[from Entanglements: a System of Philosophy (March 2017 from SUNY Press)]
Human beings may be nature's most amazing production, but whether or no, we are certainly nature's most self-congratulatory production. We have a sort of species patriotism wherein to denigrate the human as not created in God's image or not anomalous free agents in a deterministic order or not the crowning achievement by which evolution finally walked upright seems intolerable. However, that a philosophical position makes you feel defensive is not a demonstration that it is false. I would just like to point out that we do not know right now whether, for example, we will take life to the stars, or annihilate it entirely here on earth, and perhaps the ultimate end of evolution is universal extinction under our aegis; that wouldn't surprise me in the least: it's just the sort of trick evolution has already pulled on most of the species that have ever existed. But now I would like to explore a series of thoughts that arise from the speculation that the miracle of the human is not necessarily very impressive. I say we have no idea whether we are very impressive or not. Moralists of almost all stripes - certainly of the Korsgaard variety, for instance, or take Hegel - are extremely impressed with the distinctively human capacity for self-consciousness. This is what grounds the possibility of freedom and of morality, for much of the tradition. Indeed, this is also an informal or simply hackneyed way in which many of us pay tribute to ourselves: isn't it astounding that evolution ends up producing a creature capable of understanding it? Or there are many variations: as a kind of climax, nature produces creatures capable of telling stories, or understanding nature itself through science, and so on. Struggling up from the slime, evolution finally gives rise to language, etc.
I would like to register an objection. First of all, we don't know how incredible or distinctive consciousness is. The kind of reasoning that surveys and values all of the universe in this way is rather problematic. Perhaps there are possible places to climb after consciousness that are to consciousness as consciousness is to a lump of mud. Well, hard to know from here, fellow mudlumps. How amazing and great consciousness is, even if it is the sort of thing its enthusiasts think it is: an incomprehensible question. And really, if every species were self-conscious enough to speak good English, it might attribute cosmic amazingness to its own distinctive adaptations: a snakehead fish, say, might be pretty impressed with its breathing apparatus. Second, I don't think we really know much about whether and how different species of animals or plants might in fact be conscious. And third, certainly we can at least say this: we are conscious of our world and of ourselves in a severely curtailed way. We have made, and we continue to make, the most incredible errors even in figuring out what sorts of things we are (of course, I've figured all that out in this book, so you really don't have to worry about it anymore). Our awareness within the scope of all of reality is miniscule, just as we can't see most of the light. Even if self-consciousness is as good as locomotion, we are still clawing our way like pathetic trilobites out of the primordial soup onto the beach of awareness.
Nietzsche, in a moment that shows all that is best about him as a philosopher, speculates that consciousness, rather than being miraculous or even adaptive, is a derangement or an affliction. Let me just say that that idea itself emerges from a certain sort of consciousness, one tortured by its own excess. I speculate that Nietzsche experienced his own consciousness as a disease. Everybody is familiar with the experience of being morbidly self-conscious, or too intensely aware of one's own train of thought, bodily postures, expressions, etc. This condition can become chronic. And there is also the experience of being too open to, too aware of, the world: the feeling that you're being bombarded and you can't stop thinking, sorting, re-sorting, interpreting and re-interpreting. Deliberation, Nietzsche points out, is slow and often disables a creature from acting.
This argument has a structure that could be used over and over again to demolish arguments based on evolution, particularly those that assert that the fact that a certain trait exists shows that it was selected for. If this could be false of consciousness - and it could be - it could be false of any given faculty or feature. For example, people like Denis Dutton have argued that since art is so pervasive it must be adaptive on an evolutionary scale; this seems vaguely plausible but it isn't. Consciousness might be more like an allergy than it is like an opposable thumb. Consciousness could be, for example, a mere side effect of other as it were computational developments in the brain, an 'unintended' epiphenomenon of a prodigious capacity for autonomic induction or something. And it could certainly be counter-adaptational: the jury is still out on whether it brings species prosperity or total destruction.
