The Actualize Philosophy
Part One: The How of Being
"Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you", Jean-Paul Sartre.
We are, of course, all unique individuals experiencing life in our own unique ways. Experience is a fluid and constantly changing series of encounters with the external world (the physical environment, other people, our interactions with our social-cultural world) and encounters with our inner-world (bodily sensations, thoughts, feelings). I couldn’t accurately know what it’s like to experience life in the way you experience life, anymore than you’d be able to experience life as it is for me. I could hit my thumb with a hammer and you might be able to imagine my pain, but you wouldn’t be able to experience my pain yourself. We could both be standing watching the sun dawning in the Sahara and your experience of a beautiful sunrise would be different from mine and absolutely inaccessible to me. So, we are all unique beings whose experience of life is fundamentally private.Something that may be unique to humans is our awareness of our own temporality: that is, we are aware of our past, we are aware of our present, and we are aware that we have a future. We could say that the past provides the context for our present experience of the world, and that our future could be shaped by what has gone before. If our former experiences have been less than helpful, then our present and futue could be fraught with difficulty.
Although we are all unique individuals, we are also relational beings; that is, we live in relationship with ourselves, in relationship with other people, in relationship with our culture, and in relationship with the wider world and beyond.
The relationships we have as children, with our parents, families, and peers can shape how we form relationships and the kind of relationships we form as adults. Relationships can help us flourish or not, and set us on a trajectory that fosters some possibilities and not others. So, although we are all unique individuals, we have become who we are in part through the relationships we have had with other people.
Part Three - The how of relating to the world
Elaborations
"The potential space between baby and mother, between child and family, between individual and society or the world, depends on experience which leads to trust. It can be looked upon as sacred to the individual in that it is here that the individual experiences creative living"
DW Winnicott
“We cannot understand or make sense of human beings on their own in isolation, but always and only in and through their inter-relational context”
Ernesto Spinelli
