Basic Moods of Life

This is a reconstruction about 4 basic conversations about what is possible, which generates 4 different moods about life itself.

Assessments Of Facticity vs Possibility

In life, we make the distinction between:

• Facticity: the facts of life, what is, what cannot be changed no matter what we do.

  1. Ontological facticity: ontological meaning it is part of the nature of human existence and cannot be changed:

     • Biological: we can only do what our biology allows us to do. We age, have a finite lifespan and will eventually die.
     • The past cannot be changed. We can still reinterpret the past, but the fact of events having taken place which influences the present cannot be changed.

  2. Historical facticity: things that cannot be changed because of the historical circumstances surrounding them, not due to limits of the human condition. These are things that could not be done today, but could be possible in the future. For example, communicating with someone across the world would not be possible in the previous century - it would have been considered an ontological facticity but is now a historical facticity.

     Historical facticity is not a matter of fact, it is an assessment. Something normally considered a historical facticity may be seen as possible as a leader, which is what makes them leaders. This is subject to our ability to innovate and make grounded assessments.

• Possibility: things that we assess we can change and hence, offers possibility for action.

Assessments of historical facticity or possibility are themselves historical. It depends on the Declarations made and actions that follow. What might be impossible could now be possible because someone said it was so and acted to create that possibility. For example, the space program resulted in man stepping on the moon.

Accepting Or Opposing Facticity And Possibility

Since the distinction of what is facticity and what is possibility is an assessment, someone might see something as a fact of life while someone else sees the same thing as being possible to change. These different views create different observers of what is possible in life. Since different assessments about the same thing are possible, someone can accept or oppose the way someone else makes those assessments of facticity or possibility.

One way of assessing someone’s compitency in making the distinction between facticity and possibility is the grounding provided for those assessments. Much suffering is caused by incompetence when grounding assessments about what is or is not possible - for example, this causes someone to change what others groundedly assess as unchangeable, or declaring unchangeable what others consider possible to modify.

We can have grounded assessments about what is fact vs possibility. But we may oppose these assessments and not come to terms with them, which can generate 4 different moods about life.

The Basic Moods Of Life

	Facticity (what we cannot change)	Possibility (what we can change)
We oppose	Resentment	Resignation
We accept	Acceptance	Ambition