I have cognition. I posit it is prelinguistic, but others disagree. Years of shared experiences between the different aspects of myself, a constant internal conversation, and generally shared objectives makes the self an entity that can be surprisingly effective. This comes from the breadth of information that it can comprehend and act on. As society specializes and fewer people see the bigger picture, it changes how well we can respond to it. Additionally, whatever size of community we are referring to, also cannot have the same degree of precision in shared conversation, shared experiences, and objectives. For this reason, the larger the group, the more we see that people talk past each other as they associate different meanings with different words. I look now as attempts to make a global society has removed any given person’s insights, gives no shared experiences, and has an aim so unclear and arbitrary that people can’t commit to it. Smaller entities have had better fortune in this, but they are still composed of the self. 

What I was looking at was the lines that separate self from world. The word that came to mind naturally was “individualism.” I looked into this world and found it most used in political and social philosophy. As much as I dislike either, I thought it was worth a foray into. The question seemed to be whether society was composed of atomic consciousness units that were primary and privileged, or else if the society was an emergent entity that had those properties. Wanting to better understand this idea, I read “Analects'' by Confucious. I found that it was not making any epistemic or metaphysical claims of how the self related to others selves, but rather was giving a framework for how we ought to engage with others. Most of the book seemed to focus on a given individual to express this idea. It was then not saying that we are not seperate entities, but how to relate to them. I want to make it clear that there are also multiple uses for individuals. The original comes from the idea that the self could not be divided. Psychologists and even the tripartite soul do just that. I am instead suggesting this personhood as the basic unit of existence. Seeing the self in this light would still allow for collective thought, though I think it is clear the judgment I would give on the matter. This search was important for me to figure out, because I thought it was a very necessary fact, but then I heard that individualism is a very western idea. I was worried Descartes and I’s a priori work may have been refuted, but it seems that they are making a seperate claim. 

The next seeming contender that I have found seems to come from wholism. As I write this, I don’t have access to any resources on the matter, but from memory it is the idea that all phenomena are only a part of everything. It is truly fascinating and an enjoyable thing to consider. I have found that casual philosophers really like this idea. However, what are you claiming when you do this? You are saying that a thing is a part of everything. What this does not stop or recommend I don’t do is still seeing the world in terms of things. Perhaps Heraclitus was right and every fact was pulled apart in an abyss from a negative fact to make reality. As we people think about dark matter and negative energy, this seems so obvious. All entities are only a part of the whole. The more I think about this, the more I realize it is a play on definitions. Like any decent idea, I can believe it if I assume it assumptions, but then I must ask what prompts me to do so? If I don’t know what the totality of things equals, how can I say that a given thing comprises it in such a way that the whole is privileged? If we treat this more as an article of faith for people to feel they are a part of something larger and for people to have a sense of oneness, this could have merit, but it would be believed for what it does and not what it is. It then can’t certainly disregard my claim of what the human entity is like. 

The last claim that harms my idea of self as seperate is materialism. Dawning up from the modern period until now, this is the idea that all that is, is composed of physical matter. For this reason, it correlates to the death of dualism and the introduction of monism into the worldview. It then pronounced a new view of science and more certainty of how it was done. Now, all that was believed is what could be sensed. This may seem an issue to the self. I am nothing more than the matter and energy that comprise me, as it asserts. How can I even have the self, when like the ship of Thesius, there are no parts left over from the day I was born? This question of identity would work Leibniez into a frenzy, but I think we can let him rest for now. I break the self into the parts of the organism, inner world, and singularity of consciousness. Monistic claims could only affect the first one, and a part of the second. While people took faith that the neurologists would find we are just slimy computers, quantum physicists increasingly wonder about there being a properly basic sort of consciousness to the world. This physical being we are would then just be an instantiation of such. While I am not asserting this is true, its possibility changes the conversation. If our assumptions of a materially sensed world leads us to need entities that are neither material or sensed, it puts the whole system into question in a lengthy reductio ad absurdum that has greatly impacted the human experience. For this reason, the self comes out alive from its scrap with materialism. 

Esse Maxim of a framework is a constructed system from basic facts, situated between the two most solid ones. Waves of skepticism can crash against it, but they hold strong. These are the great facts of self and world. From the fact of my experience, there is a noun to have that experience, and another noun that can bring the verb that is experience. I am the thing existing and the world is the location, plane, and impression that allows this. No matter how I metaphysically relate to the world, I am sole, singular, and seperate from it. This is because this process of experiencing is one I do alone. I share how I impress aspects of it on the world, but it is still mine to have. This is why my earlier version of this paper was so painful. I wanted so desperately to relate to others, but seemed to fail. As Sartes finds us doomed to be free, I find us doomed to be unique. This unique is lonely. No one will ever be able to join you in your mind and know every fact of what it is like to be you. You will share that burden with no one. Neither will you be able to do the same with another. Communication of any means is then powerful. It gives a synthesis of sharing existence by sharing a given experience. We now have a powerful tool to combat this experience. We are sole, in that the human experience is derived from us. We are singular, in that we have a clear line from our awareness that we are alone, one entity. We are seperate, in that comes a point where I stop and you begin. While we cannot help that we find these facts, we can help how we find them. In my earlier paper, it was clear that how I related to these facts was one that caused low value via pain and suffering. However, that is not a necessary fact. I will still need to prove this idea via living it, but I think I will need to find this fact of merit if I am going to handle it well. Only then can I write a paper where I have any authority. I have found that we cannot control what forces come against us. What we can do is control how those forces were used. Cold and bitter winds were used to push a windmill. Monsoons in the early season would be used to build up reserves. Broken relationships mended well can be stronger than otherwise. By not just standing against the force, but pushing past it, we can turn it from a value detractor to a value add. There is no one way we must find this fact of our unique instantiation. We now can use the power of Esse Maxim and its relationship with the contingent and necessary, to consistently build what this entails. Perhaps it is a thing of aesthetically stoic honor that we are seperate. Perhaps it enhances the uniqueness that is the human experience. Perhaps it accentuates the need and application of us reaching out and being close to each other. Effort across time will show me what can be done here, but in the meantime, know that you are sole, singular, and seperate.