The New Human 2
Earth’s Twilight — Chapter 02.2
The descent to the underworld
Once again, the claim of calling archetype, an alleged psychological category of the species as whole, a trait specifically contingent to the western subconscious background as the senex/puer duality, highlights once again the eradicated cultural bias we should be trying to avoid. In fact, the entire psychoanalytic research field inaugurated in Europe at the end of the 19th Century, a period of triumph and unrest for the bourgeoisie, hides the imperialistic pretension of the West of considering itself the climax of the entire human and life’s evolution.
Before Galileo, Descartes and the tyranny of the modern principle of individuation, the great intellectuals of the early renaissance – Pico della Mirandola, Marsilio Ficino, Montaigne – were able to visualize the human cosmos without the presumption of holding the definitive answer to tell what’s human and what’s not. Freeing themselves from the medieval order, they were able to hint briefly to a picture of humanity that the following religion wars and rationalistic hype were to relegate to an aborted possibility. To the theocratic dogmas of the middle ages succeeded the axioms of positivistic illuminism, inexorable against the primitive as the former had been against the unfaithful. As it was imposing the negation of the different at the cultural and political level through its might, the western civilization denied the other face of itself.
After suppressing the ‘other’ in the external world, we found it reborn inside ourselves, and we got scared.
By fracturing the ontological axis on which ran the diverse humanities, the West dissolved the primordial archetypes in a fluid psycho-logical game: the duality thus became the
bittersweet torment of a narcissistic solipsism.
“We became – explains Karl Jung, referring to the ancient fracture between West and East – highly disciplined and rational on one side; while on the other we remained repressed primitives, prisoners of our own education and civilization”.
If we really want to find an answer to the radical questions emerging from this historical blind end in which we are trapped (our current path is only one of many possibles, this is the profound meaning of our discovery), we have to dare seeking more in depth, we must question humanity beyond the level of our particular culture, by shifting from psychology to ethnology, and from ethnology to ontology.
The shift if possible today since we grew mature enough to confront respectfully cultures other from our own, and to allow the dimension of human nature to reconnect to that original point in the phylogenetic time that stands before the cultural differentiations within the species, and even before the separation between the species and its environment.
It was necessary that by the hand of mankind life would enter a phase of extreme precariousness, so that our collective conscience could rejoin the roots it shares with all living beings and so that, thanks to this descent, could rediscover the relativity and interconnectedness that sustain our whole biological family.
It’s fair to give credit for this descent to the homo europeus, who created the physical and mental conditions necessary for a renovated self-awareness of humanity, in which to accept, as faces of the same prism, all the identities previously rejected as alien or subhuman.
Today humanity understood, said Teilhard de Chardin, to be
the temporary stage of a “flux of conscience” that since millions of years “never ceased its ascent towards the fabric of the cosmos”
and that “what it calls self is really the atomic reflection of that tide on itself.”
The natural world we used to call non-self isn’t by any means in contrasting opposition to the human conscience, it is instead
an endless plurality of free subjectivities that surround humanity in a reciprocal web without which the flame of its consciousness would inevitably fade out.
It’s scientifically proven that the human mind currently exploits only a fraction of its full potential, and I reckon this partial black-out is due to the aggressive impulses that until now have been segregating humanity to its pre-human condition, making it impossible to achieve a mutually constructive relationship with the rest of life and even within the same human society.
By not recognizing the other as other to instead repress, dominate, or trying to absorb it, mankind inhibited its own growth, and sanctified its own bias.
“Humanity, wrote Levi-Strauss, is full of unexpected possibilities, each of whom won’t fail to amaze us when revealed.” We can conclude that the many humanities that at present constitute our species are all different actuations of its intrinsic potential, actuations left with little connection one another because of geographic isolation and cultural misunderstandings.
Now everything is ready for the other process, rooted in the unitarian origin of the species, to prevail: the process of reciprocal fecundation.
Ontology of the species
In every human individual we can then distinguish two levels: that of its identity as developed within its own particular culture, and that holding the remaining potential for all those possibilities that haven’t yet found actuation. “We are… double in ourselves”, would say Montaigne. In his masterpiece Das Prinzip Hoffnung, Ernst Bloch borrows his terminology from the medieval mysticism and calls the first level edited human (homo editus) and the second level unedited human (homo ineditus or absconditus).
If every culture has a tendency to propose itself as a necessary condition for the complete realization of humanity, it’s because each of them is driven by the Unitarian impulse of the species: hence the aggression directed towards strangers (the barbaric, the savages), hence the reciprocal contempt between cultures, each presuming to be the real human.
If, as documented by history, cultures are able to compenetrate one another, to the point of individuals passing from one to the next, it’s because, beyond all the differences, every culture derives from the same phylogenetic axis and shares the same ontological trunk, in which converges and expands all that is and all that is becoming, the realized and the yet to realize, the existence and the essence. It is from the depths of this ‘ontic’ fracture that Bloch evokes the ‘principle of hope’ as a characterizing trait of human nature.
Its useful to recall Noam Chomsky’s theory on ‘generative grammar’. To distinguish and separate the pool of the human languages (today we count around 5000) there are, he says, many different grammars, and yet at their roots stands
one common generative grammar that links the diverse ramifications in a common language tree for every human.
We inherit genetically a mental apparatus that contains the basic structures of grammar and that operates in us from birth transcending the limits of the specific grammatical rules learned in our local community. This complex set of perceptive and regulatory feedback mechanisms stands as the subjacent resource pool from which we pick the most appropriate phonological traits as the species evolves, adapting to the environmental cycles. This is the not-yet-edited language that urges inside us with ‘poietical’ force and finds expression even when it accepts a compromise with the edited linguistic tradition in fashion.
The new human isn’t quite like the conventional human,
and keeps transcending it by projecting beyond it all those unedited possibilities that haven’t yet found realization on earth for lack of proper environmental conditions within the planetary web of reciprocities. The conventional human was only a temporary stage of a flux of conscience that is coming from far away, through all the past mutations of our species, and is never really bothered by the momentarily crystallizations of any given cultural identity.
Seen with perspective, cultures aren’t but the seasonally-adjusting branches of the rihizomatic leap of the human species towards the actuation of all its intrinsic potential.
The diaspora of hominids around the planet hasn’t broken the unity of this leap that brings with it the entire human bio-psychic heritage developed in millions of years, before this last phase of dispersion and cultural and ethnic diversification. It’s the inherent frame upon which is staged the game of attraction and repulsion between the human groups. The sense of this generative impulse that has been shaping each culture from within has always been the same:
1. Establish a sustainable equilibrium between life and environment, 2. Give to the group internal cohesion, 3. Develop means of self-defense against the disrupting forces, 4. Translate into reality the inner potential.
