The Meaning of Meaning

What is the meaning of Meaning?

(I)

To find it we need to open the concept up to the absolute condition: the meaning of Meaning lies in the reason for being, and as such is buried in the idea of why it all exists. The fundamental question that needs to be answered is, therefore, why does anything exist at all?, which has traditionally been a metaphysical conundrum (God willed it) but will only ultimately be resolved through a scientific understanding. However, the answer could also well be that there is no reason why the universe exists, and that might be resolved when we can be sure of how it came into existent (again, through science). But this does not negate the meaning of Meaning as such, it merely points to a condition that Meaning has evolved. In such case, the meaning of Meaning will need to be found by examining cosmological evolution (once more, through science).    

If we seek the answer from a personal perspective, however, the process becomes far more convoluted, although it also starts from an absolute idea of Meaning. Ultimately, the meaning of my Meaning is the meaning for my being here, and this also bifurcates between the metaphysical idea of destiny and the natural, scientific observation of genetic propagation, and between these two there is the socio-psychological idea of the social destiny set out for us by our cultural identity and social indoctrinations. But this drags any personal solution to the enigma through a whirlwind of relativity that in turn devalues any attempt at tackling the conundrum and invites a nihilistic surrender – just get on with your life, for there can be no obvious purpose to it at all – and our task here is precisely to overcome all nihilisms. So, how do we turn back or leap over this demon of nihilism.

In order to make Meaning meaningful, it needs to be, above all, practical. Nihilism is so successful today because it offers a very lazy kind of pragmatism: no need to stress oneself with vain reasons for doing things, just accept that there are no good reasons for anything and get on with doing whatever you find enjoyment from. However, this philosophy that seems like a very workable kind of hedonism, ideal for our consumerist culture, eventually reaches the dead end it has always been rushing to and collapses in on itself, like a dragon devouring its own tail. To escape this void-creating tendency therefore, purpose has to compete on the pragmatic level with nihilism. And to do that we now have to ask ourselves, what is the practical side of the meaning of Meaning?

The answer to this question resides in what it avoids, for meaningfulness escapes nihilism. The practical side of discovering the meaning of Meaning is, therefore, that it liberates us from nihilistic pitfalls such as superficiality, emptiness, unfulfillment and depression. What’s more, because of its Absolute condition, the meaning of Meaning transcends the personal and offers solutions on a universal plane that also transcends political ideologies and cultural identities, animating the intersubjective, pan-human side of existence.

In order to know the meaning of Meaning it seems logical that we would firstly have to deduce what Meaning is, but Meaning in the absolute sense is hidden from us and is only intuited to exist or not exist at all. So, our problem now is: How can we know the meaning of something that is unknown to us? To discover Meaning at an absolute level means to decipher the meaning for the existence of the universe, and this can only be done through metaphysical speculation (which will never provide a satisfactory conclusion), or through a cosmological investigation. The latter, which is made more practical by being more tangibly and intellectually conclusive, will have to be carried out by a thorough cosmological analysis of the present state of the universe, an investigation driven by the question why?: Why has the cosmos evolved in this way and not in any other way?. This question will be partly answered by investigating how?: How have be come to be in this condition?. But as our general concern is Meaning, the fundamental part of our investigation needs to be concerned with why?.

(II)

Let us begin with a logical proposition: Anything that is meaningful is qualitatively better than anything that is meaningless. For a universe to be a good universe, therefore, it needs to be embedded in purpose or meaning. In the case, the term good now functions in the wider sense of anything that is meaningful. And what this also means, is that a universe devoid of purpose is bad.

Arguably, a nihilist could reason that none of this is important because these concepts of meaning and meaninglessness or good and bad are merely human concepts, and therefore ephemeral and transcendental in a cosmological sense, that have no absolute bearing on reality and so should not be taken seriously in any scientific analysis of reality – yet this also presents another truth, which is that the meaning of the universe is a psychological one only, and is therefore completely dependent on the complexity of intelligences capable of forming rational, ethical propositions, i.e., Meaning and its consequences depend on human rationality and this demonstrates our importance; our meaningful role in the meaning of Meaning.

