Paul David Adkin's Blog, page 4

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.                    

The Past (and our present Quixotic condition)

The historical past, our anti-human historical process (that which we call civilisation), has been a great mistake that has led us to the existential precipice we stand on today, but that does not mean that any revolutionary response to the disaster should obliterate it and create a new, sanitised collective memory as the Soviets tried to do under Stalin.

Despite the tragic exploitation and anti-human goals of the Wealth-driven historical process, the past is still humanistically glorious: primarily through the arts and sciences. The greatness of humanity lies in the fact that, despite the constant anti-human aggression we have suffered, the human spirit has always been able to find ways of expressing itself in a universal and atemporal way that will always be enriching for all who are willing to spend some time discovering and positively deciphering the achievements and eternal messages that are there. In fact, for the present and future to be humanistically positive spaces, they must be interwoven with the past, i.e., with the words, sounds and images embedded in the dreams and realisations that surge from that deep well that lies behind us. While the past has been an anti-human historical process, at the same time it has, until now, always managed to carry the great shadow of humanity forward and without human hope it would never have sustained itself for so many millennia. The past gives substance to the present and gives form to existence, and because of that we are duty bound to never ignore it nor deprecate it, although, at the same time, our relationship to this past should never be a Quixotic one that blindly defends an undefendable idea. Our relationship with the past needs to be tempered by a constantly critical approach through which the lumpy, anti-human motives of Wealth are forever being sifted out from the smoother deliberations and desires of the human.  

We need to remind ourselves that authentic human existence is part real, and part fictional. Humanity has, and should always have, one foot in the practical and one foot in the mythical; one foot in the realistic and the other in the allegorical. Only then will be able to unravel the reasons of our current predicament and form the more positive view of humanity that is needed to pull us out of the mess we are so deeply swamped in.

Likewise, any analysis of the human condition has to take a concerted look at the environment we find ourselves locked in. Human fulfilment has traditionally always been hanging in a state of suspension, but at the moment we are strung up over a particularly woeful and an enormous abyss. As such, our present circumstances demand that we haul ourselves in and suspend our hopes over a more desirable landscape again. But even this would not be enough: human progress will only take place once we have been able to lower ourselves into the landscape itself and, with our feet on the ground, concentrate our efforts on reaching the other side of the horizon. By so doing we could revitalise the epic spirit of the human soul (for the epic needs horizons to cross). For pragmatism to work, therefore, it needs to be anchored to a positive vision of a possible, better human future and divorced from the needs of immediate, personal gratifications.  

Of course, we are where we are now as a result of the accumulated errors of humanity’s past, errors which have crept up on us and now manifest themselves as one big collective disaster. Seen in this way, the present is like the second part of Don Quixote in which the hero meets characters who have read the first part of the novel and recognise him. And by doing so, make him the object of his own narrative. Likewise, in our current Quixotic reality, the present is the object of the past’s narrative, and this is what creates the paradigm or, at least, allows the paradigm created by Wealth to be perpetuated. Like Don Quixote, humanity is trapped by a need to be faithful to the narrative, albeit a very bad one, that we find ourselves existing as a prolongation of. When we read Don Quixote (or properly exam our present condition) we see that this situation is absurd, but we are incapable of appreciating the real absurdity which is that, with regard to our own reality, we act in the same Quixotic manner. Just as Don Quixote was a mere, absurd shadow of an epic-hero dream, so humanity has become a deviant image of the great dream of wealth.

