IMPERATIVES OF CULTURAL WORLD EVOLUTION

 

Homo Genesis: Future through Individuation – Equilibration - Determination

VON  J  MICHAEL  HEYNEN

Abstract

This essay of critical-programmatic reflection describes a conceptual framework on the imperatives of civilizational transition processes as individual-social, equilibrating evolution. The focus is on the category of inner and outer worlds of humans, identifying the mutual complementarity of cognitive-aesthetic individuation and simultaneous universality as a determination of noumenal-transformative, future-proof development of societies.

Introduction

In the beginning there was not the word, but spirit and consciousness. The will derived from this formed the energy of the Big Bang, the universe was created: the external world - also a space of free will. Within the framework of the metaphysical, then physical cosmic law, the home planet of today's human civilization was subsequently created, vitalized ed by a leading essence, an intrinsically hybrid essence, in order to govern the mutual complementarity of idea and reality in an evolutionary manner.

This process of so-called equilibration ensures that the spirit is vitalized and life is spiritualized - as the primary driving force of gradual transition and evolution. Life understood in this way forces the question: Is the current development of man still coherent and concordant with the universal law of development? Who will be the man of the future? - The correlation of inner and outer worlds provides realizations for the critical self-reflection towards the upcoming development paths of civilizational transition and transformation.

I. STATUS QUO : TIME AND SPACE

Beginning with the industrial revolution, human development has reached an age in the last fifty years at the latest that is referred to as the Anthropocene: the extensive domination of the planet by humans.

Complementary to this development, an increasing despiritualization set in, because Anthropocene orientation is essentially physical-material. People(s), societies and their states decoupled themselves from the self and the supremacy of the spirit, allocating their existence largely to the substructure of possessions and technical functional dominance. Cultural-spiritual connections and developments faded in favor of coping with pure existence and seemingly endless resources.

To this day, this coping is about private-public / oligarchic-autocratic competing forces of egocentric profit and power concentration under the condition of purely materially understood "distributive justice". Anthropocenic domination has thus become decoupled from people and humanity - inversely proportional to external progress - and formal power to act has largely shifted to the side of the system agents. Humane principles are marginalized or paralyzed.

This also applies to the so-called western, democratic, constitutional states that are progressive in terms of humane political models and systems. Government processes that lack substance, transparency and competence preserve democratic forms and empty society and the state - both materially and immaterially.

Political power is reduced to administrative action of formal legitimacy with high control and extreme bureaucratic expenditure; substantial creative power is the great vacuum being compensated by old, mixed up political models - mostly based on ideological political marketing and egocentric substitute projection. Highly complex pseudo-regulation and staged crises, conflicts and wars camouflage the structural legitimacy deficit of factually autocratic-feudalistic systems. Humans become persons, life becomes a function.

The critical, enlightened and analytical person might not fail to notice that such systems of rule cannot function in a sustainable manner on either the micro or macro level and are obviously unsuitable for establishing and dynamically sustaining a humane order and world order. Irritation, disharmony and disorientation are the predominant consequences. Rigidity through constantly repeating antiquated, dogmatic-ideological power formats of autocratic-imperial pseudo-greatness leads to a final loss of legitimacy, dissolution in chaos and finally complete paralysis.

Despiritualization, decoupling, emptying lead to entropy, desolation and nihilism; even quantitative attempts at control through artificial intelligence will of course not remedy this, because so-called transhumanism ignores or negates the inexhaustible creativity and cognitive quality of human-metaphysical potentials. But these are based in the inner space of man, who has currently exhausted himself in the outer space. And here - in the inner space - lies the source and the reason for civilizational transition, which describes a quantum leap. Because in the end it is always man himself: the phoenix rising from the ashes.

II. METAMORPHOSIS: INSIDE AND OUTSIDE

Anyone who agrees with the above anamnesis will have an idea of ​​the reason for the regression of civilization: the increasing loss of external freedom as a consequence of the self-inflicted abandonment of internal freedom. In any case, in Western civilization, the fathers of the freedom struggle came from the internal determination of freedom in order to organize and order the conditions of external freedom accordingly. The external constitution essentially became a reflection of the internal.

Today, the external world is in increasing disorder, as its conditions are largely decoupled from internal determinations or these are not identifiable and effective as leading ones. For a situation of transition that appears urgent, a reversal of thrust in the sense of conscious will formation to identify and dynamize necessary potential for change appears inevitable:

1. Inner and Outer Space

The Neo-Platonist Augustine conveyed the knowledge of inside and outside. According to this, humans are hybrid beings in which inner and outer worlds come together. And yet humanization develops clearly distinguishable modalities of movement depending on the space in which the respective activity is centered: being or consciousness. Inner and outer space therefore describe different sources and potentials for aggregating life processes and fulfilling life.