(III)

In his General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, Husserl makes an interesting comparison between the factualness of things and the essence of them[i]. For Husserl, our individual experience of our existence in the world is universally contingent, a contingency that he calls ‘factualness’, but that the random behaviour implied by contingency is actually moderated by the essence of things that stem from the very shapes and forms of things comprising the Eidos of reality. It is through things like shape, form, or tone that individual items fall into an essential group of items, or species, and that: “Everything belonging to the essence of the individuum another individuum can have too.”[ii] Or, in other words, we, as individuals, are most definitely random, contingent entities, but everything belonging to the essence one of us can be a part of everyone else.

What this means is that we are united by our shared essence, i.e., by our humanity. And this also means that the best way to resist divisiveness is to accentuate this shared essence.

One of our essential human traits, for example, is the complexity of human language that we use to communicate and understand each other and the universe in which we live. Although we have thousands of languages and dialects, and many more that have disappeared, there is an essential quality of all those languages which is communication and comprehension, that is only possible between human beings, or between human beings and the animals that live with humans, or between humans and the machines that are built or programmed to understand our languages.

This means that a primary essence of being human is meaning. Without meaning language would make no sense; would be pointless; would not be used; and from this we can say that without meaning there could not be any humanity or human beings. Meaning then comes before language, even though it is language which has to uncover meaning.

The idea that the essence of humanity and, as such, of each individual human being, is meaning immediately creates a problem, for while we understand the general meaning of things it is not so easy to say what an absolute meaning of Meaning is: What is the meaning of our existence, of being human, of being here?

Ironically, the search for the meaning of that essential question has led to humanity’s greatest metaphysical errors – the idea of God, or the notion that is no meaning at all, or that the answer to the question of Meaning is elsewhere and impossible to grasp here.

If instead of God, we had used the term Meaning, and subsequently affirmed that the meaning of Meaning is Meaning, the history of humanity could have been a far less turbulent phenomenon. If, instead of claiming that God were the Alpha and Omega, we had understood that Meaning is the beginning and end of the universe. If we had been capable of understanding that the universe had to have emerged out of a void of non-meaning, and seen such an emergence embedded with, an albeit, purely intuitive purpose to create the meaningful; if we had understood how this process would have required the formation of cosmological conditions apt for the creation of and ability to sustain life-forms capable of evolving into sentient organisms that could ask and resolve the question of Meaning; and if we had been able to rationalise how by doing so, cosmic evolution was capable of making the meaningless universe meaningful, then we would now be able to appreciate the meaningful place of our own humanity within the domain of the Absolute that is cosmological purposiveness, and by so doing having a far more purposeful and confident, and less anxious, idea of our own selves and our shared humanity.

By looking for the meaning of Meaning by investigating our own inquisitive instincts that evolve from the raw question of Meaning that is such an integral part of the essence of humanity, we will allow the beautiful blossom of a Meaningfulness (in the absolute sense) that is being unravelled, uncovered and in a continuous state of becoming known.

It is this meaning, understood as an essence, that gives us our why and what for.

Through our intuitions we are able to sense an absolute Meaning to the universe, and it was such an intuition that created the concept of God. But it is Meaning that is the essence, not God. This essence can only be known vaguely, through intuition, because the nature of the essence as Meaning is only an intuitive one. Meaning as an essence is an intuition of what Meaning could be when the Universe which is the subject and final object of Meaning matures to the state of Absolute Meaningfulness.

In the beginning there was an intuition of Meaning.

Meaning as an essence needs a factual, material-world environment (with three dimensions of space and a forward, unilinear motion of time) in order for it to become existence.  

For an essence to exist it must be given form. The form given to, or created by, the essence that is Meaning for us, is our Universe.  

(IV)

If the essence of the Meaningful Universe is the intuition of Meaning, then everything in the Universe is imbued with Meaning via intuition, although this does not mean that all activity is meaningful.

The intuited Meaning has to be grasped, but, in order to grasp it, it needs to be located. An intuition of Meaning does not tell us what that Meaning actually is. Only when we can be completely sure of what the Universe really is and what it could be will we be able to clarify what Meaning is. At the moment we can know the Universe from what our cosmology tells us about it. We know it is expanding and that it will probably continue to expand until everything freezes and dies. However, reason tells us that this is an absurdity.

Via intuition we are told that there can be a thing we call eternity. Eternity, therefore, is a possibility in Meaning, and as Meaning will always gravitate towards meaningfulness, and abhor meaninglessness, the eternal is a logical component of cosmological will.

