An Essay on Prophecy and Evolution Content

An Essay on Prophecy and Evolution by Roman Angerer

Content Collective Consciousness and Society .......................................................................... 1 Functions of Prophecy ............................................................................................... 3 Functions of Evolution .............................................................................................. 4 Prophecy and Harmony ............................................................................................ 5 Ethical Life and the Reality Bracket ........................................................................ 6 Resources .................................................................................................................... 8

Collective Consciousness and Society Emile Durkheim writes, in the Elementary Forms of Religious Experiences, that in fact prophets, the founders of religions, were not merely insane but sane enough to sense phenomena which were “not pure illusions put at the basis of these religions; but they corresponded to something in reality.” This idea isn`t an isolated assumption in his work rather connected to the idea of a collective consciousness which, for Durkheim, is “the highest form of the psychic life, since it is the consciousness of the consciousnesses.” As that which is placed “outside and above individual and local contingencies, it sees things only in their permanent and essential aspects, which it crystallizes into communicable ideas.” According to this argumentation a prophet shows up as the one who is able to cross, with the help of his senses or suprasensual perception, the boundary between his and the collective`s mind. More specifically, to cross it in a way that is neither a generally available mode of perception nor common to most people. Spencer Browns Laws of Form state that in the context of crossings “the value of each crossing made again is not the value of the first crossing.” That means, the prophetic act lies within the creative advance generated through touching the contents, motives and values outside the boundaries of one`s separate, skin-encapsuled ego – outside one`s mind, body and sensations. The prophet thus is someone, given a specific place and time, who surpasses most everybody in what Derrida calls the Invention of the Other: “the coming of a still unanticipated alterity, for which no horizon of expectation as yet seems ready, in place, available.” What for most people is simply an undiscernible, not to discover and completely contingent space of concealed intersubjectivity, unmarked and seemingly completely exterior and nothing apart from a stranger to the faculties, paradoxically becomes, through privilege or 1

Roman Angerer: Prophecy and Evolution

heightened sensitivity, full-blown potentiality: potential marks, discoveries and distinctions – no longer and no more contingency but unconditional, collectively generated truths and essential ideas and ideals. However, intersubjectivity is not the right term for that which, rendering Durkheim, “embraces all known reality.” As Luhmann accentuates, the idea of intersubjectivity is something “we must let go of so that it can be replaced by the concept of a closed self-referential system of communication which is called society.” Society or rather, in this case, collective consciousness, as the wellspring of prophetic knowledge, means that which is radically outside of any human subject and thus not intersubjective but distinct from any subjectivity, living and existing but hidden from normal perception. Nevertheless, society is defined as an after-effect. It is the consequence of conscious systems, humans and sentients, who contribute to it through embodied gross, subtle or very subtle modes of speech which turn into the insides of terrestrial and cosmic realities, hence into communication as the medium of the collective consciousness`s forms which vice versa constitute man, and other life forms, such like material, alive or simply imaginary ones. By this, the ever-increasing amount of speech and related communication, society seems inherently built for the continuation of pre-human evolution as “an increase of freedom and possibilities through both increasing invariance and increasing changeability walking hand in hand.” This can, if Luhmann is further considered happen through both: intensification of discourse and emergencies or jumps in complexity as permanent achievements like eyes, verbal speech, the printing press or traditional, modern and postmodern modes of understanding and interaction. First and foremost, the freedom incorporated by humans increased overnight by such an emergence, explicitly “with the invention of negation”, Luhmann muses. Only by birthing the possibility to decide between yes and no something like society can be generated as a communication-based image and mechanism of evolution in opposition to a static, lifeless or deceasing object. Only the twofold formula of negation “as that which contains its inversion: affirmation”, the beginning of social dynamics becomes more than just a dream but an experienced and lived terrestrial reality. Because, in a reframe and rewriting of Nietzsche, “negations are ways of passing sentence, value judgments; they are a way of turning one's back on the will to existence.” Existence at large or just on a specific spatiotemporal expression of communication, life and society. The type of no, Luhmann refers to, thus creates at the very least an irritation and maximally the end of society. It consequently brings forth, through the ever changing and revolving relationship of the constituent and the constituted, alternations within “the unity of two possibly infinites” and infinitely free. Negation is a bone of contention for the, within society,


interlocked but distinct interiors and exteriors. It varies the structure of a “unity of differences, those between individuals as well as systems and their environments”, the ever self-reinforcing or vanishing fabrications of minds which, too, generate the revolving of society. Any negation always invites both alter and ego, individual and group or system and environment to change to keep their unity working. And this, not merely as epiphenomenon but as an own reality generates society or collective consciousness as the sum of all the spoken heartbeats of the past within that of the present moment. Again, in order to sustain their structural coupling necessary for the self-constitutive autopoietic structure and process, two sides, inside and outside, have to change in accordance. But the information necessary for change can never be available within an ordinary system or individual because it is distributed throughout society. As something invisible, undiscernible and completely unknown it needs a prophet to be sourced, to condense, unless adaption is seen as something strictly contingent, as merely blind trial and error. Functions of Prophecy Prophecy in the Old Testament had according to the German biblical scholar Erich Zenger a double function, including educated words of judgment on the one hand and visions or words of salvation on the other. Earlier is exemplarily expressed in Mica`s “woe to those who devise iniquity, and work out evil on their beds”, while Ezekiel points to the later, when he narrates that “the man said unto him, son of man, behold with thine eyes, and hear with thine ears, and set thine heart upon all that I shall shew thee; for to the intent that I might shew them unto thee art thou brought hither: declare all that thou seest to the house of Israel.” It is the tragic of the Abrahamic religions` prophets that they are entrapped in this, by most people of their times, unappreciated double function. They are not only visionaries but foremost critics and occupants: “The necessary counterweight to retarded or invalid social practices, administrations and institutions.” However, as Zenger puts it, it is “through the inspiration and power of the divine word that the prophet gains the charisma of sharp analysis of the present age`s downsides and the power for relentless critique of their presence.” Comprised of the involuntary but divine and appointed role of being a caller in the desert of the old, the privileged connection to the highest psychic consciousness of all other consciousnesses is the only thing that makes him endure his travails within this desolation and allows him to exceed weakly stating the “certainty of salvation, like wrong prophets do in expectation of reward, gratification and arrogantly increasing self-worth.” However, a true prophets critique is not just black or white and bare condemnation. The uncovering of imbalance and backwardness