While the outer space describes the space of conditional and limited incorporation and materialization in the outer world, i.e. the space of learning communication, sensory experience, material-physical coping with life, etc., the inner area is to be characterized as the space of all consciousness processes and classified as follows:

The inner space contains the developing, autonomous potential not only of the mental and spiritual processing of external experiences, but also the sui generis initiated determinants of thinking and feeling processes. The emancipating self becomes the bearer of learning and perceiving consciousness, which generates the driving energy of the formation of ideas, beings and will and continues to scale it qualitatively. The mind and reason help to organize intellectual developments and results as intermediate steps, to keep them available in order to return them to consciousness in accordance with a control loop and to correlate them with feelings and thoughts.

This process - controlled as an internal one - is autonomous and thus the foundation of individual freedom, since it is completely removed from sensory experience and thus from possible external, limiting influence. In contrast to the external world, the internal world is not bound by conditions, i.e. unlimited and open to universal endlessness and eternity. The inner world of man is therefore suitable for developing and realizing the absolute, the totality of his self. This inner, formative reality of unlimited imagination and vision formation fills and shapes the respective personality, forming the consciousness of a unique essence. This also describes - analogous to the universe - an ever-expanding developmental dynamic of spiritual-psychological identity and energy.

2. Subject und Object

Comparable to the distinction between inside and outside, the differentiation of subject and object describes the central function of an intelligible, perceiving human consciousness (based on Karl Jaspers). In the identification of the human being as a subject beyond the pure object function lies the emancipatory, independent, and thus always individual mastery of existence - each from the individual self, the actual humanization according to the potentials and dimensions of the inner space.

While the object keeps external, adjustable, quantifiable materiality available up to scientific objectification, the subject is the open source of mental and spiritual, feeling and cognitively comprehensible processes including the dimensions of the absolute and the totality. The object refers to normative / standardized quantity and conditionality, to form and symbol, the subject to unlimited qualification / quality and determination, to substance and meaning, to idea and deduced will.

Objectivity questions provability and external, conditional truth, subjectivity generates inner world movement and imagination as well as processes of decision-making and finding the interior truth. The subjective leads the inner world from idea and will as the driving force, the objective offers material formation and serial conditions for existential implementation and development.

Subject and object describe a mutually complementary relationship, decoupling them means "disembodying" the spirit and "despiritualizing" life, emptying its meaning. And a life without meaning and sensuality from subjectivity becomes "objective", at the same time cold and nihilistic, and above all the least humane. The subject therefore needs the object to vitalize the spirit, and the object needs the subject to spiritualize life, to form the basis and the initiatory energy of consciousness, to humanize being.

In the current Anthropocene, material-technological domination has seduced people into almost complete objectification. And transhuman quantification marginalizes societies into unified, controllable masses that, in the false security of the enslaved collective, replace a kind of being with having and compensate for "freedom from meaning." Humans become objects by giving up their subjectivity, and the subject's individually based freedom becomes an "objective" threat to the politically economized or eco-politicized systems.

As a result, nihilism, inner emptiness and vegetative existence leave behind an external world without human ideas and imagination, without reason and fantasy - in other words, everything that is so urgently needed beyond the current, small-scale system relevance of the objective as a prerequisite for successful and sustainable transition. This assessment provokes the question: How can people and societies overcome this dead end of any kind of humane development?

3. Individuation und Introversion

The ability of humans to learn is based on cognition and experience, the latter can serve knowledge and finding. At the same time, cognition - the area of inner space - has much more extensive dimensions, which it places independently of experience in the outer space and elevates above it: the dimensions of reflection, perception, imagination and contemplation as well as empathy and feeling as a method of a- priori exploration of complementary inner and outer worlds.

The increasing consciousness of the adult human being is developed from the process of being as a child. This type of emancipation - like a quantum leap - brings about the reversal into the supremacy of spirit-supported self-determination, the autonomy of the subject, i.e. dependent on conscious cognition processing, to deduct leadership and responsibility from its inner world and to correlate and communicate with the outside. Only this opening to the inside, introversion, creates the foundation for inner leadership from the self in order to give space to the absolute, the totality of the human being's inner world and - depending on the condition - to represent it on the outside.