As for what eternity is for such a will, we define it as a Permanence of Being (wherein Being means cognitive existence – that which knows and is known).

Meaning in essence has no syntactical form: it is, in a grammatical sense, itself void of meaning. It comes out of its opposite, the Meaningless void and, from that antagonistic birth, is immediately imbued with positivism. Meaning is a will for the Meaningful. Creation of an inanimate, meaningless universe is not enough: Meaning needs the silent space to become animated and capable of possessing its own creativity.

In order to achieve the physical conditions allowing for conscious existence to be possible, in order for that to happen, life-forms needed to be created. The evolutionary process unto life was therefore a logical imperative imposed on the universe via Meaning. Living organisms that could reproduce, morph, adapt, evolve, learn, advance, and change the environment around them were necessary for the meaning of Meaning and the subsequent meaning of everything to become possible via consciousness. For the meaning of Meaning to be grasped the universe needed organisms capable of asking: What is the meaning of this universe?. And for Permanence of Being to be possible, the Universe needs a consciousness capable of acting according to the logical answers found around this ultimate of all questions which is What is the meaning of Meaning?.   

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[i] Edmund Husserl, General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, Martinus Nijhoff, 1983, Chapter 1, § 2, p. 7

[ii] Ibid, p. 8

On History

History as a mechanism to describe human progress or human development over the ages is a fallacy because human development has never rightfully taken place. Societies are no more human now than they have ever been, and where progress has taken place it has always been in the service of the interests and needs of wealth, never in favour of humanity.

We cannot therefore take the past on its own terms if we want to create more humane societies and develop a purposive, human future. The point now presently reached is the one in which we clearly see the nakedness of the emperor when we are told that he is parading his new clothes – the emperor here being a metaphor for the ugly nakedness of our civilisation. We should be all denouncing the crude reality, despite the narratives we are constantly being fed to accept the contrary. Instead, we get lost in the partisan ideologies that the emperor is naked only because he belongs to the party we never vote for, and that when our boys and girls are in power the emperor is or will be splendid.

The absence of human progress, however, does not mean that the narrative of history did not happen, but rather that the motives for its unfurling are very different to the ones we are usually fed. Once analysed from the perspective of humanity, the motives which have evolved throughout the world’s historical process are not at all favourable for the development and progress of any authentic humanity and the evolution of civilisation is quite simply a terrible error.

The problems in our societies are not the necessary results of any weaknesses in human nature, but rather in the fundamental greed of the general motor driving the mechanics of civilisations – and that pilot is wealth. Rather than seeing wealth as an integral part of human nature, it would be more correct to see it as the cultural of human societies that separates us from the possibility of truly embracing our human nature.

CIVILISATION – WEALTH = AUTHENTIC HUMAN SOCIETY

Since Voltaire and Hegel, then Nietzsche and Marx through Adorno, to Foucault and Žižek, we have been trying to subvert historical narratives in order to let humanity breathe the fresh air of a more authentically human future. That more than two hundred years of subversion has achieved so very little in terms of establishing authentically human narratives beyond the tyrannies of wealth is indicative of how powerful the self-interested discourse of wealth is. As Foucault said: “truth is not by nature free – nor error servile – but … its production is thoroughly imbued with relations of power.”[1]  

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[1] Michael Foucault, THE HISTORY OF SEXUALITY, Vol. 1, Penguin, London, 1990, p. 60

The Burden of Consciousness

The burden of consciousness lies in its inevitable awareness of the fact that our individual self, and this individual consciousness itself, is only a temporal thing in a process of dying, i.e., movement towards non-existence. Add to this the spiritually crippling idea that everything is moving in the same abject direction and this ‘consciousness’ can be thoroughly devastating.

Truth is terrible, and terribly hard to bear. As such we create possibilities, alternative conceptualisations of reality that allow for a continuity and allow the universe and our existence in it to become a bearable, purposeful thing. Most of these fictional narratives take the form of religions, which are institutions that can, collectively, bolster anti-natural theses that will quell the burden of truth. Through these narratives, what our consciousness reveals about reality becomes a lie, a misperception of reality, because reality is far more subtle than human consciousness ever realises. But the negativity of religions lies not just in their fantasies but in the fact that, in humanistic terms, they are anti-human, oppressive forces, that diminish the importance of our humanity and have negative rather than potentiating effects on consciousness.

