Most of humanity believes that a well-lived life is that which is characterized by the fulfillment of dreams, purposes, and desires, and by the outcomes of happy insertions, understood as success and professional, social, and familiar valorization. This also includes mystical visions - affinities and elective synchrony with the divine. What people always privilege is ultimately the external, that which is beyond oneself.
To consider that the realization of individuality occurs through the internal/external plane leads to fragmentation. This thought establishes a dualism that leads one to be lost in the world or to isolate oneself from it. It is a mere artifice to imagine approaches such as ‘inside and outside’, ‘external and internal’ as configuration of individuality, as configuration of the human being. When this is done coherently and logically, one discovers that everything depends on the subject, on the individual, even if it refers to a subjective plane that is thought to be different from the objective plane.
The individual is in the world. The world is his space, his time, or, as Heidegger said, his home. In 1919, Wittgenstein wrote that “a good life is not based on objective motivations, but on radically subjective decisions”. This summarizes the effort of the author to give man back its humanity, instead of treating him as a piece of reductionist and mechanistic organization. This latter thinking was the biological view that considered that one who is born, grows, procreates, and satisfies oneself is happy in achieving his/her goals as a sapiens species.
Responding to whatever is proposed, whether by following it or by changing it, leaves the human being in a binary configuration of hits/misses, maintenance/change, acceptance/denial that does not exhaust its infinite possibilities. Without transforming contradictions into syntheses that generate new questions and antitheses, nothing develops. Everything ceases, stops; everything is conservation, maintenance, survival. In this way, the human being is transformed into the intelligent and insightful animal that best survives, and that dies when it does not learn the lessons. Reduced only to answers of yes or no, to hits or mistakes, one creates an artificial network of objectivity, comprehending something that strikes from the outside. Maintaining what has been achieved, taught - improving it and expanding it - is also a way to continue without transformation. There is repetition and generation of anchorages, bunkers, security systems that create emptiness, boredom, depersonalization, sadness, depression, and fear.
There is no such division: subjective and objective. Subject and object are poles of an axis. The philosophical/psychological thinking focused on the poles, the positions, by breaking or neglecting the axis, the configurative relationship of subject and object. To think of the human being as separate from his/her world (society, family, others) is a mistake. The individual is an intersection of infinite variables and when he/she transcends them, he/she accomplishes what Wittgenstein claims to be a good life, one that is based on subjective decisions and not on objective motivations. Although Wittgenstein enunciates it in a dualistic way, it apprehends the wholeness. In my words, the individual has a good life when his/her decisions are coherent, consistent with his/her experiences.
To live, to have a good life is ultimately to apprehend contradictions and thus perform syntheses that bring the new, that bring perspectives and surprises. Going beyond the imposed is what makes the world go round, it is what brings transcendence of limits, it makes one experience the present and makes liberating decisions.
The discovery of the freedom to exercise one’s infinite possibilities is what fulfills and satisfies the human being. Outside this freedom, one finds imprisonments that only clarify successes, errors, difficulties, ease, all centered on needs, on situations beyond one’s individuality. The freedom to discover the limit of that which imprisons configures magical and achievable eldorados. This is what brings happiness, harmony, and satisfaction in being in the world with the other, with others, and with oneself.