In filing through search results for the query: “philosophical formulas,” I came across the blog of Garry Fitchett, author of Life is a Bicycle––which I admittedly have not yet read. I was thinking to myself of the tiny niche market of Philosophical Excel Aficionados ––I capitalize that for no reason other than my desire for there to be such a noun; that market, I imagine to be vanishingly small. I was curious enough to keep browsing and came across his answer to Ayn Rand’s meditation on bumped heads and rocket ships––baseline human curiosities, that is, which she boils down to “Where am I? How can I discover it? and What should I do?” So I thought I’d take a run at these same questions. Many thanks, Garry.
Where Am I?
Well, what is an “I”? If ‘I’ am my subjectivity, why do I have subjectivity? It seems self-evident that only conscious things can have this self-consciousness, this self-awareness. Why do I view things as ‘having them’–things being objects that are not me. And so, there are two categories for me: me and not me. I obviously have experience, or ‘do’ experiencing, and this means I am an agent (rational or otherwise), and this implies my role in relation to an arena (thank you John Vervaeke). For some reason, it is instinctual to put on a play, to act a role. So this first question is best phrased, the above having been taken for granted upon its exposition, “What is this arena?” This is to ask “What should I do––in this arena, this place, this situation I find myself in?” ‘Should’ comes from the german ‘schuld,’ which means both ‘debt’ and ‘guilt.’ So asking what one should do, is to orient one unto himself, personally, as a debtor, a schuldner.
Who does one –an experiencer, an agent, a hermanut, an actor, the homunculus– owe?
If he belongs to a society, if he is part of a communal species, if he reproduces sexually, then he owes his community a debt for the implicit cooperative outsourcing that takes place amongst the group, the daily swap that allows him everyday conveniences and that aids him in staving off his privation, along with his opportunities to reproduce. The guilts he experiences in this community move isomorphically with his level of contribution and his sense of the balance of debt, the socially implied ‘owing’ between parties–to feel devoid of these is akin to psychopathy. So here, what one should do is to balance his books with his proximal peers. (The assessment of distant peers and debt is another matter entirely.) Additionally, if he is born to humans of tradition (without which, I would challenge the very definition), he may not escape the concept of his ancestors. An owing to those who came before, who inescapably laid their lives down in instinctual self-preservation but thereby also in hope for legacy and the general preservation of the species––which is the individual’s experience, and, as I think I’ve proven here, the root of his owing to those ancestors; for what has already been prepared for him by his culture’s collective quasi-mythical but also very real ancestors before he arrived (for the conscious creature understands time, from the inference of death and narrative). Coincidentally, what one should do, what one owes as the ‘Who’ question has been answered to him: “You are an actor in an arena filled with other participants and audience members.” is to balance these books both, and as soon as possible as to alleviate himself of this debt, the former being still plausible, though decreasingly so due to technological progress and its uncontrollable positive feedback loop; this amounting to insurmountable asymmetry in the individuals Debt Coverage Ratio. The latter being a debt –a should– quite literally impossible to repay, its calculations of historical progress beginning at time ‘zero’ being combinatorially explosive, the individual has often concluded –especially when cajoled by priests, politicians––moralists in general– that his debt, being un-payable, gives said guilt-laundering institutions ample recourse to prey on his communal instincts without his conscious knowing so, tempting him into his own slavery. All of the past, and all of the fast-moving indulgent present make these circumstances so, and appear to him to answer this “Where am I” question with: “In the place where debt, for past and present, an investment in the future is paid each day by each agent in this arena to those around him. To default is sinful (a failure to preserve the species and a failure to appreciate the past hardships of ancestors) . We are all counting on you. You owe us.” Thus another imperative of survival, and a secondary but no less important answer, is “to mind not to allow others to heap on any extra or unnecessary hot coals without proper negotiations having taken place.”
“How can I discover it?” This question presumes ‘it’ –what you ‘are’– is a thing not obvious to the experiencing agent, but just above I believe I have unfurled the reasons, in cascading fashion, as to why this question is already answered: “What is obvious to you, the very reason you experience the emotion of guilt and that the neuro-biological pretense is set to experience it in the first place, the reason guilt is both in you in this way and is cast upon you by your culture, is that your debt exists, that you are indeed a debtor, and that there will be tribal consequences when you miss payments.” The question of discovery is thereby a non sequitur.
“What should I do?” follows the same fate as “How can I discover it?”: “What you should do is to find a way to pay, and pay.” If our psychobiology is centered around this core realization of the individual, his experience, then the negative effects of ignoring our ‘life as debtor’ existence should be counterbalanced in the human neurological system with positive, psychobiologically rewarding effects. To receive these positive effects, and in keeping with his communal orientation and its tyrannies upon him, is to: “Garner acknowledgement of our contemporaries, our fellow agents for having dropped a coin in the offering plate, having contributed a useful service to our fellow man.”
As for philosophical formulae: I don’t believe any of us, Rand, Fitchett, nor I promised any specifics, nor did there seem to be any beyond platitudes. Go your own way.