Understanding Human Existence: Reality and Life
Two Aspects of Reality
Human beings, through contact with reality, recognize a duality of aspects:
- Exterior Experiences: The subject of experiences. These are perceived as being outside the subjective being.
- Subjective Experiences: Experiences perceived as internal.
These aspects are obvious because humans do not need to search for them; they are readily found. We exist within these components and outside ourselves, finding ways in which we relate.
- Outside: Includes the body (as a physiological component) and the physical habitat.
- Subjective: Includes intimacy (as a psychological component) and neighbors (as a social environment).
The Two Poles of Life
Through our notion of life, human beings immediately recognize a duality of poles: the world and the self.
The immediate way to live our lives is within a bipolar relationship: I-world. This bipolarity is experiential because our place is evident in each moment.
There is a perfect match between the two poles of our lives and the two aspects of reality. Everything that belongs to the same aspect is integrated into our experience of life on the same pole.
Dualities and the Notion of Existence
Our immediate notion of life and our contact with reality are dualistic. We recognize life and reality through dualities.
- Basic Dualities: The duality of aspects of reality and the duality of the poles of life.
- Secondary Dualities: Component duality (body/intimacy) and the duality of means with which we interact (physical/social).
Life, from this system of duality, is called existence. Existence is to live fully within this complex system.
The Body
The body encompasses everything within intimate self-perception.
Our perception is both physical and psychic because we perceive ourselves with our two components: physiological and psychological.
The difference between an intimate character and the body is that intimacy is not encompassed by any further perception, unlike the body itself.
Due to this difference, the body is not completely intimate and is not fully integrated into either the self or the world. The world is built by the physical and social means by which man relates.
Conclusion: The body, within the bipolar relationship, is not *per se* a pole, but inseparable from the poles.
Lack and Needs
The obvious aspects of reality highlight the lack within a man, contrasting with self-sufficiency.
For man, to exist means to participate in the obvious aspects of reality: appearance, body, and subjectivity to privacy.
- To participate in both aspects, man must maintain and develop life at two levels: the body and the intimate.
- Man is lacking and not self-sufficient.
- The lack of man is defined as his constitutive lack of sufficiency to preserve and develop his own life.
- The body and intimacy are components of deficiency.
The relationship between the components of man and his ways is like the relationship between scarcity and resources.
- The habitat and neighbors provide resources to maintain and develop life: the first at the body level, and the second at the intimate level.
Man’s existence is located in a relationship between lack and resources: The lack is given by the two components that form him (physiological and psychological), while the resources are given by the two means by which he relates (physical and social).