Neverhteless, it still remains true that the ugly truth revealed by consciousness needs to be transcended. To take this leap without humbling ourselves and subjugating our individual consciousness to an imagined monotheistic omnipotence, consciousness’s focus on ephemerality needs to be superseded by concentrating on the collective reality of human consciousness and the positivity and power that this change of perspective generates. For the systemic nihilism we currently suffer to be overcome, humanity must first develop itself authentically as Humanity (with a capital H), and develop societies capable of uniting rather than dividing the consciousness of the human race. Individual mortality can only be overcome if the collective memory of humanity endures. The seemingly inevitable process of dying can only be transcended via an enduring collective consciousness. Likewise it is only a well-tuned and well-exercised collective consciousness that will be capable of making the creative and technological advances that will allow humanity to dream of an eternal existence in which even cosmological-death scenarios can be remedied. To overcome the burden of consciousness we have to concentrate on making it eternal.

Leaping into a positive future

Why is humanity so knotted up? Why can’t we unravel ourselves and make the world a better place rather than continue on the self-destructive course unfolding before us, as if we were actually driven by fatalistic forces with tragic humours lacking all semblance of any collective free-will?

The fault lies in contemporary humanity’s general lack of futuristic vision, which in turn stems from a self-engendering pessimism fuelled by an almost universal, albeit subconscious, nihilistic belief that humanity is a despicable species destined to ultimately err. From this comes the basic tenants of religion: Save us O Lord from ourselves! In other words, the greater part of humanity exists in a bubble of such low self-esteem that human greatness can only manifest itself either accidentally or through the small minority of human beings who actually do think we could be great, achieving the greater good and furnishing a much better world for ourselves. This minority has managed to create fine art and fantastic technology, but even this traditional hope of redemption through the manifestations of human genius is now sharply threatened by the enormous impotence generated at the political and social level of civilisations, through the narrowing vias of autocracies and dictatorships, on the one hand, and of the inhibiting forces of nihilism-driven democracies, on the other.

Politically, of course, this conclusion is devastating as it leaves progress without a road to take and with no chance of building one. While the nihilistic attitude is predominant in society, an authentically forward-looking politics is impossible. In order to go forward in a meaningful way the nihilistic bedrock of society has to be challenged and changed.

But nihilism is so embedded in humanity’s perception of reality that it will take a metaphysical upheaval of that perception to alter our current tragic course: and that means that we need to think, firstly scientifically, and then socially and politically, about the philosophical question of Being.

Idealism has taught us that this question is double-edged, and that reality consists of the physical world, but it is also conditioned by our sapiens perception of that world. Hegel talked of the naïve consciousness of Absolute Being, and we would like to invert that to consider the naïve consciousness of Non-Being. Being doesn’t begin with perception, as Berkeley argued, rather it is made real or actual by it. Being matures through sapiens perception and evolves into something which could be meaningful.

This means that the great gap between Naïve Being and (Authentic) Being is a matter of meaningfulness. Naïve Being lacks any meaning but strives for it because it lacks it – but it is a blind, unconscious striving, driven by pure, intuitive need rather than any desire.

Seen from this metaphysical perspective, our human place in the Universe is by no means a purposeless, nihilistic one, but rather a fundamental tool that gives the Authentic Being to the Naïve Being of the sapiens-absent cosmos. This tiny adjustment to our way of perceiving ourselves, would be a radically positive, revolutionary way of combatting the inherent and enormously destructive pessimism that is so ingrained in humanity’s self-perception today.

To unravel ourselves we need to embrace our enormous, inherent nature as generators of meaning and purpose in the cosmos. The decline of human progress is not only created by the knots we have tied ourselves into through our nihilisms and pessimisms, it is also the greatest threat to meaningful reality in the entire Universe. And if that is not a sobering, life-changing idea, what is?  

It’s time to unravel the great knot and let humanity breathe freely again in the pure air of meaningfulness.              

