I’ve been rereading Joseph Conrad of late. I was looking for books a few weeks ago at a book shop in Seattle and came across Nostromo, which I vaguely remembered reading many years ago but once I started reading it last weekend I realized I hadn’t read it before, I had only purchased the book and intended to read it. As often happens, though, you read truly great books when you need to read them, not before.
I finished Nostromo and quickly tried to find a copy of Under Western Eyes, which I definitely had not read or even intended to read before, and after failing at a few stores finally succumbed and bought a copy on Amazon, along with a new version of the boardgame Sorry for the apartment – my son is a bit obsessed with it right now and given that it’s a fun game I had no qualms indulging his latest fanatacism. I’ve been reading it this weekend, while the girlfriend has been breaking up with me amid accusations of manipulation and control. There is a piece of my heart that understands where she’s coming from, although not with respect to our relationship – manipulation is a particular terror of hers and our fear has a way of conjuring phantoms where none exist. And then there’s been Conrad, the master of the novel of manipulation, lurking beside me – his political novels are all about phantoms and being ruled by fear. So a bit of a themed week, as it were.
It’s also Easter, and April Fools Day. It’s a kind of poetic beauty that this year the two days should fall together. I don’t think Christ was pulling some sort of cosmic prank when he ascended from death – I’m not at all sure what to think about that – but on a day where manipulation and fraud are on my mind, it all somehow makes sense.
So, with that in mind, I write my confession in the hope of being washed clean.
If you’ve continued to read this blog, then I feel that I can share with all of you a simple truth: we all live in the shadow of our founding trauma, the original sin as one of my friends called it, of gaining consciousness and awareness in a world which lacks any purpose. As we look upon history – and our world today does that rarely if ever – we see no intentionality to the narrative of humanity on this earth. Yet still, every year children are born, and every year some of those children awaken to the reality that there is no reality, that there is no reason for us to be here, that our constructions as humans are just a mirage. We become aware of those who came before us and silently disappeared, despite their hopes and their love and their magical insights of consciousness. In that awareness we become aware of the chimera that is our own existence. We give our children hopes and love and we experience the majesty and pain of them acquiring consciousness as well, but even as that happens, we see the illusion of it all.
There is, then, a need to discover some common ground with others. We look for others who share something of our hopes and our love, desiring to find something concrete in the illusion we otherwise must acknowledge as being real. We sometimes cajole others into seeing the illusion through the lens of our own understanding, in the hopes that their belief will reduce our own uncertainty, make our illusion more solid. And we listen and hear others and sound out their words as our own, in the desire to share another illusion so as to solidify ourselves in the other.
I used to envy people I would encounter who felt no need to do any of this, whose world was already concrete and solid and needed no further support in the words and thoughts of others. But that was just silly; I’m not built that way and if I’m honest, I have no desire to be free of doubt, to live without the knowledge that this world is ephemeral and that my existence is just as light, just as airy as all that which has come before me. I used to envy Christ’s certainty that he was the son of God, but it’s the same thing. If Christ was truly human in every way, then he too knew the lightness of being. His lament on the cross seems to indicate that he did understand that, that in the end, he came face to face with that quiet, with the knowledge that living is itself an act of impermanance.
This temporary life, though – this temporary light of existence on this earth – is worthy of our joy. I confess to being in love with this world. I confess to trying to be a kind of missionary of this world, as it is, almost because of its impermanance, because of how in our experience of it we acknowledge the abandonment of ourselves by the universe to discover a place in it that will disappear, that will not remain. I marvel at our creations and the creations of this world. And I’m unabashedly pleased to tell others of that beauty, and to try to convince them – conviction and expression being acts of manipulation – that that beauty is real even if we are only temporary, even if we are just phantoms here for a short while.
I think a lot about how we express value but much of that comes from my awareness of my own inability to describe the value that I feel is most true – the value of life as it comes into being, comes into consciousness, and then dies and leaves this world. We value things and experiences, and we assign quantum signatures to them through money and prices and exchange, but the real value I see is inexpressible via quantum assignment because the magic is seeing all of it in whole, as imperfectly as we can through our short lives on this earth. The real value is not of ourselves but it’s in ourselves being part of a broader world, with connections that were there before we came and which will change but continue when we leave. And I want others to see that too – and I will do my best to bring others into that communion.