In this way, humans mature into individuals, while at the same time increasing their potential as free, communicative social beings. And further: humans as subjects of their respective individuation, guided by the infinity of their consciousness, are largely aware of their relativity in physical-material reality and choose appropriate positions and processes to position themselves socially and legitimately within society. Their inner formation becomes a creative impulse, an inspiration for social, non-violent processes of will-formation, decision-making and qualitative growth.

4. Equilibration und Elevation

Man becomes a human being from a person - see above - through his natural hybridity: correlating inner and outer spaces, transcendence and spiritual worlds with real and material ones. Intertwining consciousness and being privileges and liberates in the independent potentials of universal control and design. The human capacity to design and understand the interface between inside and outside, between subject and object - comparable to a control loop - and life processes from this is all the more essential.

This process of equilibration is a vertical (re)connection from and with the self of the subject. Consciousness takes the lead, the process is simultaneously and first of all a mental one. The soul, still part of the inner space, is the perceiving connection to the outside, the inner eye to the outer world. Imagining, contemplating, finding and learning connect subjectivity and objectivity, connect inner and outer impulses, inspire and facilitate.

This type of equilibration is one of the greatest challenges of human interaction, because inner totality meets reality, the absolute meets the relative, determination meets conditionality, the will of the spirit to create meets finiteness and the conditionality of the physical and material. It is therefore a specific learning and performance capacity of humans and in particular of their constant mental development to approach potentially opposing energetic "aggregate states", to coordinate them adequately, to balance them integratively and to harmonize causes and effects as transformatively as possible.

In any case, humans have a solution for this connection and transformative fulfillment: the dimension of aesthetics and cultures with all their multiple levels of design and expression. "Objective" reality is bound and sensitized, high consciousness is aesthetically grounded. The experiencing soul becomes a dynamic space, mediating and moderating inner and outer worlds and perception processes between substance and form. The perpetuation of this equilibration leads to a kind of constant conversion, transition and transformation.

Thus the a-posterior mutates into the a-prior and opens consciousness to a creatively effective subject in increasingly reactive objectivity. In this way, vertical and horizontal equilibration are crossed and fused in an emancipatory manner: the object is subjectivized and the subject is objectivized, thus life is spiritualized and spirit is vitalized! The middle, the "arithmetic mean" of the resulting decision-making and action processes of the individual human being is cognitively and communicatively raised and describes a permanently available elevation as a core element of human development dynamics: the foundation of a cultural human.

The equilibrating solution of subject-object differences and opposites can serve the fulfillment of the human being in forming a reality from his dreams and fantasies, visions and imaginations. In this way, the civilized human being – each with a sense of freedom and peacefulness – can also succeed in configuring and shaping concordant social worlds of humanity that prescribe an adequate statehood, insofar it’s still needed.

5. Free Will and Societal Worlds

Consciousness determines being. Thus, the inner space (see above) comprises the basis of freedom, the cause of free will. Individual totality, the absolute, purified by mind and reflection, feeling and contemplation, norms the determination of the subject. These exclusively internal processes are to be connected with and in the external space through adequate communication and negotiation. The inner determination is correlated and equilibrated with the external conditions (see above), thus creating free groups, societies and unlimited inter-societal interaction.

Of course, societies can exist that constitute themselves exclusively from a collective will (volonté generale), foregoing individual consciousness and free will (volonté de tous). In this case, the conditions of reality are elevated to determination, being determines a limited consciousness that follows the so-called knowledge into necessity. This can result from a final act of free choice, but can also be based on physical or psychological violence. If the source of the norm lies exclusively in the external space, the internal space becomes the vanishing point of a mental and spiritual emigration. The dominance of external pressure to conform dissolves the humane connection between the inner and outer worlds and sacrifices individual existence to a mostly ideological and/or religious totality and absolutization that lacks any legitimacy in the external space. The exclusion of human subjectivity leads to slavery, spiritual impoverishment, nihilism, morbidity and overall to social decay; a future that at least meets the standards of a humane existence is thus probably unattainable.

The existence and future viability of a society therefore require the spirit to bring it to life and the spirit to guide its development. In constant equilibration, the change and transition processes of internal and external sources of norms must be classified, adapted, balanced in negotiations and the formation of will - from individual freedom – is to be coordinated. This function of representation shapes governance and creates the statehood that a society can give itself to control its living conditions, as long as and to the extent that the categorical imperative (Kant) has not yet been essentially fulfilled.

