How Physical Objects Submit to the Apparent Miracle of Human Consciousness
The role of objectification in the advent of civilization
Is there a default mode of human understanding, a way of thinking that’s universal and hardwired into the brain?
If so, it would have to be the animistic sort of hypersocialization that seems to have been commonplace for thousands of years in the Upper Paleolithic. Until we were taught to do otherwise, after history accumulated through trials and errors, the way we naturally preferred — and still may prefer — to think is to adopt what the philosopher Daniel Dennett called the “intentional stance.”
Taking that stance, we presume we’re dealing with a fellow mind, so we attempt to negotiate verbally or magically with what’s in front of us. We posit gods and goblins and ancestral spirits, just as children readily invent imaginary friends. We interpret nature as being fundamentally alive, meaningful, and subject to moral assessment.
All of which is a long way from objectivity, logic, and scientific inference to the best explanation. What, then, is the difference between hypersocialization and objectification?
The Subjectivity of Understanding
Objectivity is supposed to be cognitive neutrality, a passive deference to the facts themselves. Instead of expressing our biases and our preferences, we let the real facts speak, as it were. Alas, the facts never do so. Only knowledge-gatherers can speak; only we care about the truth and attempt to ascertain it by understanding the world with symbols, arguments, and models.
What would it mean, then, to be purely neutral towards the facts, to let them wash over us, nullifying our impudent impositions and producing a purely objective thought or statement? Suppose the clouds begin to rain. What would a purely objective response be to that eventuality? Maybe I respond to the rain by thinking “It’s raining.” Would I be neutral and passive in thinking that thought?
My use of the English symbol for rain, namely “rain,” would track rainfall rather than, say, a blizzard, a dog barking, or a lunar eclipse. But mere tracking with a repertoire of symbols can be almost accidental, having little cognitive value. Even a squirrel can track cars on the road by thinking, say, “Blort” in reaction to their appearance, yet the squirrel doesn’t understand what cars or roads are. For the squirrel, “Blort” means just any loud, fast-moving blob that may threaten its safety.
For “It’s raining” to count as knowledge and thus as a justified, veridical thought, I’d have to understand the subject matter, in which case I’d have to apply a conception of rain, based on my background knowledge. Surely, I understand rain to some extent since I can distinguish rain from many other things. But does any conception ever passively reflect the referent? What would that even mean?
A passive, neutral letting of a fact be what it is would amount to getting out of the fact’s way, adding nothing significant, for example, to the rain itself. But all conceptions are stereotypes or models that simplify and that add plenty of human, cultural, or personal preoccupations. I might think of rain, for example, as being worse than sunshine, as a nuisance inflicted by nature’s annoying indifference to my plans. Obviously that value judgment would be subjective rather than objective, in that it would actively express a piece of my mind which has nothing to do with rain itself.
Objectivity as Cognitive Neutrality
Even the most technical, rigorous, scientific conception of rain, which comes closest to a pure act of objectification would impose something onto rain, namely an instrumental outlook. The fact that we never conceptualize something’s relation to everything else, but carve up the world into levels of analysis, into parts and wholes, causes and effects, systems, processes, and cycles testifies not to what the rain is but to what we mean to do about rain.
Objectification is the kind of understanding that enables us to control our environment. After all, if we stretch our minds and try to think of rain the way the entire universe would if the universe could do so, how would we think of an instance of rainfall?
First, the passage of time would be largely illusory, an artifact of our conscious filtering of experience, so the fact that it’s only begun to rain now would be neither here nor there.
Secondly, rain in one location would be part of the water cycle, connecting with the seas, rivers, fog, and evaporated water, and terrestrial water as a sprawling whole would be a hyperobject occupying the scale of deep time, stretching into the distant past and future, to the very beginning and end of life.
Thirdly, water would be part of the Earth which in turn is part of the solar system, which in turn is part of the Milky Way galaxy, and so on and so forth until you could no longer talk about rainfall without talking about the origin and the fate of the entire cosmos.
Does even the scientific conception of rain, then, convey any such total concept of that interconnected event? Perhaps all scientific models together would do so. But which human mind encompasses the entirety of scientific understanding? None, so the fragmented empirical description of rain would be an imposition just in leaving out the overwhelming context of any natural event. We ignore the event’s background not arbitrarily but subjectively and strategically because no such knowledge fits into any useful conception.
This is just to say that even a scientific conception is a tool, not an absolute revelation of something’s essence. We reduce the terrestrial water cycle to the rain stage because often we prefer to contemplate just that fragment of the whole phenomenon and pondering the sublime whole in every case would be courting madness.
The Impracticality of Epiphanies
A neutral, self-negating deference to the entirety, say, of rain would amount to a mystical epiphany, to the mind’s acting as a conduit for the whole cosmos — complete with rain’s causal and evolutionary connections to everything else — to wash over the helpless thinker. In that case you’d have no intuitive mental representation, gross linguistic simplification, or scientific model of rain, but just the rain itself in its relation to everything else. You’d have the universe itself drowning out your mind.