I have no monopoly on this even though my missionary zeal will come across to others sometimes as a kind of evangelical force which admits no room for alternative. My parents experience of this through their faith, my friends (and girlfriend’s) experience of this in their multitude of ways all show me that I only have a perspective on an infinite space, and those other perspectives are all just as true to the extent that they also see that beauty, that space of joy, that transcends our lives. I want others to experience my perspective but in the same breath I crave their experience as well. The beauty of this world – the current of love and of life which inhabits it – makes me aware of the limitations of my single perspective and inspires me to connect with others who can show me new sight lines, who can expand my visionary palette.
That moment when I was around five or six and I became aware of this and simultaneously knew that I was temporary, that I was going to disappear some day, even though this incomprehensible beauty would persist and continue and grow without me, that moment was both a moment of trauma – of pain – and a moment of release, of joy. I hold that joy within me even as I nurse the pain of knowing that someday it will fly away. For me, at least, that moment made me start searching for others to understand the joy that they must surely see as well. I’ve found, though, that my goal isn’t to find someone, or other people, who share my perspective. I just want to find other people who see joy from whatever angle. I want to share my perspective on that joy and share in their different perspectives, knowing that we will never align, knowing that there is no point to trying to justify or solidify our experience through anothers. The point, really, is just to marvel together at the whole of existence from the shared experience of being temporary inhabitants of it.
I think of this today through the lens of Conrad, that author of worldiness who still sees the cosmic background glow of amazement, of beauty, that we spend too much time ignoring as we pursue worldly value and worldly intent, as we look to others to give us a sense of the concrete. He’s unique in offering us portraits of individuals who seem to have access to that light but then turn away – and he often writes from the perspective of a detached but deeply interested observer, who is looking for others’ perspectives but seeing how too often individuals choose to turn away, to close their eyes and hearts, and his chronicle of the inevitable despair that follows a Nostromo, a Razumov, a Kurtz in the wake of that willful blindness is, really, the essence of the modernist morality play.
I said earlier that our founding trauma is realizing we are in a world with no purpose. Lacking purpose is not the same as lacking beauty, or majesty, or grace. And being only temporary residents of this world does not make our existence any less graceful, except when we choose to ignore it. As spring renews us – even though in Maine that consists largely of mud and raw winds off the water – I’m grateful to be reminded of that grace, and to be reminded simultaneously of the folly of turning away from it.
You write about our founding trauma, our original sin. Was the trauma ‘gaining consciousness’, or is it believing that our lives lack purpose? The former is clearly laid-out in the apple story. I do not think of it as a trauma per say, but as a birth to what it means to be human (though being born is quite traumatic – I will give you that). The burden of consciousness is ours to bear, if we want to truly live a human life. The latter is different: it is entirely a matter of faith – we cannot empirically know, only spiritually believe. Believing in a purpose (for both our lives and our humanity) is enough to avoid the traumatic pain of being purposeless…
I have never believed that my life lacked purpose. Like you, I study our human history and understand the sciences behind our physical existence and evolution. Like you, I see the beauty, the majesty and the grace in the world. But unlike you, I chose to believe that my purpose for being alive IS to witness that majestic beauty AND to enhance / bring forth / create more beauty, more grace, more pleasure and joy. My purpose in life (and I am willing to extend that purpose to everyone) is to tip the scale toward more goodness and love than badness. As simple as that.
This purpose is simply the extension of our free will: What will you do with your ability to choose your own faith and path? How will you spend your impermanent but nonetheless real time on Earth? How will your actions influence the course of humankind?
Because our lives might be short (in the scale of Earth time), but we can “live on” through what we did while alive. We have children. We have discoveries. Jesus came and went, but somehow “survived” 2000 years. Plato, Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Einstein. Simple human, like you and me, who influenced the path of our human world. Yes, the whole human construct could – hypothetically – have been different if it would have been different men leaving different impacts into the world. But it isn’t.
