If You’re Conscious, You’re Alienated
If You’re Conscious, You’re Alienated
And cultures channel that alienation in their myths and practices
Mental health professionals say we ought to be healthy and happy, and they prescribe medication for those who are depressed and anxious. This is odd, though, because alienation has been the cornerstone of religious and secular societies since the Axial Age in the middle of the first millennium BCE.
Is there some reason why we should expect alienation to have found its way into so many social norms? Indeed, there is since the structure of consciousness itself primes us to be alienated.
The sophisticated self-awareness of people has its roots in animal sentience, and even in that simpler case, as cognitive scientists like Terrence Deacon and John Vervaeke explain, the organism’s neural control center includes filtering mechanisms that displace the organism from the facts in its environment.
That is, being aware of something in the most rudimentary sense is a matter of focusing on some aspect of the thing, registering the noumenal thing X as Y. The sentient being models X according to that being’s phenotypically possible conceptions, stereotypes, attitudes, instincts, and reactions, so the animal either explicitly conceives of X in some useful way or implies some such conception with its behavioural responses.
Organisms with brains gather and process information, separating themselves from how things really are, by generating an internal model of how reality should be categorized and interpreted. Of course, animals evolved with that bias in mind since their major task is to survive by coming to grips with their environment. Animals analyze their options, dividing advantage from threat, friend from foe, and home territory from foreign grounds. They view the environment not as the universe at large or as God would view it, as it were, but as their species should interpret it, given their skillset and the imperatives of their life cycle.
Mentally speaking, then, we live in a world of abstractions, of genetically, socially, or personally determined constructs. The philosopher Immanuel Kant called those constructs “phenomena,” while Indian religions call them the plays of “Maya,” the illusions to which we cling in mistaking them for the real things themselves.
For instance, consider dogs in the cosmic scope of things. What would you say is the ultimate, most complete account of a dog’s nature? This is something of a trick question because any representation of the animal — including the concept of animals — is bound to be incomplete. To put it paradoxically, the ultimate account of dogs is no account of dogs, no mere model or conception, but the dog itself as it really is. Yet to specify what that reality is requires some simplification and thus a fall from ontological grace.
We’d want to say that dogs are animals, mammals, and pets and that they include bulldogs, poodles, terriers, and the like. But that’s not what dogs really are in the final scheme of things; rather, it’s what they are for creatures like us. We think of dogs in a way that’s useful to us. We understand dogs (and everything else) in these limited ways, based on our information, cognitive inclinations, and social and personal agendas.
To see what’s limited with the human stereotype of dogs, consider whether that conception will be remotely relevant five million years from now — or a billion, or a trillion. What are dogs in the final analysis? That’s the question of dogs’ noumenal (sub-phenomenal) reality, and that reality is perfectly inhuman since it’s divorced from the cognitive, psychological, and social equipment we bring to bear in categorizing and coping with the contents of our environment. Dogs are part of the universe which is itself unfathomable in its entirety or essence.
Granted, some of our conceptions are more objective than others, but they’re all still human conceptions, and the notion that any conception could be adequate to the pure reality of the represented thing or event is a ludicrous vanity.
Specifically, a dog isn’t just a mammal or a pet (a slave or a companion), but something made up of organs, molecules, atoms, and subatomic fluctuations. Moreover, dogs are part of the hyperobject that is the organic continuum. All living things are genetically connected, for instance, so dogs are part of the great family of terrestrial organisms that stretches back to the origin of life and forward perhaps to unimaginable adaptations. Understanding the reality of dogs (or of rocks, planets, or paperclips) would require comprehending the whole history of life. And good luck mentally encompassing all of life without vastly simplifying the subject matter!
The point, then, is that consciousness itself alienates living things from how the rest of the world is. Consciousness takes us from reality to a simplified representation. With every thought we entertain, therefore, we exchange the unfathomable way things really are for the playpens of human conceptions and our creature comforts and pet projects. Noumenally speaking, the whole universe is inhuman since we’re by-products of certain processes, as far as we can understand. But our worldview, meaning the sum of our mental simplifications is all too human in being supported by our judgments of what’s relevant.
In thinking of dogs, we abstract from the animal’s irrelevant aspects and focus on those that are typically useful to us. We do so because our brain uses these conceptions to filter information for our benefit. After all, we’re not mentally suited to grasp every detail there is to know.
As Vervaeke says, we recognize what’s relevant for our purposes or our “affordances.” But what Vervaeke, with his Neoplatonic and Taoist sensibilities, doesn’t appreciate is that alienation is thereby built into life, from the single-celled organism right up to the personal self. Vervaeke wonders where the modern “meaning crisis” came from, and he lays out how scientific objectivity presents a relatively realistic and therefore humbling picture of the world.
Yet historically, objectivity turned inwards in the West, which led to the late-modern evisceration of all myths — including the semantic myth of the absolute adequacy of any conception, such as that of a scientific theory. We’re all just telling stories, concocting models, emphasizing this or that feature to obtain some advantage in a competition of ideas and a struggle for scarce resources.
This is to say that what’s most modern is the realization that we’re bound to be alienated. Modern objectivity informs us that as living things that mentally simplify their environment to survive, we’re inevitably detached from the real world and can therefore only be playing a peculiar game just by using our brain.
Why, then, are religions and secular philosophies such as Jainism and Humanism so filled with alienation? Because these worldviews indirectly come to grips with the nature of consciousness, with what we are at our core. And what we are in structural terms are alienated beings.
This is also the existential philosopher’s point: our great project is to overcome life’s absurdity, and what makes life absurd isn’t just the lack of a loving deity, but the necessary disconnection between life and the world: we want meaning, utility, and control, whereas things as they really are transcend and therefore mock those preoccupations.