IDEALSM VERSUS ALIENATION

In philosophy today, idealism is certainly not the most popular perspective to have, and it is often disparaged, ridiculed or simply pushed aside as being something ‘old-hat’. This is a shame, given the present critical state of humanity, as idealism has given western civilisation some of the most positivistic reflections on those ‘Big Questions’, the philosophical questions concerned with what we are doing here, in this universe, and, above all, what does our relationship to the world have to be to make our experience here a purposive one. Of all the tenets of idealism, whether it be in the subjective or objective variety, the idea that the universe and self-consciousness are inextricably entwined is a deeply thought concept that carries an enormous charge of optimism.

Philosophical idealism explains the universe metaphysically and can be understood scientifically and cosmologically, yet, in western culture, it is a concept restricted to a chapter or two of philosophical history or to the marginal fields of mysticism. As a consequence, WEIRD societies are generally ignorant of idealistic concepts that would be valuable in tackling the enormous problem of psychological or spiritual alienation that plagues so many individuals in western societies.

Feelings of alienation in the world come about through intermediary agents that segregate the individual from its natural idealistic connection with the universal. These negative intermediary agents are ubiquitous and operate through the forms of the family, the neighbourhood, the society, the culture, the State, the Church, etc.. All of these elements can be (or are) forces of separation within the authentic condition of universality, which, by dividing the whole and cutting us off from the self-fulfilment that comes from the experience of the universal in a purposive way, create a field of lack in existence. A gaping hole in our connection with the whole that leaves the individual staring into an apparent void, clutching at the handles of any nearby ideology to stop oneself falling into the abyss caused by this alienation.

Self-consciousness is only valid as an interpreter of the world when it makes its interpretation from the point of view of the universal. The individual, therefore, is only valid as an interpretation of the whole when it is expressed as a microcosm of the universal. Differences are always positive as creative advances or artistic or technological possibilities, but they are negative when they manifest themselves as differentiating, separating forces. Universality is not a question of conforming to a whole, but rather a matter of casting off that which divides the whole.

What is desperately needed now is less ego and more universal connection and a more idealistic perception of reality, that takes our psychological interconnectedness with everything seriously, has to be seen as a positivistic way to perceive reality. And that is what is imperative now, the positivistic perception of our nature, and human nature’s own positivistic conception of the world.     

SELF-FULFILMENT THROUGH THE UNIVERSAL

Figure emerges from the cosmos

The idea that individual self-fulfilment can only be realised through a transcendence of the ego and an embracing of universal reality is a very old and culturally wide-spread one, deeply embedded in most oriental philosophies and prevalent in western cultures through the thinking of Pythagoras and Plato and disseminated through Christian cultures via the concept of prayer. Nevertheless, it has also been made deeply unpopular (or unfashionable) in our contemporary societies, which are driven by consumerism and the egoistic imperatives of want and take. The connection between self-consciousness and the universal (be it the Universe, God, or what Hegel termed as the Mind or Spirit with a capital M or S) or between the I and the We that we all are as human beings, is usually shrugged off today as mystical thinking rooted in superstition rather than any sane philosophy or science. Unfortunately, though, as a consequence of this, our contemporary downgrading of our relationship to the universal has placed us in the deep existential crisis that we are currently facing. We have overfed the individual ego and overlooked the importance of equilibrium to such an extent that the structural collapse of the planetary ecosystem that keeps us alive has now become the most likely scenario, and a complete extinction of the homo sapiens is an ever-growing likelihood.

This idea of self-fulfilment coming through an embracing of the universal, has traditionally but wrongly been associated with religion, and yet the materialism of Marx is just as deeply embedded in this spirit of universal self-realisation as any evangelist or religious fanatic. In fact a Marxist activist campaigning against the ills of capitalist consumerism may be considered more deeply spiritual in the sense of his or her connection with the universal reality than most of the faithful members of religious congregations.

Likewise, it is equally erroneous to imagine self-fulfilment to be achieved through a loyalty to the State or any other social unit that operates as a dividing, ideological, identity-forming force against the authentic universality of humanity. In order for the individual to achieve self-fulfilment through the universal there has to be an embracing of the universal form of our authentic selves, which is humanity. Only once that is done can we begin to see the purposiveness of our I and We in the rest of the cosmos, a reason for being which has to begin by overcoming our own collective suicidal tendencies and what seems to be an ever-growing desire to disappear.    

Brief Notes on the Theme of the Ethical Life

Our ethical life should be based on self-fulfilment through universality rather than a sense of duty to anti-human identity groups or individualisms.

