Philosophical thoughts on The Steps of Essence

The whole point of my book The Steps of Essence is to make philosophy accessible to a wider audience, and I don’t want to turn off anybody who is not quite as fluent in philosophy by posting something overly abstruse. The book makes a very conscious effort to stay clear of such heavy language while still presenting the concepts in more accessible form.

Having stated this disclaimer, somebody recently posted this great question to me, which deserves a true philosophical answer, so here we go – philosopher mode on.

Warning: serious philosophy lingo below.

Question: “A.H. Almass (‘Essence’) correlates the experience of presence with essence, presence being a direct experience of existence rather than inferred through sense or thought and consequently not rooted in certainty. He goes on to describe essence as fusion of object and subject, observer and observed, the medium of perception itself and the very nature of authenticity. If this idea is encapsulated in your work I would be curious to know your take on it?”

Answer: Etymologically, the words “essence,” “presence,” and “present” all stem from the root “es-“, which meant “to be” with the sense “existence.” (Whereas our word “being,” “physical,” and “future” are from “bheu-,” which is “being” with the sense “growing”). Thereby, essence and presence are already linked, and indicate an ontological connection with regard to “existence.”

The Steps of Essence are also ontological at the core, and ask “What is YOUR Being?” (Incidentally, note that this website is called “SeinQuest,” with “Sein” the German word for Being).

They hold the existentialistic premise that you must take responsibility for your life, and that you are continually making your self and essence. In the book, I use the term “weave” instead of fusion, because it also is the underlying meaning of our word “text.” And our lives also have a certain textual quality to them (as Derrida pointed out). Interwoven into your life’s text/weave is your genetic, cultural and personal history, with each experience/memory being a thread.

All of these together form the vast potential space that sets what you see as possible for you in your life (here, subject and object are indeed “fused”).

It now becomes your task to work out of this weave the specific life-threads that matter the most to you—these then become what you can live authentically to, and thereby (using your term) your presence in the present (sounds a bit like Heidegger, doesn’t it :) And this has to be done, just as you say, through “a direct experience of existence rather than inferred through sense or thought.” Indeed, in the book I lead the reader up to this choice through a purely phenomenological approach that brackets out sense and through, or “deciding” along some criteria, and leads you instead to make a “personal” choice, as much as this is possible (an example of this would be to find moments where you are in “flow,” using the research of Maslow and Csikszentmihalyi).

In fact, I present a new paradigm on what it means to choose, and how to choose.

That’s one of the many, many philosophical backbones in the book. But, as Wittgenstein once said, Philosophy (as much as I love it) cannot just be something abstruse that we simply talk about, but it has to make a change in the way we answer the important questions of our life.

Philosophy has to be the basis--but it has to be brought alive. And to bring these hard concepts to life for the reader (who probably is not as versed in philosophy as you may be), I am drawing on modern psychology, life design, and even method acting.

For here is the thing: authenticity is multi-faceted. Indeed, when we look at only “existence,” we look at only one part of the onteo-ontological split. We must still consider (as already indicated above) Being, which grows itself over into the physical and the futures.

And so, once you know who you are, you still have to also learn to be true to you, so that you can grow your Being into the physical.

That is not easy. Because, as we all know, we live in a world that tries with all its might to conform you back into one its faceless cogs.

So The Steps of Essence go further, and also help to bring yourself alive in this world—authentically after who have you declared yourself to be.

The book should be available within the next month, and I hope you all will do me the honor of reading it. I really think there is a lot of good stuff in it.

Namaste — I and the Divine in me bow to You and the Divine in You.
~Hanns

Copyright © Hanns-Oskar Porr