Through society’s newfound addictions to social networks and its discovery of a new home within the borders of the smartphone screen, humanity has become trapped in a huge advertising campaign in which all truth lies in the campaign itself and its quality control is measured within the quantitative success of the campaign’s exposure. Within this campaign is recorded everything that each one of its members have done, said, seen and thought, and its success depends on its ability to automatically self-reproduce itself, more and more in the mode of the image rather than the word, with the subsequent result that reality becomes more and more pornographic (in the literal sense of that word). The new language is the photo – the complexity of words being swallowed by the simplicity of the photo. The social network experience is a new madness that is being palliated by posing as ‘the real’. In it people take things and other people for what they are not; they break off with their friends and embrace complete strangers; users think they are revealing themselves when in fact they are putting on new masks, and they are constantly encouraged to alter and re-shape themselves, distorting themselves so deeply that any authenticity has become lost forever. The social-media anthropoid wants to be the same as everyone else, even though the sameness that brings them together lies in a quest to be different from all the rest; sameness is upheld by the common search for pseudo-individualism. Ours is a present-tense world devoid of any future and delusional about our history.

 In the world of social media, society and madness blend into each other as never before in any other human society. It is an anti-poetic reality in which all words are swallowed up by images that ultimately erase all authentic meaning from the social narrative. It is a world of identities and differences in which everything is the same. Despite the seemingly political and social polarisation, everything is the same.

In this sense, that which is considered ‘reality’ lacks authenticity and the systemic paradigm we live in today is an absurd fabrication of the real: the great illusion of capitalist realism. Capitalist realism is an alternative reality of alternative truths that are so skilfully embedded that they are seldom questioned. But as the gravity of our disassociation from authenticity has worsened, so has the insanity spread to potentially suicidal extremes. Currently we exist in a massive illusion, fermented by social media madness, that masks authentic reality, the authenticity that spins about a two-pronged foundation entwined around the tragedy of the climate emergency fed by the insane ideology of growth on the one hand, and the tremendous, systemic class divisions, promulgated by the tyranny of wealth on the other.

Through the power of social media, the realism of this alternative reality has been able to render any revolutionary forces driven by the real problems impotent. In a sense then, the mad Quixotic dream is that which dominates societies and propagates ostrich-cultures of downward staring people with their heads in holes in the ground. Because of this, survival depends on our ability to see beyond the present and focus on the future, but without ignoring the glorious and meaningful moments buried in the better parts of our unfortunate past.

 

Revolution, Tradition & Preservation

In Dismantling the Paradigm[1] we analysed the profoundly anti-human nature of the evolution of civilisation and, given the deeply misanthropic essence of our social, political, and economic realities we found, tradition should no longer be seen as a valid pointer for the ethical and moral reconstruction of the postpandemic, pre-climate-collapse world we live in today. Once we have embraced our human identity and become focussed on rectifying the anti-human element of the historical process, it becomes clear that any progressive future vision will have to deny tradition of a large part of its current authority and imagine new kinds of human customs based on an ideal vision of a future utopia.

It is only by contemplating where we should be going that we can imagine the form and extent of the tremendous and tragic mistakes of our anti-human past and truly comprehend the full extent of the tremendous mess that humanity faces today. However, there is an essential danger looming here that is being manifested in many parts of our collapsing civilisation and is most obviously reflected in the deep rift between conservatives and progressives that we see in the USA at the moment. Reason tells us that once we have refocussed our perspectives toward humanity we should expect the ground of tradition’s validity to collapse along with its authority – this is the fundamental faith behind all revolutionary movements – nevertheless, there has to be great caution in going forward with this idea for it is precisely this initial fervour for the dismantling of traditions, and the posterior realisation that there are parts of tradition that need to be preserved, that are the main reasons behind the failure of all revolutions and revolutionary movements.

If we reject the authority of tradition outright, before we begin, then any revolution is doomed to failure right from the start. Our own metaphysical indagations into Being tell us that preservation is one of the basic features of an eternity-orientated spirit of qualitative existence, and for the revolutionary-will surging from the basic principle of saving the planet in order to save our souls then preservation is certainly not a negative term in any way.

