The Madness We All Share
We all know what it means to regret something. We look back on a decision and think, I should have done things differently. We imagine another life that might have unfolded if we had taken another road, met another person, or made another choice. And when we look ahead, we worry about what might happen, what we might lose, and whether we will choose well.
These thoughts seem not only natural but unavoidable. They are part of how we understand ourselves and the world. Yet what if, beneath these familiar experiences, there were an assumption we had never really examined?
Common sense defines madness as believing in what is not there: the person who believes himself to be Napoleon, or someone who sees what others cannot see. But there is a deeper question hidden in this ordinary definition. What does it mean to affirm something that is not?
If madness consists in treating what is not as though it were, we may need to look beyond its most obvious forms. For there is a belief so deeply rooted in our everyday thinking that we rarely recognize it as a belief at all: the conviction that things could have been otherwise.
The Past That Never Was
Consider the familiar thought: I am who I am because of what happened to me. We understand ourselves through our past, through our experiences, our decisions, our successes and our mistakes. And almost automatically, we add another thought: If those things had happened differently, I would be a different person.
But what are we affirming when we imagine that alternative past?
The past that actually appeared is real. Its events, its encounters, and their consequences belong to what has been. The alternative past, however vividly we imagine it, never appeared. It exists only as a thought we have now.
Of course, we can imagine different events. We can construct alternative stories and explore what might follow from them. Such thoughts are real as thoughts. But this is different from claiming that the events they describe were genuinely possible alternatives to what occurred.
Here we reach the heart of the philosophical question. If Being is what cannot not be, then nothing that is can have been nothing. What appears is not something that might just as well never have existed. Its being is necessary, even when we do not yet understand that necessity.
The belief that the past could have been otherwise therefore rests on a deeper assumption: that what exists might not have existed, and that nothing might somehow have taken its place.
This is what the title of this essay calls madness. Not a psychiatric condition, nor a failure of intelligence, but a fundamental error in our understanding of Being.
From this assumption arise many of our regrets, accusations, and forms of guilt. We torment ourselves because we believe we should have acted differently. We condemn others because we imagine that they could have done otherwise. We judge the actual past against an alternative that never existed.
This does not mean that suffering is unreal, that consequences do not matter, or that we should cease to care about what happens. It means that our understanding of responsibility and regret may rest on a view of reality that has never been adequately questioned.
The Future That Haunts Us
The same assumption extends into the future. We imagine that several lives lie before us, each waiting for our decision. We fear choosing the wrong path, missing an opportunity, or becoming someone we do not wish to be.
The future appears open because we do not know what will happen. But not knowing what will appear is not the same as knowing that what appears could be otherwise.
Our uncertainty is real. The alternatives we imagine are real as thoughts. Yet neither uncertainty nor imagination establishes that Being itself is contingent, that what will appear might either be or not be.
We often confuse our lack of knowledge with an openness in reality itself. Because we cannot see what comes next, we imagine that the future is waiting for us to create it.
But perhaps the question needs to be turned around. Instead of asking how we can make ourselves into something we are not yet, we might ask what it means for anything to appear at all.
In the perspective explored here, Being does not become what it previously was not. What changes is the order in which its determinate forms appear. Each belongs to Being and cannot simply fall into nothingness or emerge from nothingness.
This challenges the familiar picture of ourselves as unfinished beings standing between what we have been and what we might become. We certainly experience ourselves as changing, learning, deciding, and discovering. But must these experiences mean that our being is progressively created out of what it was not?
Perhaps the person we are is not something we manufacture moment by moment. Perhaps our changing appearances belong to a reality that is not itself subject to becoming.
What Does It Mean to Choose?
This raises an obvious objection. If everything is necessary, what becomes of our choices? Are we merely passive observers of a life that unfolds without us?
Not at all. Decisions still appear. We deliberate, hesitate, compare possibilities, act, and encounter consequences. Nothing in this account requires us to deny any of these experiences.
The question is what we mean when we say that our decisions create what we are, as though there were an independent self standing outside reality, free to determine whether its own being will be one thing or another.
The self that decides is not outside Being. Neither are its thoughts, its reasons, its desires, or the circumstances in which it acts. All belong to the same reality.
A decision, then, does not bring a previously nonexistent self into existence. It is itself part of the necessary appearing through which that self is revealed.
We might compare this with an oak tree. Its branches grow, its leaves change, and its appearance develops through time. Yet it does not choose to become an oak, nor does it create its own being from nothing. Its changes are real, but they do not require the oak to manufacture its existence at every moment.
The comparison is imperfect, as all comparisons are. Human beings think, reflect, and deliberate. But the essential question remains: does the experience of deliberation prove that we could have been something other than what we are?
To question this is not to deny the richness of human life. It is to reconsider the assumption that holds our lives hostage to an imagined alternative.
The Possibility of Release
Much of our inner tension arises from the belief that reality should have been different, or that we must somehow force it to become different from what it is. We try to correct the past, escape ourselves, or secure a future that will finally justify our lives.
We struggle against what has appeared because we imagine that it should not have appeared. And we struggle toward what has not appeared because we imagine that our being is incomplete until it does.
Yet neither regret nor anxiety can change the ontological status of Being. What has appeared cannot be made never to have appeared. What has not appeared does not become real merely because we desire it.
This does not mean that we should abandon action or become indifferent to suffering. Our actions and responses are themselves part of what appears. Care, resistance, understanding, and change have their place within reality. What falls away is the fantasy that we must stand outside what is in order to make Being itself different.
The dissolution of this illusion is not another project of self-improvement. It is a change in understanding. The very impulse to escape our condition can be seen as part of the reality we are trying to escape.
The observer, the observed, and the act of observing are not separate realms. They belong to the same appearing. There is no isolated self standing beyond the whole, looking in from outside and deciding what Being should have been.
Action Without an Illusion of Control
When this begins to become clear, action need not cease. What may change is our relationship to it.
We can still deliberate, care, respond, and act without imagining that every decision is an attempt to create ourselves from nothing. We can recognize suffering without adding the torment of an alternative reality in which it should never have occurred. We can face the future without pretending that our uncertainty proves the existence of several competing destinies.
Action becomes less burdened by the demand to make Being justify itself before us.
The wind moves through the leaves. The leaves tremble, branches bend, and the tree responds to what surrounds it. Nothing in this movement needs to be unreal for it to belong to a deeper necessity.
So it is with us. Our lives do not become meaningless when we cease to regard ourselves as the absolute origin of our actions. They may instead become more intelligible as expressions of a reality that does not depend on our power to create it.
We do not stand outside Being, trying to force it into existence. We are among the ways in which it appears.
The Stillness of the Eternal
The dissolution of the belief in contingency does not leave us with emptiness. It opens another way of looking at what is.
The world remains full of movement, difference, suffering, discovery, and wonder. Nothing needs to be reduced to an illusion. What changes is the belief that beneath every appearance there lies the possibility of its absolute nonexistence.
Even our most intense experiences belong to Being. Their appearing is real, though no single appearance exhausts the reality to which it belongs.
The stillness of the eternal is therefore not the absence of movement. It is the recognition that movement does not carry Being out of itself, and that nothing which is must fall into nothingness in order to make room for what comes next.
Perhaps this is where the madness we have been examining begins to dissolve. Not because we have cured ourselves of being human, nor because suffering and uncertainty have magically disappeared, but because we have begun to question the belief that reality itself could have been nothing other than what it is.
Being is.
And what is cannot not be.
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