The problem of consciousness . . . first confronts us when we begin to realize how much we can do without it. . . . For we could think, feel, will, remember, and also 'act' in every sense of the term, and yet none of all this would have to 'enter our consciousness' (as one says figuratively). All of life would be possible without, as it were, seeing itself in the mirror; and still today, the predominant part of our lives actually unfolds without this mirroring - of course also our thinking, feeling, and willing lives, as insulting as it may sound to an older philosopher. . . . All becoming conscious involves a vast and thorough corruption, falsification, superficialization, and generalization. In the end, growing consciousness is a danger, and he who lives among the most conscious Europeans even knows it is a sickness. (Gay Science sec 354)
This series of thoughts is, as I say, Nietzsche at his very best. That a particular belief or whole intellectual structure would, if true, enhance the self-image of the person believing it should be a reason to suspect that it is held for bad or no reasons, or that the reasons are just developed retroactively to beef up the ego of the believer. Nietzsche is an artist of this sort of suspicion: he sees the massive insecurity seething under the calm declaration of rational agency and free will in a Kant. This is one of those moments when Nietzsche gives the impression of standing outside what everyone else is too in the middle of even to see as an issue. This is the function of the 'overman' as a sort of thought experiment, or something with which Nietzsche would like to identify himself or his voice as a philosopher. Really, I have to say that in many ways it is a despicable notion, and as soon as Nietzsche starts developing political hints from it, he adumbrates a nightmare. But it also functions something like Rawls's original position: it is an imaginary place to stand to see about homo sapiens what we have such difficulty seeing, or such motivation not to see.
When I wrote Obscenity, Anarchy, Reality - urging an ecstatic affirmation of all that is, etc. - I think I said that I was the person very furthest from being able to take my own advice. I was urging myself into a stance of affirmation as a response to an annihilating or engulfing negation to which I have been tempted (by the deaths of my brothers, for example). I would also say that writing that book was somewhat successful in this regard: along with many actual experiences both of pleasure and suffering, it gave me a measure of acceptance. But I have probably never had a moment of actually perfect acceptance, and I'm not sure, finally, that I want one. At any rate, this style of self-therapy or consolation by writing books is I think evident in the whole history of this idea, or even of this element in almost every system of ideas: the part that turns toward the world. Nietzsche, we must see, is tortured by his resentment or hatred of the world. That is what he calls decadence and he associates it with illness: his own, I suggest, above all. He wants to annihilate the world and in particular other people. But above all he is propelled by self-loathing, by the futile desire to become something more than he is by killing the sickness that infests him. In his own eyes he becomes precisely that when he discovers the recurrence, his grail. He overcomes his negation, and the achievement is measured precisely by the size of that yawning abyss. He achieves what the Stoics regarded as an antecedently-existing coherent self.
Now to characterize a set of motivations and ideas like these as stupid passivity or as a mere capitulation to being enslaved by reality is an intolerable simplification, and every system of thought at a minimum had better have a moment of loving the world or it had better not be. But I also think that, as has so often been remarked, in its Nietzschean or its Stoic or its Taoist forms radical acceptance is just not a sustainable attitude for creatures such as we, who are built to need. It would be all too easy to represent the madness of Nietzsche precisely as an index of this impossibility; at any rate it was a demonstration of his inability to eradicate his own sickness or even to diagnose it very well. And indeed, to cease to need is not something one would necessarily wish for, nor would it be only liberating to be freed of sexual desire or hunger, for example: here one would be free for one thing of whole arenas of or contexts of choice. The Buddha taught that suffering is caused by desire, and that one could cease to desire. But that is not clearly desirable, and if we lost desire, we would lose pleasure and love and even certain bittersweet varieties of pain or longing that open up entire dimensions of experience. As well as suffering, of course.
A good model here of free action that is left open to creatures such as we are is handcraft. The crafter, of course, does not impose his will on the material in a mere or sheer way: there are certain forms clay or wood or glass will not assume; these parameters are the very conditions of possibility for the craft or skill in question or they constitute it: the tools of the craft and the movements of the body of the crafter are articulated or formed in dialogue with the materials, or in order to nudge or deflect them toward a desired form, selected from among materially and socially determined possibilities. And then, of course, as the crafts have proceeded they have also developed new materials and then shaped them with reference to their own odd stubbornnesses and various ranges of use. At no point is any one thing or stuff the agent or the patient: stuff and person are mutually articulating one another, with tools as a means of communication between them. In my old age, though I am myself without any handcraft per se, I think the freedom made available in such situations - which will include moments of improvisation - is the most freedom we can actually hope for. But on the other hand it is very satisfactory.
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