When I venture out into the philosophical jungle of my thirdself, I quickly encounter the “fundamental questions”. These are the most important existential questions. Kant’s three questions come to mind.
The problem with this exercise is that questions are secondary to something more fundamental: every moment I am awake, I want something. Whether I want to eat, distract myself, rest, shift my sitting position, express myself, or scratch an itch on my head, I always want. I can see my desire by sitting motionless, thinking and doing nothing. Every moment I have to battle my desire until it eventually overcomes me and I must move, eat, think, watch, talk, or any other of a million actions.
I always desire. My fundamental condition is that of desire.
My state of desire therefore precedes any question, and any answers I might find. Questions and answers extend from, and are an artifact of, my desire. It is my questioning and answering that either obscures or reveals, satisfies or intensifies, my desire. The questions themselves are not actually important; it is where they lead me relative to the awareness I seek.
As long as I can remember, I have been asking questions, writing at great length on countless topics. I started and discarded drafts more times than I can remember. Ultimately, in an effort to preserve my work, however unfruitful, I would assemble all my notes together into a single document of dead-ends. It took me nearly forty years of life to find the right questions. I realized there were two types of question: those which enlarge and complicate my existence; and those which narrow and simplify it. I needed something more fundamental than an open-ended question, and I found it when I tied my question to my condition:
Why do I desire?
That was the right question. It jolted me out of my circuit of self-pity and abstraction. Yes, I was in pain, and my pain was an expression of desire not to be in pain anymore. It is all very circular and self-referencing. Everything I wanted was an expression of my desire. And rather than look at all of my individual desires, like the leaves on a tree, I was learning how to look downward at the branches of desire all leading to a central trunk of desire, which in turn led to a hidden root system of desire.
The fundamental question stems from my fundamental condition: I desire. Why?
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