What is the point?
A point for anything suggests that whatever process is going on in what we observe or take part in can be understood in terms of its own finality. It implies a development towards an end so that the changes taking place – and everything changes – can be made sense of in terms of where the thing is going.
This is like Aristotle’s idea that all mortal things – men, animals and plants – develop according to their own specific natures and this is their purpose for themselves in a sublunary world that is also following the rules for its own perpetuation.
However, if there is no ultimate purpose for everything save its own eventual dissolution and random dissociation into a void, which is what scientists now think will be the ultimate heat-death of the universe (since there is apparently not enough dark and other matter in existence to prevent its endless expansion), then the finality of anything, including humanity collectively and individually, is to fulfil our nature by becoming what we are in the brief time allotted to us as fully as possible.
This was Nietzsche’s idea for accepting what he thought was an endless recurrence in which the universe (as scientists then believed) would be repeated by a perpetual reordering of random events an infinite number of times. Nietzsche’s Superman was a heroic individual who rejoiced in joining this pointless dance and spurned the untermensch who could not live without myths and religions that all supposed some universal purpose guided by a supreme deity, even if only a watchmaker who had constructed the whole caboodle and wound it up to set it all going in the first place.
Darwinism for Nietzsche, as for Dawkins today, explained the emergence of increasingly complex living beings following the same physical laws that allowed the formation of non-living but regular objects and events from the original chaos of creation through further mechanically and statistically random events. Today scientists are experimenting with the sub-atomic building blocks of matter to model how if not why this all happened in the first milliseconds after the Big Bang.
Nietzsche’s existential individualism – aside from its implied moral and philosophical relativism (since what is true or not is what the Superman can get everyone else to accept, so that ‘might is right’) – was not intended to have a social appeal. To find a humanist doctrine that would have a collective appeal ‘to all mankind’ was the task of the European Enlightenment philosophers who sought to replace irrational religion with rationality as the guiding light of human progress. As distinct from other animals, human beings were uniquely able to reflect on their own situation and to make purposes for themselves, the first of which is surely our own survival. And not survival alone but betterment and improvement to increase the total of human happiness through progress.
Progress does not necessarily mean greater complexity; it might involve a return to some previous more simple and harmonious relation with nature. But it was understood as a feat of emergence, of a whole greater than the sum of its parts. In this, humanity, even whilst being different from other animals, shares with similar complex and living systems their being as centres of self-interest against the universal drift of meaningless events.
This leads us to systems theory, which sees reality as composed of hierarchically ordered systems open to determination by the systems within which in turn they are contained. So, the individual as a biological system maintains and reproduces itself throughout its lifetime by digestion, excretion, growth and regrowth, relying upon psychological and other subsystems while being contained within the various levels of its society as a larger system.
Societies also follow the tendencies of their own development, within – in turn – economic, ecological and other still larger systems. In this context, human needs are defined in terms of sustaining the necessary conditions for the continued successful maintenance of the social system and if they are not met the behaviour of the system is disturbed, either at the level of individual or group sub-system or at the level of the society as a whole.
However, human beings are unique in not only being informed by but in forming their own environment through the use of tools. Tools transform objects not only literally but also conceptually; they distance consciousness from its immediate perceptions by forming a new purposive whole of means to ends with thought before action. A new and symbolic subsystem is thus created which is capable of self-steering, as the phrase is. Unlike inherited genetic information and animal communication by signalling, symbolic consciousness and the self-steering system it creates is capable of learning from past mistakes to act differently in future. This is what makes human beings, as the nineteenth century artist and socialist, William Morris said, ‘the learning animal’.
For, potentially at least, humanity can learn from the accumulated knowledge and experience of human and natural history that is contained in the culture we pass down the generations to decide our own purpose or point of our collective existence, within which individuals can also achieve their own satisfactions. Utopian ideals of a fixed end state of human development, whether as ‘communism’, ‘a free society’, or any other ‘state of grace’, can be forsaken. Instead, we need to develop and implement the collective knowledge of what is required for human survival. In this sense, nowadays survival has become Utopia. We can then decide where we go from there!
But it may be that we are not alone as beings that have consciousness of themselves in a universe that, despite its vastness, is seemingly pregnant with the possibilities for life and that we may share with other conscious beings, as Michael Polanyi put it in the conclusion to his 1958 philosophy of science, Personal Knowledge that I discussed in the last issue of The Philosophical Take-Away, ‘a short-lived, limited, hazardous opportunity for making some progress… towards an unthinkable consummation.’
By Patrick Ainley