This would amount to what William Blake spoke of when he said,
To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour.
Such an epiphany would be overwhelming and therefore useless; indeed, it would be counterproductive. Certainly, while lost in neutral, passive deference towards the facts in all their inhuman fullness, you’d forget to eat, to sleep, and perhaps even to breathe. Acting as a conduit for the transmission of the cosmic entirety might even be lethal, not just useless for human purposes. What could we do with rain-in-so-far-as-rain-is-part-of-the-universal-whole?
Living in the now, as the wealthy charlatan-mystic Eckhart Tolle says, we might find inner peace. Or as Baruch Spinoza said, we’d understand our deterministic place in nature’s causal order. But then what? If everything were all one and foreordained, what would be the point of human agency? Why bother living as a mammal that keeps deluding itself into thinking its selfhood has independent merit?
No, even the mystic comes down from the mountain and lives on mundane terms, swapping passivity for active egocentrism. That’s why Tolle hoards the millions of dollars from his book sales and speaking engagements instead of deeming the money arbitrary in its relation to the cosmos, and freely giving it away to all comers. The mystic, too, must think practically, if only to communicate his or her revelations to the disciples or to help save the planet from mass ignorance.
But that practicality is only a human strategy to get the better of situations, to outthink rivals, to find weak spots in the facts, and to apply our crafty conceptual simplifications with know-how and technology.
Objective Facts as Virtual Zombies
Along with logic, science, and industry, objectification in general seems to have arisen with the social hierarchies of large sedentary societies, and thus with the royal master’s domestication of plants, animals, and human slaves.
Of course, even in prehistory, we could figure out how nature works by trial and error and by appealing to the best explanation, getting lucky with some socializing frameworks (myths, theologies, and magic) that we now think badly misrepresent natural forces, elements, and complexities. But true objectification, the eschewing of myths and childlike mental projections, in favour not of mystical neutrality and epiphanies but of an instrumental, Machiavellian, humanistic outlook went along with political schemes of domination.
As I explain elsewhere, objectification has an unintended side-effect, which is nature’s re-enchantment. To objectify is to posit only lifeless, amoral causes that are ripe for exploitation, which is to say that the objective knower implicitly sees himself as a master in relation to potentially enslaved natural systems. The laws of nature are the manacles binding nature to our whims.
But if nature is fundamentally mindless, and an objective explanation of anything entails atheism as a matter of course, whence the natural order in the first place? Objectification ushers in animism 2.0 or pantheism by zombifying the cosmic plenum. Each natural event will resemble the zombie’s magical, albeit pointless, amoral, absurd, horrific shuffling from here to there. Somehow nature creates itself or has always been. Natural events just keep happening for no reason, towards no redeeming end.
Possibly, natural events are indeed horrific in that sense, and an enlightened perspective on nature would begin with something like the survivor’s outrage in the standard fictional zombie apocalypse story. Surrounded by zombies or “natural” events, that is, by purely physical, “objective” — absurd, lifeless but not inert — happenings, we’d pass swiftly to waging an existential, tragic rebellion against the wilderness.
From Egalitarian Animism to Civilized Humanism
But does objectivity in this sense relate to what I explain elsewhere as the necessary strangeness of conscious subjectivity? There I argue that qualia are metaphysically distinct from unconscious matter because the evolution of consciousness powers life as a pivot point in life’s existential revolt against entropy and thus, more broadly, against the indifference of the greater wilderness. In that respect consciousness is like a black hole’s singularity, given the latter’s role in shaping galaxies.
Putting these two theses together (consciousness and objectification), we should say that in most of our prehistory, in the Stone Age, qualia wouldn’t have stood out as anomalous in human experience because prehistoric people would have tended to presume that everything was conscious. Rather than objectifying nature, animists explained seasonal patterns, life cycles, and causal relations by projecting intentions and purposes onto the nonliving phenomena. Far from appearing as a miraculous anomaly, then, human qualia would have belonged to a social continuum of ancestral, trickster, and benevolent spirits.
Eventually, as the nomadic way of life was replaced with a sedentary one, requiring a hierarchy of special social classes to manage society, to acquire the supplies for growing populations, and to feed the vanity of the upper class, animism evolved into polytheism. The “spirits,” too, were concentrated now, matching nomadic people’s shift into isolated communities.
As people retreated from the wilderness, building cities, kingdoms, and empires behind fortified walls, they were alienated from nature. Just as the patriarchal nobles now mattered more than the women, the labourers, and the slaves, the chief gods ruled over the lesser spirits. We withdrew, then, not just to the artificial domains we constructed, but to a more politicized religion. Egalitarian animism morphed into the hierarchical pantheons, from polytheism into henotheism and monolatry, and eventually into monotheism in which the one true God was nowhere to be found at all in nature.
With that descent into politics and that ascent of the gods into the Heavens, nature began to look like a reserve of raw materials, of resources to be exploited and managed for profane purposes. With our intimate relation to nature lost, as we settled into civilization, we began to look at nature not as inherently sacred but as raw material for our tools, to be exploited to magnify our greatness.