Our physical reality is not an illusion (IE: matter exists), and what we do within this physical reality matters in shaping that one future ahead. I don’t believe in the multiverse. I believe that there is this Universe, that our World is 13.8 billion years in the making (not ephemeral), and that science is starting to understand that the ‘life forming’ capacity of our world is so improbable that we could call it a miracle. Furthermore, I believe that by being alive, IE: by being embodied into this somewhat limiting but still extraordinary powerful body, we come to influence the course of evolution, may that be by our inaction, our willingful blindness, our intended exploitation or our generosity. In other words, we co-create. I figured that this is the very reason why Jesus came on Earth. He couldn’t influence the human evolution / history from the ether; he had to have a body that could feel pain, that could be betrayed and killed.
Now, talking about the intentionality of the narrative of humanity, that might be a bit much. Is there a Grand Plan? An Architect somewhere? Probably not – per say. But each soul born is a co-creator, with agency to be as passive or active as it wishes, with full free will as to which intent it will pursue. That is already plenty to deal with !
And if we are looking at history, both human and of the physical world, we can see that the path has always been toward greater complexity. A complexity that somehow stabilizes, reproduces, and from which emerges ever greater complexity. I see no reason to doubt that if the Universe had intentionality, that would be it !
I don’t think we’re that far apart in this. Your purpose is self-constructed – and it’s a beautiful one that does make our human world more lovely and more loving. I think I share your idea, too, that experiencing the beauty and joy of the world, and seeking to do more than simply “no harm” but to positively create new sources of beauty and joy with the material that we are given, is what I’m pursuing. I do see that as an act of will, of free will, and that consciously directed will to beauty makes me get out of bed each day and do whatever it is I do.
By “purposeless” I really am speaking to the lack of a purpose outside of ourselves, one that we are compelled to pursue for its own sake. My experience has been that most people are looking for that kind of a purpose, be it from a God or from some grand design that may not be God-like but still is greater, and therefore instantly validated, than ourselves. The pursuit of the trappings of our human world, for example, becomes this greater design: many of us see the human construct as something which drives us to build, to create, or to seek validation from others. This kind of self-referential pursuit is circular, though – we seek validation from a society that we are complicit in building, that we are complicit in creating the references of success – and circularity gives no purpose. It’s simply chasing a tail.
The creation of complexity is an interesting wrinkle. Perhaps it is just a restatement of the pursuit of beauty – beauty is complexity, and releasing ourselves to our role in the construction of that complexity is the highest expression of our creative potential. I’m not sure, though, that as constructed our society or ourselves as individuals see that. And maybe that is the root of the trauma: when faced with the explosive complexity revealed by consciousness, in our panic we are driven to reduce the complexity we see to comprehensible goals and objectives and projects, none of which in themselves have meaning except in themselves. We become more or less aware over time that that reductionism is a folly, but yet we’re still compelled to pursue it.
You and I end up in the same place: we accept our roles as co-creators, and our creations are in the purest form simply new expressions of love, for no purpose that we need to find except as love. In doing that we also release ourselves from any legacy that may come in the future, and while we gratefully acknowledge those who came before, we don’t need to feel bound or entangled in whatever their goals or pursuits may have been. In that, it’s not about how we influence humanity or the universe in our short time here – it’s simply to create love, without regard to our influence.
I also enjoyed your embrace of this physical world – 13.8 billion years old, etc. I don’t necessarily agree, though, that science is getting any closer to understanding the life-forming potential of this old universe. The science that I read is, if anything, the object example of our reductionism – our peculiar compulsion to search for external meaning. The endless pursuit of ever-smaller and more energetic quantum units ignores what I think is far more central to the creation of complexity – the vast interconnectedness of all things, across time and space. Science at its heart seeks to explain; what we’re talking of isn’t an explanation, it’s a release into living for its own sake, damn the explanation.
