YES or NO? The Role of Reason in the Cosmological Evolution unto Complexity (PART II)

Continued from part one: https://pauladkin.wordpress.com/2021/12/13/yes-or-no-the-role-of-reason-in-the-cosmological-evolution-unto-complexity-part-1/

(II)

Understanding then, via reason and observation, is a higher sense of consciousness that itself enriches reality in its idealistic form: i.e., the relationship between the observer and the thing observed.

Understanding is also an enriching phenomenon that works two ways: it enhances both the thing observed and the observer. Being understood is important in the idealistic reality as that which understands. Nevertheless, this relationship will be invasive amongst individuals who enjoy the process of understanding, but also resent too much invasion of their own privacy.

For the conscious beings we call sapiens, reality has become a social reality, necessary for sapiens’ development, but not compatible, and even antithetical, with the idealist ontological relationship of observer and observed.

But how is this so? What is the basis of this need for privacy from the enquiring eyes of the others, and of the whole?   

The answer lies in the nature of individual consciousness, which is its very individuality. An individuality which is part of a whole, and, in order to protect itself, it needs to protect itself from the invasiveness of the whole.

This need for protection from invasiveness bears a profound problem for the whole itself, evolving into a profound disassociation away from the entirety, that will swallow the individual, even whilst at the same time understanding that by doing so, its identity and meaning is also diminished. Having lost the comfortable, authentic meaning of itself as part of humanity, the individual struggles to find closer, more intimate relationships. But it is through this struggle to find support and identity with the local group that fatal effects for humanity have arisen. Human history has been an anti-humanising process of separation and segregations that has created a tremendous intolerance amongst human beings. And it this intolerance to others that, throughout the anti-human historical process that we call the civilising process, has repeatedly had enormously tragic consequences.

If the roots of this internecine tendency in humanity are in our need for protection from absorption into the whole, how can this paradox – that we need what we most fear – be resolved?