Self-fulfilment can be a passion in itself, so why not a society-forming (and maintaining) passion.

Once self-fulfilment has been anchored in the universal object that is humanity, it absorbs duty. The collision between passion and duty thereby disappears in the passionate self-fulfilment obtained through universality.

Good resides in what is known – which tells us that both discovery and preservation are positive concepts.

Because of this, heroic conflict arises: 1) between that which strives to know and that which tries to impede discoveries; or 2) between that which wants to keep and maintain our knowledge of things and that which tries to erase collective memories.

Heroic conflict also arises between the creative and the forces stifling creativity. Creativity is a way of uncovering the knowledge of all possibilities and art and technology are ways of putting such knowledge into effect or giving the formless form.

Through art, consciousness sets up and establishes something from out of itself and can transform a particular moment or thing into an essential reality.

The idea of self-fulfilment in the universal assumes the ethical right of the dual form – i.e., the binary form of the individual and the universal (Humanity) … take da Vinci’s Vitruvian man as a symbol of this.

The End of the Family

All societies and States, are reflections of the family structure: Does this imply that a truly revolutionary process could only take place after we have re-structured, or transcended, the family form?

But how could any total restructuring of the family ever take place? Certainly, we have different kinds of families operating between the extended and nuclear forms, but in order to find anything radically different we would have to examine cultures which are less developed from a technological point-of-view.

For example, if we look at the traditional family structures of the hunter and gatherer tribes of Australian aborigines, we come across societies that seem incredibly complex from the perspective of our own WEIRD civilisation. On the surface this presents us with an irony: the less developed a culture is technologically, the more complex is its concept of kinship. And vice-versa: the complexity that advanced technologies impart on societies demands a simplification of family structures and responsibilities.

If this is so, could we conclude that the next socio-cultural leap our technological-society evolution will provoke will be a further simplification of the family and that eventually – in a not-so-distant future – the idea of the family will completely disappear opening the cultural field for the first time into the realm of authentic humanism.

SPECULATIONS ON METAPHYSICAL PURPOSES EMBEDDED IN COSMOLOGICAL EVOLUTION

PROPOSITION A: The universe is not self-conscious although it is purposive, i.e. it is unconsciously purposive.

Our point, or assumption, is that the universe, which is ever-evolving and subject to physical laws allowing it to be made up of certain interior forms, approximately repeated in certain ways throughout this universe’s limits, has always been evolving towards something since its inception and that this very act of evolving is a purposive mechanic. Purposive because it is moving somewhere.

To understand what the primordial, unconscious universe could be evolving toward we have to ask ourselves what the universe would have been lacking when the evolution began, and we conclude that the great lack in the unconscious universe is consciousness and especially self-consciousness.

Seen in this way, cosmological evolution must be regarded as an element embedded in the physical structure of the universe. It is a driving, mechanical force that works in a moulding and sculpting, necessary way that has nothing to do with the idea of determinism or any negation of human free-will because it is not a conscious force. The purposiveness in the universe is unconscious.

The problem with this line of thought is that we cannot decisively answer the question ‘how?’. How can an unconscious entity be imbued with an evolutionary aim? And this answer eludes us even though the natural world is constantly involved in acts of unconscious evolution. Everything is change and everything is evolving.

Certainly, traditional metaphysics has proposed the idea of an eternal, infinite creator, or God, but that really does not satisfactorily answer the question at hand because to do so we would need to ask how can it be that God exists, which is an even greater problem answered with a simple ‘God is eternal and has always been’, which does not help us at all with our problem, because it forces us to turn to the great swindle of the so-called holy scriptures for any, usually cryptic, answers.

Yet, it is precisely the strong-hold that traditional, God-centred metaphysics has on humanity, for they are still the dominant attitudes behind the purposiveness of most human thought, that inhibits an idea of authentic human purposiveness. It is the intellectual cowardice embedded in religious notions that has created the general atmosphere of nihilism that we are experiencing today, because without authentic purposiveness humanity is most definitely a pointless, nihilistic concept.

So, in order to combat nihilism and create an authentically purposeful humanity, we need to wrestle with the metaphysical question of cosmological purposiveness in a new, non-scriptural, perhaps atheistic, certainly agnostic way, or, in a philosophical manner that is unhindered by religious preconceptions, drawing on the tenets of science and cosmology rather than the testaments of prophets and seers.