The state and government form of the constitutional monarchy and in particular that of the constitutional democracy are particularly suitable for organizing the objectification of subjective social dynamics and for correlating them synthetically. However, this form of governance is subject to the highest demands: maximum legitimization for the minimum necessary regulation, consistent promotion of individual and social freedoms, unrestricted transparency, personal integrity and professionality. Otherwise, governance becomes rigid in form, empties social resources, delegitimizes state power and reverses the state's monopoly of power entrusted and granted by society against the substance of its mandated existence. Feudal-autocratic overstretching of state functions and - especially evident in foreign policy – (post-) imperialist policies counteract freedom and peace in social living conditions. After statehood has solidified, society then takes on the emptied form again in order to reposition itself substantially. The process of subject-object equilibration as described above organizes innovatively and at the same time creates truly legitimate sovereignty if the a-priori cognition primarily includes the historical process: the social dynamics, drawn from the individual's free consciousness and will, guarantee future developments in constant, equilibrating internal and external transition.

Ultimately, it can be recognized that the reasons for good governance and wise politics - as well as for economic processes - lie in the responsibility of societies and their future-oriented responsibility, in terms of power control and, above all, the free will to shape things. And these depend on a consciously and intentionally de-personalized, i.e. transpersonalizing, social leadership culture in accordance with universal laws of thought. The equilibration of the creative tension between adequately corresponding essences and external resonances creates the transformative synthesis of a humane fusion of present and future. In this sense, the free will of man is the energizer and the conditio sine qua non of his free societies.

III. FUTURE VISION: CIVILIZATION AND HOMO GENESIS

Anyone who looks at the current world situation and, above all, the current development of humanity in the ongoing Anthropocene can identify three directions of egocentric "vision formation": transhumanist projection, perceptions of the threat of an end of the world and the traditional persistence in ideological and religious patterns. However, all attempts of this kind also deliberately fail to recognize the centrality of humans for their future development. Or have humans largely become alienated from themselves in the course of the Anthropocene?

As already stated in the introduction above: Human life and the sustainable design of their development processes remain intrinsically linked to their individual human identity and the quality of their implementation. The supremacy lies in the autonomous subject, not in the vegetative object and its tendency towards entropy. The obvious self-alienation can be reversed through a re-connection with the human self - the "eternal self" (Sörensen Kierkegaard) - through remembering and revitalizing it, its inner spaces and processes. This revitalization of inner "radial energy" (Teilhard de Chardin) from the totality of reflective consciousness is to be understood as the basis of the present, from which a humane future can be developed. The humanization in the waning Anthropocene is at the same time the building of a bridge to the Noocene: from the balancing guidance of human consciousness and being to the process of fulfilling its self-according destiny.

1. Noumenality und Normativity

Leadership into the future of man and for man is firstly inner leadership from the self and thus from and for freedom. The most essential immanence is that of freedom. Successful leadership comes from individual determination, never from the immanence of external conditions. The necessary potential for change towards the future follows the processes of inner spaces, which are to be correlated afterwards with the outer spaces in a way of guiding implementation.

Leading development understood as evolution, transition and transformation towards humane future evaluation is based on the - necessarily individual - capacity of the mind, on the cognitive, reflective and feelingly contemplating use of universal laws of thought and human consciousness. The 'cognition / knowledge based on mind' - noumenality – being independent of limited reality offers the unlimited scope and autonomy to identify and decide on the future. The a-priori cognitive consciousness of the individual can sovereignly emancipate itself from the normativity of the factual and organize the relevant living conditions. And so it is possible to use inner spaces of freedom to reorganize and shape the external living spaces of people in a formative way and to constantly qualify them in an equilibrating way. The largely superficial circulating present processes (“dead end”, see above) are thus replaced and dissolved by the noumenal and normative (maxims) inner guidance of the creative human, who knows about his future and makes it manageable for his society.

2. Will of Creation and World Formula

The human who acts and equilibrates from within comes from the “cogito ergo sum” (Descartes) as an autonomous subject and thus controls his identical and social positioning. From substance and “radial energy” (see above) he transforms his internally matured process of finding into the life processes of society – creatively, subjectively and communicatively objectifying. Its radial energy is transformed into a "tangential" one (also Teilhard de Chardin) and internalized and formed socially in a clarifying resonance process. Individual creative will is transformed into a process of persuasion in order to inspire further social development on a large and small scale. In this way, in constant equilibration of individuation and universality, (inter)social interaction can be consolidated as a transition and transformation process.