Because of this, tradition has to be handled in the same way that we tackle any other paradoxical element, because tradition is a paradox. In dealing with tradition, we must remember that the struggle lies with the authority of traditions, wherein that authority has been wielded for the anti-human historical agendas of Wealth, but not with the fundamental desires for preservation and conservation that should be embedded in the idea of tradition (a paradox that has led us to the climate emergency we are facing today). It is in its affinity for conserving the power of Wealth that makes tradition undesirable for human progress, and in order to dismantle the paradigms of tradition we need to concentrate on what authority lies in those traditions in order to separate the plutocratic motives from the basic rational and human principles that may be buried there, for reason itself is not the antithesis of tradition, in fact the opposite is the case. Many authentically human reasons will be found embedded in traditions once we look for them with a human bias (which is the only bias human beings should have). And once these good and bad reasons are isolated, the cancer can be surgically removed, allowing the tradition to continue, for preservation should be a desirable act of reason.

This is an historical and hermeneutic task, determined to redefine the significance of our traditions, and it is therefore also a revolutionary task. And like any revolutionary event sacrifices have to be made – in the case of the human revolution and tradition, the sacrifice comes when we accept that our traditions are anyone’s traditions.

On the surface this idea is nothing unique, it has been present for decades through the form of multiculturalism, but what is new in our proposal is the idea of exorcising the anti-human demons from those traditions in order to instil the idea that racial and cultural purity are always negative forces when they protect the interests of Wealth or when they segregate pockets of humanity from each other. On this latter point, it is important to note that isolation in itself is not always bad, and can also be a virtue (e.g., to protect a culture from the ambitions of wealth). Because of that an extirpation of Wealth-motives is always the necessary first step in any hermeneutical procedure in order to encourage isolated cultures against fearing  the big Other that surrounds them (i.e., the rest of humanity). In this way we allow multiculturalism’s virtues to overcome the currently overwhelming problem of small cultural groups and help prevent their traditions from being totally absorbed into the same Wealth-driven macro-culture of the WEIRD civilisation that it should be trying to escape from.

But, to make any of this possible, the first thing that needs to done is to stop concentrating on our present predicament and look positively toward a far-distant, utopian future for guidance.    

[1] Paul David Adkin, DISMANTLING THE PARADIGM, Madrid, 2020

Why is the Universe Purposeful?

You are One With the Universal Mind

From a macrocosmic perspective, the universe is an intensely ordered phenomena, with a sprinkling of ever-increasing randomness (entropy) that makes it possible for complex life-forms to have evolved in it. Despite the entropy and the chaos that is rampant in the quantum fields of reality, when we contemplate our universe we find it regulated by constant physical laws that give us a sense of cosmological order, and it seems to be an apparently harmonious place in which a certain amount of certainty exists, enough at least for us to have been able to develop mathematical equations that will always resolve themselves into their own unique answers. It is true that under the surface there is a subatomic world of underlying anarchy, yet it is precisely this chaotic essence of things that allows the form of the universe to unfold and evolve. For progress to develop there has to be a certain amount of instability within the fabric of the form that is evolving. This is also a ‘law’ of nature and, quite frankly, the cosmological order is so perfect that it all seems perfectly planned. There are just too many working principles and there is too much order in the universe for there to be no determination in cosmological evolution. However, if the cosmos is a determined phenomena then it has to be asked why.

To declare what the purposiveness of the universe is may be as absurd as contemplating the will of God, nevertheless, the simple fact that the universe exists indicates its own reason for it: the primary purpose of the universe is to exist.

This statement sounds (and is) mundane. But if we accept this as the only thing that can be said with any certainty about the universe and modify the statement to declare that “The purpose of the universe is to exist”, the statement is no longer mundane at all. To say “the purpose is to exist” requires a definition of being and now we are entering into the thorny philosophical realms of ontology and idealism, and hence into the now almost tabu area of metaphysical speculation.

And so, fully aware of the dangers ahead, let’s dive in anyway and swim in this perilous lake of speculation … If the purpose of the universe is Being, it is anathema to non-Being. Being from a cosmological perspective, therefore, implies the idea of permanent Being.