I agree to all you say, and thank you for your words… I agree with the futility of pursuing the ‘society-given’ purpose for our lives. Making money, getting married, having kids, being promoted: these things may bring joy, but only if done for their own sake – by self-constructed choices – , not to fulfill parents’ or society’s expectations. I agree that most people don’t stop and wonder if those achievements are their own goals, or those dictated (or sublimely implanted) by our social construct. But it does serve one purpose, for the society’s sake, to reproduce social norms across time. Might it be the mechanism through which society ‘reproduces’ itself even as the individuals involved are different ? After all, to imprint behaviours into DNA is too slow of a process…
I take online course on Coursera, just for fun you know ! And there is several courses on Big History, the new field which aims to link the knowledge of our evolution across disciplines. I agree that this way of seeing our science is still the fringe, but it now exists – it has a name ! Same with my studies of Global Affairs, mixing International Relations, Political Sciences, Economics and Sociology. The integration of (scientific) knowledge across disciplines is starting, and yet, of course, it will take time to reverse centuries of over-specialization and reductionism. If we could, in the blink of an eye, keep all our current knowledge but see it all as subsets of philosophy (which really it is how it all fragmented) – would that bring us closer to the integration of knowledge ? Maybe not, but at least it would open us up to the possibility of an integrated theory of ‘social humanity’… (Is that the right word ?!?)
Yes, as humans, we seek patterns and reasons where there might be only randomness. We seek to explain everything, even with mythologies, simply to ‘make order’ of our world (and feel a little bit more in control – or at least, a little bit less lost). With consciousness, I think that this drive to explain everything is very deeply rooted. Maybe the two sides of a single coin: the ability to witness, and the desire to name and understand.
The one big leap required is in the validation required to ‘know’ something. Is witnessing enough ? (IE: is a subjective evaluation of something enough to know it. ) Or in the ‘naming and understanding’, does it HAS TO be objective to be ‘knowable’ ? (IE: It has to be external – hence “our peculiar compulsion to search for external meaning.” ) But hasn’t quantum physics ALSO reached the limits of objectivity ??? Why can’t ‘the scientific community’ acknowledge that the looker and the looked are linked ? That everything is linked. These are the leap we need, not the abandonment of explanations…
I don’t damn the explanations. I actually embrace them. Though my self-constructed explanations are all that I need to forge ahead. Without them though, I am anxious and cannot live merely for the joy and beauty of it. I need my explanations to calm my consciousness… What about you? Can you live for its own sake without a solid intellectual foundation ?
I’ve been impressed in reading into the new “Big History” movement as well. (For others on the site, I highly recommend David Christian’s “Maps of Time”, which is at attempt at creating a founding document for the discipline.) It’s a tremendously liberating exercise, and I do like the attempt to construct a narrative which isn’t bound to “merely” human actions but embraces the march of complexity, and of life, and then of consciousness, and then on to where we are today. But you’re picking up on something that also troubles me about this new interdisciplinary attempt at integration: it does seem to simply feed a need for explanation. We are then almost simultaneously confronted with another instinctual human urge: the desire to take our narratives forward to predict the future, or, to shade it differently perhaps, to attempt to guide our own actions going forward.
I’m trying not to do this, although I realize (reading now Charles Taylor) that this puts me square in the crosshairs of modern moral philosophy. I’m interested in understanding what I should “do” (spoken in a mild Bristol accent but with authority and intent), but I’m far more interested in how I should “be” – what the integrated field of my being should consist of, in other words, not just the actions I will take with respect to my breakfast, my dog, my girlfriend, my job, or my vote. Explanations seem to be an impediment to an understanding of how to be; they compel you to do the next thing. I’m not shying away from doing the next thing – I’m trying to find a job, figure out where I should live, meet new people and cook better food – but I am trying to not get cluttered by that.
I find the explanations intellectually interesting to be sure – it’s tremendously fun to wrap one’s mind (and heart and soul) around the connections that surely exist between the quality of our universe that allows quantum expansion, that enabled gravity to become a binding force despite its relatively weak strength, and how that leads to the creation of complexity that had, experientially, brought us to consciousness and the construction of societies of autonomous-but-linked conscious beings. I’m in agreement with you on the idea that consciousness is something new and it’s replicating itself in new ways – I like the analogy of society reproducing itself.