Inner peace and freedom leads to movement: the revitalization of spirit, the spiritualization of life. In this process, the "one decisive formula" - usually from and for the ideological-religious fixation of external power conditions - is replaced by the world formula of creatively and interactively connected, multilateral and unconditional processes: the future is development based on the presence of consciousness, and an infinite process, and a process is ultimately the limitless human metamorphosis of civilization. This world formula also offers the potential to revitalize human beings, to experience the often sought-after redemption through precisely this kind of fulfillment – ​​individually generated and socially supported.

3. Cultural Human and World Order

The above statements may provoke the objection that not every person can meet the "high" demands of this so-called ideal/idealistic image of man. And whoever or what this objection is intended to justify or protect, it is certainly not wrong, because people are not equal. At the same time, as introduced above, the following applies: Man is born in a space of free will and can have every natural potential to develop into an autonomous subject. This development is always open-ended, as it is probably the greatest challenge: the cultural man is - in his infinite variety, diversity and quality - the bearer of his civilization and thus the „principal“ of his own further development.

Thus the cultural man - grown from consciousness and being - is inevitably the master of his future, this cannot be compensated for, egomaniacally projected and/or sublimated. His fate and thus that of his society lies in his inner leadership. Because homo sapiens, an evolutionary act of creation in external space, has individually taken over the further process of creation with the development of his consciousness, incarnated and emanatively shaped it from the inner spaces of his self: homo genesis. The people of the Renaissance had already preluded it: homo genesis - comparable to a "pole shift" - comes from within and carries out a kind of individual self-creation within the framework and as part of the universal overall creation. In this way, the cosmic balance arises in connected spaces of consciousness and being and equilibrates radial and tangential energies.

This cultural human, the individual homo genesis, who is evolutionarily responsible for himself from the "knowing human" to the (co-) creative human, also expands his progress in recognizing himself in other people and their self-consciousness. Body, soul, spirit are basic elements of human nature, from which exponential variations in perception and perceptibility arise: love and solution, communication and understanding are essentially possible from and on all levels – transpersonal, not transhuman!

The knowing and perceiving subject therefore has infinite opportunities to connect and engage with other individuals and/or their groups and societies in a balancing and objectifying manner. From this connection (see above III, 2) of the cultural human being, creative and constructive synergies are created for the constant, even optimizing development of societies. The potential of humane progress and its order can be facilitated in a constant correlation of individuation and universality. In this way, these communicative clarification and ordering processes give rise to orders and a world order that can continually develop / deepen justice and the dignity of human beings as to be justified and fundamentally guaranteed even in transition.

Outlook

On the one hand, the development of human civilization is essentially admirable and successful in its control of the biosphere and geosphere, as long as these do not lead to their destruction. On the other hand, homo sapiens has largely abandoned the balance of internal and external development spaces, since it no longer or not yet recognizes and understands itself as a human being who proactively creates from within, as homo genesis.

Anyone who takes up Teilhard de Chardin's concept of cosmogenesis can recognize that evolution and the future are always constitutively linked to the further development of consciousness. Evolution first formed the conditions for the emergence of consciousness, then expanding consciousness became the intrinsic core element of human development and its societies. The reverse is also true: a being without sufficient consciousness leaves behind a stagnating evolution without elevation and provoces an end time that does not exclude the end of civilization. At the same time, an end time contains the essential ingredients of a new beginning: the self-determined rebalancing of the external and internal worlds of individual and societal humans under the supremacy of the inner space.

Cultural man has the creative and energetic potential to resolve social "dead ends" (see last paragraph II 2 above), which have repeatedly materialized in political and economic, autocratic and neo-feudalistic dominances that are ultimately turned away from man. Man, as the subject and facilitator of his culture, will always be able to regain the determination and the power to act for sustainable, humane civilization development: sovereign and dynamically balancing, at the same time free from ideological and religious messianisms that have to be overcome.

If the cultural human being as homo genesis succeeds in shaping himself creatively and innovatively from his inner destiny - transcendence, spirit and feeling - he can fulfil his humanity from within. And if he begins to "not look outside for what he carries within himself" (in reference to Gandhi), but to carry from within to outside what he wants to find and shape, then he rises towards the often-invoked redemption. The future is then not the substitute projection of a limited ego, but timeless elevation, the opening into the universality of equilibratingly developing social worlds as part of a cosmic continuum. For the so-called paradise may have been lost on the outside, but never on the inside.

©  J MICHAEL HEYNEN | FOUNDING PRESIDENT OF THE SENATE OF CULTURES