YES or NO? The Role of Reason in the Cosmological Evolution unto Complexity Part III
This article is a continuation of part two of rhe same: https://pauladkin.wordpress.com/2021/12/15/yes-or-no-the-role-of-reason-in-the-cosmological-evolution-unto-complexity-part-ii/
(III)
Perhaps if we examine what we do when we understand things we might be able to make some headway. Most of our understanding comes via a refining and defining process carried out through language. This tells us that a process of displacement is natural to the art of understanding things, i.e., in order to understand something, we have to put it aside, at least for a time, so that we can appreciate its unique qualities.
From this we can gather that there is a certain individualising process involved in any attempts to understand, and embedded in everything we understand. In order to know the whole, therefore, it is necessary to pull it all apart. But this dissecting process does not actually negate the whole of what we are investigating, in fact it affirms it by allowing us to comprehend it.
The same should be true of the individual’s relationship to humanity: although we need to separate ourselves from the whole in order to define (and understand) ourselves, and, even, in order to understand the whole of which we form a part, this does not mean in an a priori sense that the whole is diminished by our independence from it. However, that diminishing does take place if we erroneously believe that we stand in an antagonistic position to the whole. Our problem with the whole, therefore, is a judgemental one: an equivocal idea that the whole is an enemy of each individual. It is a psychological weakness that is easily exploited by the organising systems, political or economic, for their own benefit. By manipulating our individual relationship to the whole, civilisation is able to evolve into the anti-human system we have today: encompassing a displacement from the unity we fear; exploiting the illogical angst of that fear and developing its own kind of identities and unities to replace the fear that we need. What has in fact taken place is that civilisation has usurped the whole, taken its mantle, and now sits upon its throne.
As a consequence of this, unauthentic unities are created and the immediacy we experience becomes a kind of pseudo-reality that tugs us away from our authentic identity with humanity.
Nevertheless, all is not lost, and below the superficial surface of this pseudo-reality lies a deeper level of authentic reality. Through our species-defining search for the meaning of things and all the separations necessitated by search a search, our lives are made meaningful, and at the same time we are purposefully united as that which searches for meaning – the homo sapiens, our species identity – our humanity.
Our purpose, therefore, is buried in our search for meaning, which is driven by our being human. In other words, the fact that we disassociate things in order to understand them is a necessary part of our being human. At the same time, however, our act of grouping ourselves into societies that are in conflict with other societies is not an essential part of what we are. In fact, it is an antithetical absurdity when considered in terms of authentic human nature which must be qualified by our relationship to the whole.
The fact that we create our identity not only by reference to the world but also by the differences that distinguish one lifestyle from another does not mean that one must negate the other, but it does mean that one should not negate the other.
With reference to the whole, all human beings are human beings, but with reference to our lifestyles, we are still human beings and share our humanity with all other human beings, no matter what their lifestyles are. Only a way of life that negates our common humanity is reprehensible, although, having said this, almost all societies and cultures propagate some sort of negation of humanity, and this creates another paradoxical twist: How can one accept all of humanity if all human societies are reprehensible because they negate humanity? A lifestyle that is devoted to human purpose and human progress has to be considered more valuable for humanity, and for the whole, than a life that ignores the meaningful whole, or one that negates it, but: What meaning can the whole have it if in reality it is just a mess of broken shards?
From the reference point of the human-whole, we can and must be judgemental on anti-human civilisations and societies, but: How can a critical view like this ever bring humanity together?
Perhaps the answer lies in the idea expressed in psychology of the Gestalt, the whole which is greater than the sum of its parts. Humanity is more than a species, it is more than a collection of individual human beings, it is an anchoring point for the qualitative measuring of civilisations and societies to take place. What we mean by this is that the whole is not just that which envelopes everything, it is also at the centre of everything, or should be if we want reality to be authentic and purposeful.
As the Universe’s eye of reason[1], humanity is at the very centre of the Universe, as an anchoring point of meaning and purposefulness. And this condition of being the Universe’s eye is also part of humanity’s Gestalt. Acknowledging our place in the centre is the first step towards understanding our role in a meaningful Universe that is only truly meaningful if we understand our role here. The cosmos has evolved into an amazing complexity: a complexity that can either dissolve into chaos and non-being again, or flourish into an eternally evolving becoming. What is awesome and at the same time horrifying about this, is that we at the centre bear much of the responsibility for defining the direction in which this cosmological evolution will turn.
[1] See Part One of this article
