Dismantling the Absolute in order to find our Ultimate Purpose
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The romantic philosopher F.W.J. Schelling defined the Absolute as that which does not depend on anything else in order to exist or be conceived. Spinoza used the term substance to conceptualise more or less the same thing. His definition went: “By substance, I mean that which is in itself, and is conceived through itself, and is conceived through itself; in other words, that of which a conception can be formed independently of any other conception.”
This idea is also referred to as the causa sui. God, the Absolute, Substance, the infinite substance of the in-itself … but none of these concepts help us in any way to affirm any positive purpose for humanity, and for that reason, from a human perspective, they must be considered nihilistic concepts, belonging to what Camus described as our absurd existential condition.
And this is important for it is humanity’s lack of ultimate purposefulness which has trapped us into the circular moving vortex of the all-consuming purposeless absurdity that we find ourselves trapped in today. The climate emergency and the continuous and ever more precarious economic crises, broadening gaps of inequality and inflating the bubble of poverty, can only be solved through a systemic reshuffle that will only be successful if an authentic, human purpose is found.
For us, as humanists and idealists, Schelling’s idea of the Absolute does not exist. Our own Idealism tells us that there is nothing that does not depend on anything else in order to be conceived. As we contemplate the Universe, it is our contemplation which gives that same Universe a qualitative existential form. Or, in other words, it is only by being perceived that the thing is properly conceived. Without perception the Universe would be a dead limbo of utter meaninglessness. Meaninglessness being the key word here, for the underlying property of the existence of anything and everything has to be ultimately tied to the interrogative Why?.
As far as the perceiving agent is concerned, this too is conditioned by qualitative factors. Being able to perceive the world, is not the same as knowing that you are perceiving the world. The sapiens entities in the Universe, the organisms that know, like humanity, are therefore the most relevant elements in the Universe’s conception. Because the Universe is not conceived until it is known. The Universe has a circular, existential relationship with humanity: It needs humanity to know it in order to be conceived and exist, and humanity needs the Universe to have created the physical conditions that make its own sapiens evolution possible. Already we have found a purposiveness for humanity that would be revolutionary if it were embraced as a motivating concept for humanity: we are here to know, and our knowledge is absolutely necessary not just for our own existence but for the existence of the very Universe itself.
And this idea reaches deeper into the well of purposiveness, for it is not only our obligation to know and understand where we are and what we have, we also have the obligation to preserve it, to firstly maintain our own living environment, this planet Earth, but ultimately to determine how the dying Universe itself could be perpetuated. The ultimate question and purpose of humanity lies in the question of eternity. How can we make existence perpetual?
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Schelling attributed the Absolute, causa sui, to the Universe, which was a big step forward in metaphysical thinking, or a step back in theological reasoning. God was brought back to the cosmos again. Philosophy was returned to Parmenides and its pre-Socratic roots. It was overcoming the occult and the supernatural and explaining things according to the natural laws of the science of physics.
However, it was physics that also put another nail in the coffin of human purpose as a teleological aspiration, when it announced that the only thing to be sure of for our existence is doomed to die, just as we are all doomed to die. The message from this is very simple: do not hope that the work you do today is for prosperity. The Universe now has a use-by date. There can be no perpetual progress either. You may as well just make the most of what you can do for yourself in this short lifetime. To think beyond it is pure vanity. Forget the great human works – work for yourself; make money; enjoy yourself; enjoy the day to day.
Nevertheless, this message must now be considered the old physics. We have now entered a new, more hopeful era in cosmological thinking. The Universe is no longer contracting, as was originally predicted it must, there is a dark force that keeps everything expanding. The message is still one of doom: a freezing finality rather than a total implosion (not with a bang but a whimper), but the sudden reversal of expectations is a hopeful inspiration. Perhaps the doom is not so definite, that the end is not yet written after all. We still have thousands of millions of years for our understanding of the Universe to grow and for our technological influence on the Universe to take shape. We still have thousands of millions of years for humanity to evolve into the Universe’s Guardians. But for that to ever happen we have to take humanity’s first existential step forward right now. We have to become the Guardians of the Earth. Our first great challenge: to overcome the enormous damage that we ourselves have inflicted on our natural environment. And if we fail this task, everything fails; everything dies.