But, what is Being? If Being is everything, and the universe is everything then the statement seems tautologically meaningless (the universe = Being), and cannot be stipulated as a purpose. However, the tautology is only manifested when we approach the universe (and Being) from a quantitative perspective. Once we make our approach from a qualitative direction, the problem opens up and allows us in. This was the brilliant apperception that Berkely made with his Esse est percipi (to be is to be perceived), which is a qualitative statement on Being.

Esse est percipi / Esse est intelligenti – in qualitative terms, the universe was nothing (and Being was non-Being) in the void it had created before it succeeded in manufacturing biological organisms capable of perceiving what that creation actually was. If the purpose of the universe was to exist in a qualitative sense, then it had to evolve into a phenomenon capable of perceiving itself, and the universe’s answer to this problem was to fabricate environments that would allow the formation of sentient, conscious biological organisms. Being can be found through perceiving and the universe can live through the life-forms that have successfully evolved within itself. Once it is perceived, the universe can be known and fulfilled in an existential way, through the contemplation of itself via intelligence.

Or more precisely, the universe contemplates itself via a vast plurality of intelligences. Intelligences that not only decipher and understand reality, but are also capable of modifying and transforming it – of contributing to the self-same process of evolution in the universe. Intelligent life-forms are creative life-forms: once the universe has these it is also enriched by them and by the art and technological innovations they create.

Esse est percipi – Being is in its being perceived. But what is revealed by this perception? A universe of three spatial dimensions locked in the cage of time and space. Reality (despite the possibilities of quantum physics) is driven by cause and effect. The future is regulated by the present, and the present by all that has past. Mistakes happen, as do accidents, and the past and future are conditioned as much by the errors as by the successful developments and positive, permanent-being orientated achievements.

Yes, permanent-being orientated achievements, for Being is only Being when it is not non-Being. If the purpose of the universe is to exist as being-perceived, then embedded in that purpose is an idea of permanence. Being wants to exist forever. However, from what the laws of physics tell us, the idea of a permanent universe is a fantasy: everything is destined to perish, even the universe itself.

So, the question must be asked: is the universe a mistake in logical terms? For, without permanence, the purposiveness in Being disintegrates within the immanence of non-Being (and its subsequent permanence).

To overcome this pessimism therefore we need a faith in the idea that mistakes can be rectified, even at a cosmological level. If the universe is truly a permanent-being orientated system, then it is also capable of continually rectifying its own mistakes. Mistakes which can be perceived via the sentient, rational beings it has been able to produce. It must be emphasised that the universe is not just expanding, it is also continually evolving. That the universe must eventually die has to be regarded as an undesirable notion for the universe – a fundamental mistake in its own physical nature that needs to be rectified. Our current knowledge of physics tells us that this rectification is impossible, nonetheless, the universe has displayed a capacity for acute fine tuning which enabled the conditions for life in the universe to take place, so why not expect the same universe to be able to re-tune itself in order to fabricate conditions that will eternalise its own existence and Being.

From a logical point of view, if the purposiveness of the universe is permanent-being, its own death must be resolved. Intelligence may play an active part in such a resolution. The universe created intelligence to ensure its own Being, to safeguard the permanence of the universe … therein lies the purposiveness of the universe.     

The “I” and the “Not-I”

We must always put our egos, our affirmations of the I, in the midst of the not-I from which all our motivations and our ways of understanding ourselves come from. We can only properly understand ourselves through the great complexity of what we are not.

Nevertheless, it is not for our differences that the not-I stand in conflict, quite the contrary … it is precisely our differences that makes what-we-are-not interesting for us and allows us to be desirable for each other. Our own I is possible only through our relationship with the not-I. The not-I is always another-I and it is within this idea of the another rather than the other, that a recognition and mutuality can be engendered between us.

The recognition of the not-I as that which is another-self is what holds the intersubjective framework of societies together. It is what makes us capable of feeling empathy for the not-I and its importance can be seen when it is lacking, as in the case of psychotic criminals who lack any kind of faculty of empathy.