From the Big Bang to Bill Gates, evolution has been a primarily accidental process carrying everything from the simplest forms to the incredible complexity of the sapiens animal’s brain. Accidental because it has been carried out unconsciously, but this unconscious, accidental evolution of accumulating particles was also able to create needs, likewise unconscious, because as the cosmos evolved in time from energy into matter tendencies developed that favoured accidentally formed states of permanence that took on forms (hot stars or cold rocks) that persisted because of the fact that they were imbued with permanence. That stars and planets are all basically spherical objects that can now be attributed to physical laws determined by the compositional states of the particles that they are made up of. Because the particles making up the universe are the way that they are, interaction between them will create stars and planets, even though the particles themselves had and have no idea what they were (are) doing. The interaction between hot and cold matter and the energy embedded within them because of the molecular composition of everything, eventually created a substance that we call ‘water’ which allowed for another accidental process of the evolution of organisms that we call ‘life’.

With the appearance of ‘life’ everything changes in the essential nature of the universe. Simplicity becomes something that grows ever more complex, and it is through the development of this complexity that cosmological evolution becomes purposive. Over billions of years, the primordial nature of the universe has evolved into something that seems obsessed with the creation of more and more complexity. From our human-linguistic apprehension of the world, it ‘seems’ that there is an consciously selective process taking place at one tiny point, at least, of the universe: i.e. here on our own planet Earth. After billions of years of seemingly meaningless interaction, the molecular structures of matter in this certain tiny part of the cosmos produced a very complex molecule that we call DNA – a tiny instruction book embedded in the cells of organic matter that allow the organisms that possess it to replicate themselves. From this moment on the rather insipid cosmos of stars and rocks is suddenly imbued with something very interesting indeed and the future promises a brand-new type of evolution, driven towards the ever-increasing level of complexity that we call life.

With this natural, perhaps still accidental, development of DNA, the road forward to the sapiens brain had begun. This means that, in the chronology of the cosmological evolutionary process, we can henceforth consider the universe to be purposively geared, because it is driven in a creative way to the production of something increasingly complex. But, can we also say that natural evolution had also become a conscious process?  

Of course, whether evolution is self-conscious or not, the outcome is the same. Once a system discovers how to differentiate between good and bad evolutionary choices, the choice takes on a deterministic character that seems to be rationally motivated. Likewise, the ‘programming’ constituted by the instruction book and the genetic information in the DNA molecule, makes the process seem intelligent, but much in the same way that a PC can seem to be savvy. Arguably, intelligence can exist without consciousness as such, one simply has to be capable of choosing the best way forward when faced with a conundrum, and this is how AI (Artificial Intelligence) gets its name. Nevertheless, if we can choose a better way, it has to be the better way for a reason, and consciousness implies consciously being aware in decision making of what that reason is. Likewise, the unconscious machine, operates only according to the rationality embedded in its operating structure or via its digital programming. Only when the self-learning, consciousness of AI is included in the programming do computers, robots and other machines actually seem to be conscious. Our DNA is not capable of self-learning, evolution in biological organisms occurs accidentally, via genetic mutations that prove to be beneficial to a species. However, another question arises here, for while the natural world is almost completely unconscious: Does lack of consciousness also mean a lack of knowing? We all exist in a binary state between consciousness and unconsciousness, however most of the decisions made in keeping us alive are carried out unconsciously. Our unconscious body knows exactly what to do to try and keep us alive, as do the bodies of any other living organism, and it is able to do so because of the information embedded in the instruction manuals of our DNA. When we have DNA we know how to survive and replicate our genes.

Consciousness is an anomaly in the universe, and yet unconsciousness has been able to create everything we know, by a process of trial and error combined with some accidental leaps that have been prejudiced by preferences for one result over another – and this, in the long run is a knowing process, that eventually becomes purposeful when the process has developed enough complexity to be fully conscious of what knowing is and entails.

