For years many of us philosophers, regardless of how "skilled" you may consider yourself, have asked ourselves the following question: How do we exist? This has been framed and answered in many ways, with some echoing Descartes in that the mere fact that we are asking the question demonstrates our existence. In this little piece, I want to explore some ideas I've been considering about what existence even is, because without knowing what constitutes existence, how can we claim to possess it?

Existence can be thought of as being a combination of 4 elements; sentience, clarity, form and worth. If any of these elements are completely missing, one cannot exist. The equilibrium between these 4 does not need to be an exact numerical balance, as these concepts cannot be measured in the first place, however some of these elements require, or facilitate the presence of the others, which I will clarify in detail as we go.

Sentience is perhaps the simplest element. To be able to interpret the universe, to sense it and act on your own within it, without being an extension of another sentient being, is required in order to exist. Of all the elements, sentience is least influenced by the others, because it is the most necessary, as without it, one cannot perceive their worth, their form, or gain clarity.

Clarity is perhaps the most complicated. To have clarity is to have an understanding of the universe and the world around you, to have a set of underlying rules and innate frameworks to make sense of your existence. Without clarity, your existence is indiscernible, and thus there is no way to detect sentience or form, and nothing concrete to ascribe worth to. Clarity is the element most influenced by the others. If you possess form, you must therefore also possess clarity to identify that form, and thus you cannot have one without the other, and clarity requires sentience to interpret and acquire that clarity.

If this is sounding confusing, then consider Plato's famous Allegory of the Cave. The people staring at the shadows have acquired clarity to their existence, they can exist because they know what reality is (the shadows) and how it works, their existence has rules they can follow and exist within. When they are exposed to the reality outside the shadows, they lose that clarity and are completely unable to exist anymore, and thus WILL go back to the shadows anyway. Clarity therefore cannot be gained all in one, it must be gained slowly, with experience and learning, just as we slowly go from incredibly low clarity as an infant, slowly building our clarity of the world as we grow. The prisoners watching the shadows could exist outside the cave, but they must do so very slowly.

Form is fairly simple. To exist, you must have a form that exists. This is in both the physical and spiritual case. If you can identify your body, that it can interact and be controlled by you, that is a way to identify your form. But consider the thought experiment of the man hanging above the ground blindfolded. He sees nothing, hears nothing, feels nothing, he has no body to identify his form but yet he exists. How? Because he identifies what you could call your soul or your spirit or whatever you choose to call it. This spiritual form allows one to exist where physical clarity is lacking. As aforementioned, clarity and form go hand in hand, although I should mention that form is absolute, you either have a form or you do not, and it only takes the absolute littlest bit of the other elements to gain it.

Finally, we have worth. Without a sense of worth for ourselves and the world around us, there is nothing really tangible for a merely sentient, clarified, formed being to exist as or within. If you imagine the existential crisis, this event is when a being is suddenly deprived of worth, and the possible responses to such a crisis demonstrate how worth is a necessity. Those that fail to either prop up the old worth they ad beforehand, or forge new meaning of their own, inevitably fall into a form of living that is essentially dead, or will actively take their own lives, thus ending their existence.

I do apologise if this has been a bit of a chore to read. This is my first actual written philosophical piece and the ideas need some refining. In short, to exist, one must have sentience to interpret and perceive their existence, clarity to make any sense and thus anything out of their existence, form to have a body to exist as and a form to exist within, and finally worth to allow the other elements the reason to exist at all.