We are the same and we are different. We are different and we are the same.

Presently we are witnessing the collapse of the current globalised civilisation and experiencing the advanced stages of an historic process toward a world-wide mesh of apocalyptic dystopias. For globalisation to work again it has to been made to function in a positive way and in order to do that it needs to be revaluated and reconstructed from a will to embrace what globalisation itself implied – i.e., A universal culture, by which we mean a truly human culture in which all our not-I-ness could be united in one all-embracing We.

Manipulation

Perhaps the most correctly defining idea for our species after the label of the Homo sapiens belongs to one of our distant ancestors, the Homo habilis, the hominoid manipulator.

In truth, the notion of discovery and understanding embedded in the idea of sapiens and the concept of manipulation in the term habilis are entwined. Together they lead to technological development, creativity, the arts and sciences, and almost everything good we can imagine about humanity, but also to everything loathsome. In fact, there is probably nothing that encompasses all our positive and negative qualities so completely as the concept of reasoned manipulation, for not only has humanity manipulated our natural environment for better or worse, we are also constantly and unashamedly manipulating each other. Having said this, it is also true that the term manipulation has mainly negative connotations, and this reveals a great deal about the way we perceive each other as well as ourselves. It is as if we are born with an enormous potential but cannot help but screw it up when we put that power into practice. The result is the sense of guilt and guilt-ridden anxiety that was exploited by religions through the concept of sin. Nietzsche was probably the first thinker to unravel this ambiguous, psychological relationship we have with our manipulatory nature when he developed his idea of the will to power. It is the gifted nature of humanity which needs to be wrestled with in order to turn our inherent power into something positive – this is what Nietzsche believed. And in the essential part of his argument Nietzsche was right, but he failed to see the common sense embedded in our own sinful anxiety over our manipulatory nature. Let me repeat, we feel guilty about our blessed abilities to take control because when we do embrace it we tend to screw it all up.

For the most part, with or without the will to power on the one hand or any religious morality on the other, humanity is drowning in a deep sea of constant negative manipulation. This is done psychologically, through language and feelings, symbolically, through money, ideologically, institutionally and, as such, bureaucratically through the systems (government or private) that are set up to organise human societies.

Capitalism is an evolutionary result of the acceptance of our own negative manipulating instincts. It is the philosophical apologist for unbridled exploitation par excellence. To manipulate things is to be human, but it needs to be understood and processed in an ethical way by rationality in order to dampen those negative effects of manipulation and channel our manipulatory skills so that they flow through the positive fields of creative invention and artistry, focussing on survival rather than on a blind, self-destructive sense of manipulation that serves greedy desires related to over-consumption and wealth accumulation rather than any authentic human progress.  

By focussing on the positive sides of our human essence we will be able to create a constructive, authentic mood for humanity which will lead to a more authentic human relationship or humane relationship between human beings.

From an existentialist point of view (and here we mean existentialist in the literal sense of the term, i.e., concerning the existence and the potential non-existence of conscious life in the universe) the decision that the dominant political forces manipulating humanity (our ersatz representatives) made when they multilaterally decided to embrace capitalism as the engine for all individual and social exchange, was a fatal choice. Fundamentally so because once the inspirations of the decision had been submitted to and absorbed on a global scale, it took on the form of a singularity, and by doing so made all alternative systems seem unfeasible in a practical sense.

This fundamental decision is grave because it has made all alternative decision making impossible despite the fact that changing circumstances have rendered the original principles and course of action toxic. Today’s principal problem stems from the manipulative decisions human beings made generations ago and its seriousness resides in the fact that we find ourselves incapable of escaping from the blunder.

Only by changing our stance on our system’s assumptions regarding the necessity of perpetual economic growth and on our submissive acceptance of the manipulatory, exploitive instincts of capitalism might we save the planet and save ourselves.  

S.O.S. Paul Adkin