It could be said, therefore, that whilst the universe was not born with any purpose, that purpose evolved. To create the conditions for intelligence to be possible, unconscious evolution had to move in a determinate direction. Without direction implied in trial and error, and a recognition of the advantages of replication that were unconsciously discovered in the development of DNA, the complexity necessary for the existence of intelligence would have been an impossible, evolutionary result of the Big Bang. It seems rational, to us, that the universe instinctively knows that it exists and that that same unconscious knowing has been able to gear evolution unto the creation of the sapiens organism that knows that it knows and can be aware of the incredible miracle that the universe’s evolution has been.  

DON QUIXOTE AS SANCHO PANZA’S DREAM

Part of the brilliance of Cervantes’ Don Quixote is that he remains such an easily recognisable symbol of the human condition, but to make the symbolism even more significant for our contemporary state of being we suggest changing the perspective of Cervantes’ narrative somewhat, do away with the realism of the Quixote/Sancho Panza duet and relocate the dreamer Don Quixote as a figment of the pragmatic Sancho Panza’s fantasy world.

This radical distortion of the original theme would bring the symbolism of the Quixote tale closer to a contemporary audience for the greater part of humanity are now really Sancho Panza figurines: modelled into, concerned with, and driven by the pragmatic dictates of modern life which, depending on what part of the pragmatic-life spectrum one belongs to, lies somewhere between a 24/7 quest for survival and an eternal struggle with the question ‘what should I do today?’. We would like to think that this pragmatic world protects against the dangers of wild fantasy, but in fact we are overwhelmed and swamped by reality, or at least until we can find the time to slip into the transcendent realm of imagination – either our own or through the stories of others created for our consumption – in which we can indulge in Quixotic, escapist dreams.

In other words, Sancho Panza is the real, and Don Quixote is an escape valve from an overdose of that reality.

Don Quixote’s madness, as such, is, in the contemporary world, really Sancho’s escape from the madness. Sancho Panza has to imagine the idealist, romantic, free-spirit of Don Quixote in order to liberate himself from the mundanity and drudgery of his own pathetically, practical life, which is really just a constant wading through an unstoppable accumulation of reality’s stuff that makes existence more of an endurance than a life.

So, while in Cervantes’ original narrative, Don Quixote is the dreamer, to contemporise him he must become merely a fragment of the frustrated Sancho’s imagination, but this is complicated by the fact that today there are two types of Sancho Panza: (a) the traditional Sancho who hallucinates a Quixote figure from his own imagination that this traditional Sancho is convinced exists and should be followed, and (b) a second type of Sancho who knows that Don Quixote is just a product of his own imagination and so, although he knows he needs the transcendence of the Quixote-figure he envisages, his Quixote-fantasy can be re-constructed or re-configured according to individual desires and needs. This latter, more contemporary version of Sancho Panza we will refer to as the enlightened Sancho.

For this enlightened Sancho, Don Quixote is a kind of Übermensch; the Superman that Sancho knows he will never be, because he does not dare to take the leap away from the pragmatic life that holds him into the stuff of the reality that oppresses him but must be endured because it is reality.

This modern conception of the Quixote as Sancho’s dream differs not just in the form and placing of the narrative’s voice, but in the historical viewpoint of the Quixotic ideal itself, although this is different according to whether we are talking about the traditional or the enlightened Sancho. Therefore, for the traditional Sancho Panza, the ideal, like the original Quixotic ideal itself, comes from an origin that was embedded in the past – an ideal grown decadent and corrupt – whereas the Quixote of the enlightened Sancho’s pragmatist’s dream, has to come from the future. The ideal lies no longer in what we used to be but what we could become.

By splitting Sancho into two, we are able to point to our current ideological separation, in which humanity is now composed of these two types of Quixotic figures: the Quixote in the mind of the traditional Sancho, with their dreams of an immaculate origin that needs to be reinstated through cultural purification, and the Quixote of the enlightened Sancho, who also fantasises about a better place and a better form of humanity, but a new form of humanity that has never previously existed but could be born in the future.

Of course these ideas are deeply antagonistic and great civil war of to come will be fought between these Quixotic fantasies of the two forms of Sancho Panza. A struggle between two very distinct ideas of what humanity is: i.e., (a) either the product of a determination (usually considered to be God’s determination, but which is really the determining forces imposed by civilisation) that have grown decadent or been perverted and must be rejuvenated, or (b) the image of humanity as a determining force in itself, capable of sculpting a better future for itself out of intellectual projections of what a better future would actually be like.