Between Beast and God
‘Base creatures, why do you forsake yourselves? Are you content to slither on your bellies, never to lift an eye to heaven? Cast off your bestial fetters! Climb Jacob’s ladder and take your place amongst the stars — for even those born of mud are gods-in-waiting…’ — Thus spake Steve.
A noble sentiment, certainly: at once poetical and progressive. How could we starry-eyed Liberal Art’s students not listen with clasped hands and nodding heads? But poesy and youthful naiveté will not change the world, or indeed ourselves, if unaccompanied by precise thinking and concrete experience. And whilst the broad project of humanity’s transcendence is to be lauded, the proposed method of rejecting our animal nature must surely be admonished, for it devalues present life in lieu of a Messianic future that is never to arrive. In rejecting our animal nature we deprive ourselves of its comprehension and, consequently, of any means by which we may affect its transcendence: we render ourselves impotent and pitiable.
I’ll try to ease the charge of using ‘deliberately vacuous verbiage’ — as Schopenhauer once said of Hegel — by clarifying what is at stake when we enter into discourse on humanity’s ontological position. To be betwixt beast and god is to be between two poles: actuality and potentiality; limitation and freedom. The chain of being runs from crude nature to animals with limited problem-solving abilities, through self-aware and creative humans to transcendent beings that have left behind the limitations of space and time altogether. The closer we move to one end, the farther we move from the other. What free and abstract thought gains in potential, it loses in actuality. This is the dialectic which our Tower of Babel must traverse.
To be between God and beast means that we form the link that connects these two poles; that we are already an actualised potentiality and that we are moving towards a potential actuality. God, humanity and beast form an ontologically continuous chain of becoming (not being as Plato would have it). The continuity of the chain is integral because it is the interaction of the two poles that informs the transcendent movement that we seek. Actuality determines potentiality and potentiality transcends actuality, but only when they are kept in close communion with one another.
Not all potentialities can be realised, and not all actuality has potential. Usually blind and crude Darwinian nature drives the selective process of becoming, but beast first became interesting when it learned that it could control this process and bend it towards its own ends. Beast learned to store the results of its interactions with the world around it in memory (see Hume and Nietzsche). From the compilation of such experience beast slowly came to understand the extent of its own powers and the potential that lay within its grasp. Beast subsequently developed self-awareness and took its first step towards divinity: it became human. In comprehending our powers we found our limitations to be malleable. We found that we could negotiate actuality, expand and improve our abilities and realise new potentials. Through self-awareness and experimentation we therefore came to affect our own self-transcendence and steer our own process of becoming.
Since our animal actuality its constitutive and determinative of our powers — our instinctual passions, our limited capacity to reason and our failure to advance beyond certain social and political structures (e.g. alpha male, insect/drone and herd metaphors) — we must recognise and comprehend these determinations if we are to move beyond them. If we reject and devalue our animal roots we refuse to engage with them, making them unknowable and, consequently, unchangeable. We hypostatise ignorance and betray our liberal intentions. We must affirm the whole of our reality, including our animal nature, if we are to understand it — this is Hegel’s absolute concept and Nietzsche’s yes-saying Übermensch. Both seek divine actuality.
I say again, in rejecting our animal roots we render ourselves ignorant of how to actualise our own potential and that around us. It is no use dreaming of empty abstractions that hover above reality. Of what use to us is a transcendent being that cannot impact or affect actuality? Such a god is impotent, and we too with it if we project our aspirations upon it. As is any ideal that bears an overly abstracted relation to reality. Religion: animal life is immoral and to be rejected; transcendence is to be achieved only in death. Enlightenment ideals: reason and liberty imposed upon a reality that was born of neither. In both instances the chain of becoming is broken because our past and present powers and determinations are either rejected or misunderstood. The process of self-transcendence is displaced either by a Messianic promise of future transcendence that is never to come or the delusion that it has already been achieved.
There were those who moved in the right direction in 17th/18th centuries: Locke, Hume and Kant attempted to discover the limitations of human perception and cognition — limitations that could serve as criteria for distinguishing between those ideals that were possible and those that could exist only in the flights of the imagination.
But then the parallel danger becomes the possibility of lapsing into pagan idolatry. If we become too infatuated with our animal limitations we run the risk of becoming dull and preventing progress. Such a philosophy is backward-looking and conservative in nature. The mistake all too often made here is to see our understanding of our actuality as constant, universal and uniform. Philosophers up to Kant, and even after, all made this assumption, and therefore precluded any strategy for social or spiritual progress.
The uniformity principle is wrong for two reasons. First, epistemology. We frequently misrecognise reality and subsequently misrepresent it to ourselves. Human knowledge is frequently incorrect and subject to constant revision. Whether knowledge progresses is a matter of debate between postmodernists and Hegelians, but it certainly changes. Second, ontology. Reality changes; it becomes. Humanity is animal become. Earth has become and so too the whole universe. We may expect some uniformity given perceived regularities in nature and the accuracy of our predictions. But we must not extend this uniformity absolutely, that would be to say too much. We must limit ourselves only to noting that there is relative uniformity. Even the laws of nature are not universal: they came into existence and are subject to change relative to space and time. But the change here is magnitudes beyond human comprehension so we perceive uniformity, though uniformity relative to human existence.
Our understanding of our bestial selves, our heretofore actuality, must therefore be subject to change, just as we are. This prevents our current self-understanding from unduly limiting our future self-understanding and consequently our divine potential. If we restrict our understanding such that we cannot imagine a potentiality, it will be highly unlikely that we are able to actualise it. Potential must be actually possible if it is to be actualised and actuality must be open to becoming if its potential is to be realised. Actuality and potentiality therefore co-exist in constant tension with one another, the former anchoring and founding the latter, the latter pulling the former forward. And so too must the relation be between our animal and divine natures. We must live as god-beasts soaring high above the summits, but always with our feet firmly planted on the ground.
