Who Are We Here?

“Why are we here?”
            It’s a question we’ve all asked ourselves at least once in our lives. To try to come up with a clear and concise answer, many people approach religion, while others seek the guidance of scientific education. This is an excellent question, with a plethora of possible answers. Nobody wants to wander aimlessly and blindly. We want to have a defined reason for why we are alive and why we should go on living. Of course, because there are so many possible answers to this four word question we can never be sure until the very end of our lives, when the question becomes moot.
            There is another question, however, that contains the same amount of words as this all-important question. In fact, it is only one letter off from it, but there is a significant difference between these two questions. While the above has no unknowable answer, the other can be answered quite simply if you give it some thought:

“Who are we here?”

There are so many different type of people walking along this marble we call Earth. What  we are is simple: we are human beings, which means that we are bipedal primeape mammals. We are such simple creatures, blank slates. Who we are is something far more different. We cannot choose what we are, but we cannot do anything but choose who we are.
            We choose who we are by our actions in our lives. Yes, there will be outside influences, such as family, peers, and happenings in our lives, that will become factors in our decisions, but, in the end, it is us who make the decision, us who pulls the final lever.
            Who we are evolves us from what we are, those simple creatures, those blackboards who haven’t been touched by chalk, and we must realize that, like the chalk on such a blackboard, our actions will affect what we do and where we go and who we are. Even if you erase that mark, there is always a faint trace of it left, an indelible figure on the slate.
           

Even though “Why are we here?” is a stupefying and awesome question, it has too many possible answers and absolutely no definite ones we can reach in our lifetime. “Who are we here?” is just as strong of a question and, unlike it’s sister, can be answered, and reanswered throughout our lives. It can be answered definitely, if we want to accept the answer and work to achieve it through our actions in life.

Reviews

[TLK]

I disagree, slightly.
I totally agree with the thrust. Why is followed by Who, and that is the order of things, and that is Good.
However, "Who are we here?" is not actually ANSWERED. The answer instead is INVENTED. Finding out who we are is more like telling a story than finding an answer. Who we are is part and parcel of how we go about finding out (if at all) and who is around to shed light on the situation, because their input will actually change who we are and, even, to a great extent, be what we actually think of ourselves. For who gives us information about who we are apart from others? If a beautiful person is told every day that they are ugly and despisable by the people who are nominally closest to them then this will become their idea of their own personality.


What you are getting at reminds me of Sartre's existentialism. He said that EXISTENCE PRECEDES ESSENCE:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existence_precedes_essence
The proposition that existence precedes essence (French: l'existence précède l'essence) is a central claim of existentialism, which reverses the traditional philosophical view that the essence or nature of a thing is more fundamental and immutable than its existence. To existentialists, human beings—through their consciousness—create their own values and determine a meaning for their life because, in the beginning, the human being does not possess any inherent identity or value. By posing the acts that constitute him or her, he or she makes his or her existence more significant.
To Sartre, the idea that "existence precedes essence" means that a personality is not built over a previously designed model or a precise purpose, because it is the human being who chooses to engage in such enterprise. While not denying the constraining conditions of human existence, he answers to Spinoza who affirmed that man is determined by what surrounds him. Therefore, to Sartre an oppressive situation is not intolerable in itself, but once regarded as such by those who feel oppressed the situation becomes intolerable. So by projecting my intentions onto my present condition, “It is I who freely transform it into action”. When he said that “the world is a mirror of my freedom”, he meant that the world obliged me to react, to overtake myself. That’s this overtaking of a present constraining situation by a project to come that Sartre names transcendence. He added that “we are condemned to be free”.

When it is said that man defines himself, it is often perceived as stating that man can "wish" to be something - anything, a bird, for instance - and then be it. According to Sartre's account, however, this would be a kind of bad faith. What is meant by the statement is that man is (1) defined only insofar as he acts and (2) that he is responsible for his actions. To clarify, it can be said that a man who acts cruelly towards other people is, by that act, defined as a cruel man and in that same instance, he (as opposed to his genes, for instance) is defined as being responsible for being this cruel man. Of course, the more positive therapeutic aspect of this is also implied: You can choose to act in a different way, and to be a good person instead of a cruel person. Here it is also clear that since man can choose to be either cruel or good, he is, in fact, neither of these things essentially.

To claim that existence precedes essence is to assert that there is no such predetermined essence to be found in humans, and that an individual's essence is defined by him or her through how he or she creates and lives his or her life. As Sartre puts it in his Existentialism is a Humanism: "man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world – and defines himself afterwards."