Human Existence: Navigating the Temporal and Relational Dimensions

What does it mean to be human – truly, fully human? One way to answer that is to say we are beings with a fixed nature: rational animals with a body and a soul, born and eventually dying. But this answer, while not wrong, is incomplete. It captures a snapshot but misses the motion picture. Philosophy, particularly in the existential and phenomenological traditions, proposes something far more dynamic: that the human person is not a fixed thing to be defined, but an unfolding event – a horizon in constant movement, shaped by time, language, and relationships with others and with the world at large. This is what exploring the space between before and beyond means: navigating who we were, who we are, and who we are always in the process of becoming.

The human person as a “horizon of becoming” 🔗

In philosophy, a horizon is never a wall – it is always receding, always inviting you further. When we apply this to the human person, the implication is profound. We are not defined by any fixed set of qualities or a finished biography. Instead, we are always reaching beyond our current state, always in motion. This view is rooted in existential and phenomenological thought, which insists that human existence is not a thing but an event – a continuous unfolding.

Existentialists argue that what defines a person is not some permanent set of properties held constant through time, but an ongoing process of becoming – the story of how we carry forward the tension between who we are given to be and who we choose to become. In José Ortega y Gasset’s famous formulation, a human being “does not have a nature, but rather a history.” This is not just a philosophical slogan. It means that identity is something we build, break, and rebuild – through choices, through suffering, through love, through failure.

Heidegger and Sartre captured this duality with the concepts of facticity and transcendence. Facticity refers to everything already given: the body we were born into, our family, our culture, our historical moment. Transcendence refers to our capacity to surpass all of that – to interpret, reimagine, and re-direct our lives beyond what was simply handed to us. In their view, life is the continuous tension between these two poles, never fully resolved except in death. Far from being a pessimistic observation, this tension is precisely what makes human existence creative and meaningful.

Between “before” and “beyond”: the structure of human time 🔗

Human beings live inside time in a way no other known entity does. We do not merely occupy the present instant. We carry the past with us as memory, habit, and identity; and we lean into the future through anticipation, planning, and hope. This tripartite structure – past, present, future – is not just a feature of clock time. It is the very architecture of how we experience ourselves.

The “before” is not simply what happened to us. It is what we carry forward: formative relationships, inherited cultures, accumulated experiences that shape how we see and respond to the world. The “beyond” is not merely tomorrow. It is the horizon of what we might yet become – the open, uncharted space that calls us forward. Philosophically understood, human beings emerge not as static entities but as dynamic unfoldings through time.

Kierkegaard described the self as both finite and infinite, both temporal and reaching toward the eternal. For Kierkegaard, what defines a person is the concrete way they relate to this tension – not the resolution of it, but how they live inside it. This is why no two lives are identical even when lived in the same circumstances: because each person navigates the “before” and “beyond” differently.

Importantly, our finitude – the fact that our time is limited – is not a curse but the very condition that makes life meaningful. It is precisely because moments are finite that choices carry weight, that love and loss matter, that the present moment is never merely neutral.

Transcendence: going beyond without escaping the world 🔗

The word “transcendence” can sound abstract or spiritual, but in its philosophical core it means something precise and grounded: the capacity to go beyond what is immediately given. In philosophy, transcendence points to the basic act of “climbing beyond” – not toward a realm outside the world, but within the very fabric of human engagement with the world.

Jean Wahl, the twentieth-century French philosopher, argued that transcendence need not always reach toward the divine. The world itself is full of depth and encounter that pull us beyond our habitual selves. Artists, poets, and thinkers – not only saints and mystics – are capable of genuine transcendence, because they can hold contradictory dimensions of existence together without collapsing one into the other.

This is a crucial point: relational transcendence is not about escaping the world or abandoning one’s situation. It is about engaging more deeply with it – opening oneself to others, to nature, to ideas – and discovering, through that engagement, dimensions of oneself that could not have emerged in isolation. Transcendence happens in relationship, in dialogue, in the very act of reaching toward what is not yet.

Language and grammar as mirrors of human relationality 🔗

If you want to understand how deeply relational human beings are, look at language. Not just its content, but its structure. Grammar itself is a map of relationality. The very existence of pronouns – I, you, we – reveals that the self is never self-enclosed. Every utterance of “I” presupposes a “you.” Every act of speaking reaches toward another. Communication is not merely the transmission of information; it is a form of co-existence.

Martin Heidegger took this insight further, arguing that language is not simply a tool humans use to describe a world that exists independently of it. Rather, language is “world-forming” – it structures how beings appear to us, how we make sense of things, how we relate to what exists. In his phrase, it is “the house of Being.” We do not stand outside language and then enter it; we are always already inside it, shaped by it, oriented by it toward a shared world.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty extended this relational view of language into the body itself. In his phenomenology, to exist is to express – to a world, to others, through one’s very embodied presence. Language is not merely spoken words; it is gesture, posture, expression, the whole orientation of a body toward its world. Human existence, in this view, is communication – a continuous reaching-out to others through which the self is both expressed and discovered.

