"A Round Trip Journey"

"What makes us who we are? What defines our essence?"

This was the question that haunted my adolescence and continues to puzzle me to this day. Who are we? Who am I? What makes me think the thoughts I have, and what drives me to the actions I take? Why did I make the specific choices I made?

At that distant time, I was not yet acquainted with Descartes and his assertion that thinking confirms our existence in this world: "Cogito, ergo sum." But I doubt his answer would have satisfied my curiosity back then. My doubt was not about existence itself but about the nature of that existence.

In a vague way, I felt that the details of my life defined me—the place I was born, the people I lived with, the events that occurred in my life might have steered my thoughts in one direction over another. Although these were my feelings during my teenage years, Jean-Paul Sartre remained too complex for me. I couldn’t grasp how others could be hell. Those statements seemed artificial, like meaningless slogans.

I believe if I had understood Sartre back then, I could have avoided many of life's unfortunate incidents. Most of the people around me were hell itself, and except for two individuals, I did not want to be with anyone else. Yet, they continued to shape my life experiences, pushing me toward an introverted path, where I drowned in my own world, perhaps driving me to love reading and books, and escaping into distant imaginary worlds. This traditional path led me to life’s incidents without realizing the absurdity of this story.

I didn’t understand Sartre, nor did I comprehend how he suddenly concluded his ethical philosophy advocating for freedom and social responsibility. Sartre seemed complex and illogical to me. I was immersed in my personal experiences, facing misery and mistreatment, and my instinct was to distance myself from all this misery.

It wasn’t until later that I realized that Sartre, unlike most existential philosophers, was trying to emphasize not to follow blindly what personal experience shaped you into. He was advocating for liberation from personal experience and stepping into the broader human principles that shaped European modernity.

Now, I lean towards viewing Sartre as a social philosopher who used existentialism as a path to promote European modernity in society. Although many started from the same point—social experience and knowledge—each philosopher ended up with a different stance. For example, John Locke saw the mind as a blank slate (Tabula Rasa), written on by human experience, leading to an epistemological approach to explaining the knowledge in the world. In contrast, David Hume saw human identity as a chameleon, changing with its movement; a series of impressions and ideas shaped by changing experiences, nearly nullifying the concept of identity itself.

I read these philosophers and understood nothing. When I emerged from my teenage years unscathed, I discovered Viktor Frankl and loved his extraordinary journey to find freedom and meaning. Perhaps it was Frankl who made me return to Sartre to understand him better, although I still relish the idea of existence preceding essence, which should guide identity towards ethics.

My encounter with Martin Heidegger’s philosophy was a stormy one. Unlike the ethical Sartre, Heidegger was provocative. The first thing I read was his letters to his lover, Hannah Arendt, the philosopher who trivialized the motives of evil and contemplated revolution. I wasn’t convinced by a word Heidegger said, except perhaps his talk about the impossibility of translation. The concept of a person conveying truth about the world and aligning with it in one existence resembled mystical talk, akin to what I read about the union of God and matter, pantheism, and a long history I engaged with from Hallaj to Ibn Arabi—all those philosophical and interpretive mazes that twist around meanings and the simplicities of things.

In my mid-twenties, I was fascinated by how my search for an answer to my question led me into endless mazes and how most philosophers started from what I thought was the beginning of explanation and ended up with things that didn’t align with each other in any way, except that they emerged from the womb of European modernity and materialistic thinking.

But as I began to become independent and decide whom to keep around me and whom to leave behind forever, the answer appeared differently to me.

My answer was, "Our actions," not what happened to us. Our choices define who we are.

My answer was heavily influenced by what I read from Viktor Frankl: how our response to what happens to us defines our identity. This is nearly the essence of Sartre’s philosophy. While Sartre advocated responding according to ethics, Frankl called for seeking a personal value that guides your responses.

I spent a significant amount of time influenced by this idea, enjoying the newly discovered freedom. I suppressed my anger, smiled in the face of my enemies, and decided for myself how to spend my day.

Then I encountered the concept of collective consciousness in my readings of Jung. I disliked Freud's sexual analyses, perhaps because they revealed more about myself than I could bear or because they put catastrophic ideas in my head. Thus, my escape from Freud to Carl Jung was, at its core, an attempt to "get easy with myself."

My reading of Freud stemmed from my admiration for Frankl; both were psychologists, and someone told me, "If you’re going to read psychology, you must start with Freud."

Carl Jung introduced me to another layer and presented the world to me. The concept of the collective unconscious that we all share was new to me. The shared symbols that enter the world of dreams to shape our consciousness or are shared among us began to alert me that I am not an individual separate from the world, but rather part of a greater existence. And this was another disaster, for I had not yet discovered myself to then recognize humanity and its unconscious symbols.

But this idea brought me back to a point I had encountered with Descartes and quickly abandoned: the mind. But not the conscious, thinking mind aware of what it thinks, but the unconscious mind that stores images and experiences and disturbs our sleep. A mind closer to feeling, or the ability to store emotions.

This idea terrified me, this strange mix between mind and heart, between the illogical and the emotional. I began to feel that "my identity" was a puzzle, a mystery that couldn’t be solved, and this caused me a degree of frustration.

I had abandoned the idea that past life events dictate our actions in subsequent days. I began to see it as a defeatist and negative idea. But I faced it again with modern French philosophy.

In my early thirties, during my master's studies, I discovered Michel Foucault. He was my wide gate to modern philosophy. I hadn’t previously engaged with modern philosophy, especially French, except through the writings of Abdelwahab Elmessiri and his fierce attack on material modernity. Unfortunately, not much French philosophy has been translated, and what has been translated is stuck in academic circles, not available to a wider audience. Thus, my encounter with it was academic.

Foucault’s revolutionary ideas resonated with my adolescence. Analyzing power and deconstructing it was very entertaining, and the tools he provided seemed intriguing. From Foucault, I ventured into Althusser, Jacques Derrida, Charles Taylor, Judith Butler's gender theory, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and all the phenomenological philosophy group that starts from sensory experience as the beginning of forming identity and meaning. Phenomenology was a blend of David Hume, John Locke, William James, and John Dewey, and although the movement started from Marxism, which began as an extension of a Hegelian concept, it seemed different to me.

The focus of phenomenology was on experience separate from identity without any preconceived ideas or essence preceding identity as Sartre claimed; it was just matter and nothing more. It was a call to reconsider the world with an empty mind.

But as I tried to do that, I found that the world reproduces itself. I spent a long time meditating, but amidst my meditations, I found that even if I faced the world with an empty mind and discarded all my preconceived ideas, my identity would be reshaped anew, and I would fail to face my experiences without preconceived notions, finding that my identity—as David Hume said—would turn into a series of impressions that change every moment.

But as I finished my studies, I tried to avoid this question entirely. I tried to let myself become a social product driven by politics and shaped by economic motives, seeking to find something to sustain me.

And whenever I was faced with the question: Who, the heck, am I?

I simply answer: I just don’t know.