So: can I live for its own sake without a solid intellectual foundation. I don’t know. I think the answer is yes, even given a mind prone to questioning and rationality and doubt. As I say this, in fact, I think living is done best without too much of an intellectual foundation – too solid a foundation is an impediment to living, and in facts leads to a kind of automated existence, in which we exist simply to validate the state of nature as we find it against our intellectual foundations and then solve for the action to be taken next. Living, in my terminology, is the ability to stay in a kind of innocent wonder as nature continues to change and offer new possibilities.
One of the core concepts of quantum time is the idea of a future cone. We exist always at the intersection point of a fixed past and a non-fixed future of an infinite number of potential states. The present is simply a moment of closing off a certain part of that future cone as we fix the current state into historical stasis. I’m uncomfortable with that, although I understand the mathematics that makes that a viable description of at least the physical reality of time. As a historian, I’m aware of the past as a set of infinitely unknowable assessments of where we came from, and as a living being on this marvelous earth, I’m also aware that the future’s potential neither closes off all possibilities, nor does it close history to reinterpretation and reconsideration. Rather than living at the fatally sharp tip of the cone of future states, I think I’m seeking to live at the centre of a sphere of potential stretching both forward and backward in time, and around me in space, and my job in living a good life is to expand the sphere in all directions.
You’re right, to say “to hell with explanations” is a bit childish (but I’ll jealously guard my rhetorical flourishes, thank you!). But I don’t want my explanations to get in the way of the broader practice of living a good life. We’ve seen far too much of that amongst others in our lives, Viktoria, to buy into it! Living for its own sake is a practice which gives rise to intellectual explanations simply because we are human. I guess what I’m trying out is an exercise in seeing if my consciousness can be at peace without using those explanations as a crutch. Can I stand on my own human feet – and what will my mind do once I’m upright?
Dear Peter,
You are the most learned person I know (by very far !). I admire that in you, that you have searched and been able to accumulate all this knowledge and ideas of our human fellows and predecessors. Now, you are looking for your own truth (not how you should be, but WHO) and that will be found inward, not in the library stacks. I get that. You are looking for what ‘feels right’, not what ‘makes sense’.
I also understand that rationalizations are not helpful when rigid, when dogmatized. The head can justify anything and its opposite – I agree. (I’m a 4 handed economist after all!) Still, I believe that explanations are as essential to the human mind as food is to the human body. You can feed your body well or eat crap, and both will sustain you and lead to various outcomes (either live fit ‘till a ripe old age or have type 2 diabetes in middle age). But the need for explanations remains, and I believe that we are better off concentrating on improving the quality of the explanations we provide ourselves, than to try to let go of explanations all together.
That being said, I very much like your terminology for living: to maintain innocent wonder. Yes, to continuously witness the world as it is. And if explanations are too rigid, then one falls pray to the confirmation bias and see only what confirms one view. Maybe ‘solid’ was indeed the wrong word – since our world is so in flux. Just beware that the mind (the left brain actually) will continue to ‘make sense’, seeing patterns and putting words on whatever you are facing. I believe that you are trying to quiet that down. That is a noble goal, since the rational mind (the reason) is only one facet of consciousness.
When you stand upright on your own human feet, you will find that your center of gravity moves from the head to the heart. That indeed, love is to guide you. Joy and beauty are also expressions of love, as is complexity (since it required positive attraction of distinct components to emerge as something new). Love in all its form, at its core, IS merely positive vibrations. And yes, this is clearly more subtle than that big (reasonable !?) voice in our head.
So, ask your heart some questions. How would I feel if X/Y/Z ? Then imagine that scenario, fill in a few details, immerse yourself in it, and with empathy, listen to how you feel. What emotions are emerging? This practice is the heart equivalent of thought experiments. This is how I have use my heart as my life compass – by being empathetic to all the potential ‘who I should be’ and letting the ‘what feels the most right’ being my arrow. And whatever answers you find using your heart, the explanations for these answers will either be very faint (self-constructed / filled afterward), or not even use words – just be the memory of that feeling or its particular flavor or intensity.
Nonetheless, consciousness is satisfied and at peace by theses answers found in our heart. That might be what you seek.