Think of verbs like “to share,” “to care,” “to receive,” “to forgive.” These are not descriptions of isolated acts. They presuppose relationships. They are action-words that only make sense in the context of others. Our grammar is saturated with relationality because our existence is saturated with it.

Relational and interconnected: what science is now confirming 🔗

Contemporary science is catching up with what philosophy has long proposed. Research in neuroscience confirms that the human brain is not a fixed, closed system – it is radically relational and dynamic. The concept of neuroplasticity – the brain’s capacity to reorganize its structure and function in response to experience – is one of the most significant discoveries of modern neuroscience, and it is essentially a biological translation of the philosophical idea of “becoming.”

Research on neural networks shows that an individual’s brain connectivity is shaped by encultured social practices that influence both pre-reflective and reflective consciousness. In other words, the very structure of how we perceive, think, and feel is formed through our relationships and cultural participation – not just our biology. The brain is not a private island; it is a social organ.

Neuroscientist Daniel Siegel’s model of the “triangle of well-being” highlights the deep interconnectedness of the mind, the brain, and relationships. The mind itself, on this account, is not reducible to what happens inside a skull – it emerges at the intersection of biological processes, inner experience, and social interaction. Mental illness, too, cannot be reduced to a brain disorder alone; it reflects disruptions in the whole relational web of a person’s life.

Similarly, social neuroscience research into empathy, compassion, and the capacity to understand other minds reveals dedicated neural circuitries oriented toward others – toward reading intentions, inferring feelings, and coordinating action with fellow human beings. We are, neurologically speaking, beings built for relation. Our brains have been sculpted by millions of years of social life.

In developmental psychology, attachment theory demonstrates that our earliest relationships with caregivers lay down the foundational patterns through which we experience ourselves and the world for the rest of our lives. Identity is not self-generated; it is relational from the very start.

Humans as beings in the cosmos, not merely in society 🔗

The relational character of human existence does not stop at the boundary of other people. We exist within a universe – a cosmos – and the conditions of that cosmos are constitutive of who we are. We breathe air produced by other life forms. We are composed of elements forged in stars. Our biological rhythms are shaped by the rotation of the Earth and the cycle of seasons. We are, in the deepest sense, beings in the world – and the world is not merely a backdrop but a participant in our existence.

Philosophy has long recognized this. Heidegger’s concept of Dasein – being-in-the-world – insists that humans cannot be understood as subjects locked inside their heads, peering out at an external world. We are always already out there, immersed in a world of meaning, tools, others, and nature. The world is not an obstacle to selfhood; it is the very medium through which selfhood unfolds.

This interconnection with the cosmos does not diminish human uniqueness – it deepens it. We are the part of the universe that can reflect on the universe. We are the point at which the cosmos becomes aware of itself, capable of wonder, of grief, of gratitude, of inquiry. Our temporality – the fact that we are born, live, and die – is not a defect. It is what makes our relation to the world charged with meaning.

Always becoming: the ethics of an open existence 🔗

To see the human person as a horizon – open, dynamic, relationally constituted, temporally stretched between a “before” and a “beyond” – is not merely a theoretical observation. It carries practical and ethical weight. If we are always becoming, then no person is ever simply reducible to their past. Growth is always possible. Change is not an anomaly; it is the norm.

This view challenges the tendency to fix people into categories – to say “this is who you are” as a final verdict. It invites instead the question: “Who are you becoming?” It orients us toward possibility rather than merely toward record. And it grounds a kind of ethical openness: if the other person is also a horizon, always more than what I have so far encountered of them, then I owe them the respect of not reducing them to a fixed image.

At the same time, the “before” matters. We do not transcend by erasing our past, but by taking it up, owning it, and moving forward from within it. The tensions between our facticity and our freedom, between what we have been and what we might become, are not problems to be solved but the living texture of a genuinely human life.

What do you think? If the human person is always “becoming” rather than simply “being,” what does that mean for how we understand personal identity – is there a stable “self” beneath all this change, or is the self itself the movement? And in what ways do the relationships you carry – with people, with places, with ideas – actively shape who you are continuing to become?

References

1. https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/thematic/existentialism/v-1/sections/the-human-condition
2. https://deepinsight3.wordpress.com/2025/06/29/humanity-as-a-temporal-being-an-inquiry-into-philosophical-time/
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendence_(philosophy)
4. https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/human-existence-and-transcendence/
5. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/heidegger/language.html
6. https://ecommons.luc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3037&context=luc_theses
7. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3110420/
8. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/cns-spectrums/article/unified-understanding-of-the-human-mind-a-neuroethical-perspective/80C3E0CAC377F551D48951347A9D6B7D
9. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12096818/