As formulated by early philosophers in India and Greece, nature became physical, objective, and disenchanted. Complementary to that process was the elevation of human consciousness, which now indeed appeared bizarre in relation to the mere physical events that had been drained of their vitality and divine purpose, as it were. Now qualia (and life generally) stood out as foreign to matter and to inorganic energy. In its personal, subjective, private dimension, consciousness was a ghostly, immaterial fragment of long-lost supernatural divinity.
This paved the way for the function of elevated forms of consciousness, which is to transform the absurd, indifferent, amoral wilderness into the ideal, responsive, artificial worlds we create with our applied knowledge of nature’s affordances.
Humanism and Objectification
Thus, nature’s objectivity or physicality is magnified by the rise of humanism, by the dawning appreciation of the strangeness of personal, alienated subjectivity.
Of course, we’d want to say that objectification isn’t a mere political strategy to elevate us above nature; rather, we discovered that there are no gods or spirits in nature. The moon and the planets are indeed best explained in scientific terms, as physical objects that are cosmically processed.
Indeed, there’s little reason to think that ancient philosophers selected objectivity as something like a rhetorical strategy. We shouldn’t commit the genetic fallacy of assuming that because objectification arose with sedentary societies, the epistemic value of objectivity is reducible to the conditions of that point of origin. On the contrary, retreating to large societies enabled us to view nature with some detachment, to notice what prehistoric people had missed or what was hiding in plain sight, namely the sheer, mindless physicality of events in our environment.
Nevertheless, the facts themselves didn’t inform us that philosophical naturalism, say, is superior to religious supernaturalism as a way of viewing the world. The facts themselves never speak our language. What happened instead is that, in pursuit of the purposes that seemed increasingly urgent with the rise of civilization, certain epistemic criteria took precedence over archaic ones.
Religions served their purpose of making prehistoric people feel at home in what was arguably, rather, a godless, horrific wilderness, a truly wild place that was alien to their burgeoning concerns. As we domesticated ourselves and took on our civil roles as managers of our household and of our corner of society, philosophy, science, and industry came to the fore because they were more useful to the civilized agenda.
Epistemic Criteria for a Way of Life
We can test this ultimate subjectivity or pragmatic scope of our “discovery” of nature’s mundane physicality, by asking how we’d think of nature if we were forced to abandon the humanistic expectations of civilized progress.
Suppose, for instance, we were met with an apocalyptic event that spelled the end of human civilization. We few survive the catastrophe and confront a shattered world. Would nature seem to us still like a mere standing reserve of materials to be efficiently exploited? Would consciousness still strike us as a miracle or as a saving grace of disenchanted nature? Or would we slide back into a childlike conception of nature as a magical place to be befriended, as hinted at by the novel Earth Abides?
What is it exactly that chooses the epistemic criteria by which we judge whole worldviews, cultures, and grand theories? There’s no such deliberate choice, at least none that settles the matter without prejudice. To prefer naturalism to supernaturalism is ultimately to throw your lot in with humanism, liberalism, and secular progress. The choice isn’t just of narrow epistemic criteria but of a civilized way of life.
To reject those standards and that disenchanted view of nature is to opt for “tradition” and for illiberal codes of conduct, as in the autocratic backlash against neoliberal democracies, led by Russia, China, India, the Muslim world, and the Republican Party. For the rising illiberal societies, the Promethean, Faustian, or Luciferian elevation of humanity over nature isn’t the paramount concern. What matters, rather, is nationalism, the security of belonging to a unified police state, driven by a strongman leader.
From the liberal standpoint, this is barbarism, just as prehistoric animism made for “savagery” (for the supposed opposite of cosmopolitan, broad-minded civility). But liberal ideals don’t triumph over illiberal ones without being presupposed. The Allies physically beat the Axis powers in WWII, but that didn’t prove that American society was better than the Nazi one. What could it mean to show that America is good while the Third Reich was evil, without presupposing the terms to bias the debate? If the Nazis had won, the notion that American individualism is evil would have become the default presumption — as indeed that assessment is in much of Russia, China, and the Middle East.
Of course, if you presuppose the axioms of liberal humanism, then Nazism, racism, and slavery seem evil. But there’s no neutral standpoint for drawing that conclusion — at least none apart from a possible foreshadowing of a transhuman, enlightened standpoint in some combination of existentialism and dark pantheism, as I’m inclined to argue.
What matters here, though, is that the physical, natural, or historical facts themselves don’t dictate which way of life is best. The universe doesn’t care how we live. And the fact that one society can overpower another doesn’t mean the dominator’s culture is in all ways superior to the weaker one. To say otherwise is just to commit the naturalistic fallacy.
The principles that guide cultures aren’t objectively true or false. A culture’s vision and ultimate mission in history brand its corresponding lifestyle and are subject, rather, to moral and aesthetic evaluation. Just as you pick your favourite fictional narratives depending on how much they shape your identity and move you emotionally, so we prefer the culture we grow up in because it shapes our character and sets us on our life’s path to which we cling.
