‘In this world which we enter, appearing from nowhere, and from which we disappear into a nowhere, Being and Appearing coincide.’
-Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (1978)
I felt rather delighted when I read the quote of Hannah Arendt, because there is nothing as subjective as metaphysics itself and the interpretation of it.
Neither of us can be wrong.
However neither of us can be right.
I will try to interpret the quote of Arendt from my own perspective and then try to extend this quote by adding some of my own philosophy into it.
The quote begins with the rather confusing words ‘In the world which we enter’.
That sentence alone has so much more meaning behind it than the 6 words you read, that I had to mention it separately.
We enter from somewhere in this world.
So there is another place above our observation from where we enter our current world.
Another place that is the big nowhere and nothing, which decides to throw us into our current world and then when it’s over, it takes us back to a nowhere.
What is Arendt actually trying to say that happens the moment we are thrown inside this world?
What do we gain the second we are born which we lacked before our birth?
To be born is the moment that human observation takes place.
The moment you come out of a nowhere and you suddenly experience everything.
I can only imagine that as a huge climax in which the senses experience perception.
Breathing for the first time after being inside the water for too long.
Breathing after being inside a nowhere for too long.
Her quote references to the Greek philosopher Epicures, who said this:
When we are, the death isn’t, when death is then we aren’t.
Death is the disappearance of our human senses.
When we die, those human sense die with us.
This means that we end up back inside the big black ocean of nothing and cease to experience every form of human senses.
Arendt says that being born and dying coincide, the only difference is that it takes place in another order.
And I have to give her right, subjectively speaking.
But that’s the whole point.
It is very subjective.
One thing that triggered me a lot is that Arendt made a difference between the world, which we enter and the world where we enter from.
She clearly states a world which we enter, which means we enter from another place: namely a nowhere.
A separation.
Objective and subjective.
Objectivity is the transcendent place that we cannot experience the moment we are born and we go back to the moment we die.
This is the place where no form of subjectivity exist.
Subjectivity is perspective in which we use human senses as means to process information we gain from the outside world which we then experience all individually in a unique way.
That is exactly the crucial point that I want to discuss.
And just like Arendt I believe in this separation.
Everything around us is the result of the human subjectivity and what the humans decide to do having this subjectivity.
And the most difficult part of subjectivity is the fact that it’s so unique.
So extremely unique that no other person can process the world the way you can process it.
It can even be problematic.
People can start having arguments due to this because they just don’t understand the world of one’s experience.
That’s what I want to bring across; be aware of your uniqueness and even embrace it.
But do know that due to being so unique, it is also very difficult to deal with subjectivity when you are confronted to understand another person’s perception.
So beginning by the begin.
What does it mean to be born?
Being born is exactly the separation in which the objective essence that exists in all of us is released into the world.
When that takes place, our objectivity is gone for the rest of our life until death.
Why is that?
Because we have been released from the transcendent into the worldly.
We have been put inside a complex thinking machine that always wears pink subjective glasses and experiences the world from his own perspective.
Leave the homo sapiens for what it is.
We are the homo subjectiva.
But going back to Arendt, can we even be sure that we come from a nowhere and disappear in a nowhere?
I can firmly say, I don’t know for sure.
Having my subjectivity as limit I can only use my unlimited fantasy as to how that objective world looks like.
The limit of my subjectivity can also mean the limit of how I experience world using my senses as means.
And this the subjectivity has layer over it of the education we have gained through life and the people we have met.
With other words, it is a big nowhere solely because our subjectivity doesn’t allow us to know for sure what the transcendent is.
But what gives me grip is the capacity to use the ratio, which is for me the closest form of gaining pure knowledge even though I’m sure that it still stained by my subjectivity.
What I noticed furthermore is that Arendt only quotes about being born and dying, she skips a big part I would like to discuss.
Namely life.
What does it mean to live knowing the theory I brought about earlier?
What is that one force that makes us want to keep going?
It’s something I would like to indicate with the term ‘Love’.
This term does not have the meaning we would add to it nowadays
Love it the undeniable urge to go back to the objective world.
And until that we live our lives with one goal and that is to experience our subjectivity to its fullest.
When we are thrown into this world we wear our subjective glasses from the very beginning until the very end.
This subjective view is being layered and twisted and turned by our environment, but never changed.
What subjectivity does is taking those experiences inside the big complex machine and then experience its very own and unique way.
Putting two people in exactly the same home and letting them grow up exactly the same way does not program them into robots who are copies of one another because they solely grew up in the same environment.
I am definitely not denying that our environment plays a huge part in who we become later.
Our environment gives us the options of showing different way of how to experience our subjectivity.
But it never changes the subjectivity we already have.
However, what plays an even bigger role is our perspective and what we decide to do with the data that we gain from the outside inside our complex machine.
That is exactly the point I everyone to be aware of.
Know that you are unique and try to understand that the other is.
Never make the foolish mistake of trying to put yourself in the shoes of another.
You simply can’t; there is always a big layer of subjectivity that denies us the possibility of seeing everything the same way.
The only solution would be pure logical thinking or ratio.
This comes closest to thinking in a transcendent manner; namely by analysing every little thing you think up and knowing that this is something you gained from your environment.
Or by throwing away all dogmas and prejudices you gained in all these years.
Only this way we can try to understand each other the best.
And if you don’t have the capacity to do so, try to embrace subjectivity on its own for what it is and leave the other to do the same.
The last point I will discuss is death.
When we die, all of these collective experiences come together into the big nothing (or objective world) and I by God do not know what happens there, but I can conclude one thing that we have in this world which does not exist in the objective world.
Subjectivity.
The capacity to experience life from a unique perspective.
The only thing that does is the absolute opposite of the objective world.
Experiencing ourselves and our uniqueness.
Concluding as Arendt said, we disappear into a nowhere.
And I fully agree on calling it a nowhere.
Losing the capacity of seeing the world from our own perspective gives us the opportunity to call it a nowhere, because that is exactly what it is in our eyes for whom nothing except the subjective world is known until death unites us.
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