is, too, at least hopefully, “the ceasing of the retarded through a visionary pointing towards the possibility of change”, Zenger continues in circumscribing the Abrahamitic prophet. So, Prophecy first yet not alone is a divinely guided bifurcation between a sacred yes and no, the birth of negation. It establishes a distinction within society, one between the old, the already manifest forms and expressions of society and those of which Aurobindo says that they are supported by “a truth of conscious being which expresses itself in them and the knowledge corresponding to the truth, thus expressed, reigns as a supramental truth-consciousness organizing real ideas in a perfect harmony before they are cast into the mental-vital-material mould”, hence foremost into the prophets privileged sensibility. But the no to the desert and desolation of the old is, according to Luhmann, only one component of evolution. It is that which makes a variation more probable and as put here: creates a connection to a preestablished transcendental harmony, truth and will, originating within the collective consciousness. Functions of Evolution Since for Luhmann systems tend towards “realizing different structures for different functions”, that can be considered true for evolution, too. The true prophet can be considered as one of three Luhmannian functions incarnate, plus the seeming source for final harmony. Therefore, it should be remembered that he not only says no but within that, at least ideally, creates the necessary justification for any no. Just like the nights sky basically contains the sun, not as its full light, nonetheless mirrored on the surface of the moon, the no includes the vision or direction on the other side of the evolutionary globe. The negation or evolutionary variation, which the prophets tried to set in motion, first makes place for a basal anarchy to arise unless the path to the visionary state has been explored already. Because of equifinality the evolutionary function of selection has to realize, out of functionally equivalent forms of communication, that material which seems useful to sustain autopoiesis and direct it towards the attainment of a goal. As Talcott Parsons would say: selection, the second evolutionary function, must open the possibility of an agent to utilize a situation for actual connotation, as sense of purpose, and orientation towards an end. However, if Luhmann is to be believed in, the more complex a society becomes the greater the importance of a third evolutionary function turns out to be. It is often called “selective retention.” Selective retention means “sequences of integrating structural changes into a structural determined system for means of enhancing performance based on reiterating and repeating variation and selection.” However, while earlier, the variation and selection, can be produced by a single person or system selective retention needs a population which establishes


consensus around the same habits. Integration, how Parsons calls it, or, speaking in Luhmann`s terms, interpenetration, is a medium for selective retention. It means to reduce the degrees of freedom available to systems in handling external and internal contingencies but not for the sake of nothing rather that of higher complexity. In other words, it restricts modes of communication which are subjectively perceived as useless in favor of understanding and interpretative certainty. By this a broad range of diverse expressions of one mode of communication can be established, the noise is degreased, and thus the discussion of a specific topic, however constrained it might be, generates ever increasing depth of specificity, so too say. This increase in complexity, unfortunately, comes at cost of irritability and thematic diversity in discourse and communicative expressions. Just think of a child which instead of making a billion different noises starts to form constraints to its expressivity, generates words. This happens, like Parsons states, through a “value laden ‘compromise’ between the ‘efforts for consistency’ between a person or single system and the larger social and cultural perspectives, respective, in a way that reaches nothing close to ‘perfect’ integration” but leaves residual degrees of freedom to all the infinites and possibly infinitely frees in their unity as difference. Prophecy and Harmony The interpenetrative and coordinated reduction of free energy and irritability in advance of higher complexity and a larger number of functionally equivalent substitutes within communication about a single issue creates, what one can call, a memory or internal representation of past states, the everpresence of past multiplicities, their discourses and their outcomes. Memory is the necessary source for selective retention, however, not sufficient for a system to incorporate, what Aurobindo calls, a “gnostic consciousness which would perceive and bring out the evolving truth and principle of harmony hidden in the formations of the ignorance” or that which, as advance into a more harmonious novelty, is derived from society and collective consciousness and birthed into the nature of the present practice of selective retention. “The harmonies and perfect mutuality of the infinite potential multiplicity of divine truth consciousness” shall, for the Prophet, one could think with Sri Aurobindo, “be natural to his senses and it would be within his power to link them in a true order with his own gnostic principle and the evolved truth and harmony of his own greater life-creation” derived from the truth within the highest of all psychic realities, the collective consciousness. This would, in relation to Parsons theory of action systems, be the constitutive symbolization which latently sustains the earlier mentioned patterns of integration. Again, likewise as the prophet initiates the first variation, the possibility for adapting a new truth, his sensitivity is not privileged for no reason. It is designed to give rise to that which is already manifested


but not materialized. To that which is still unbound but not less bound to be. At least, from the hypothetical perspective of the invisible reality within the collective consciousness. Notwithstanding that, which is necessarily perceived as a boundary circulating and seemingly solid, permanent and fixed within the mental or physical sphere, it is the not yet seen past, which is the yet to come future of our present. The creative crossing of the prophet’s mind into the unmarked space and back. However, not on its own behalf and for his own arrogance but carried by the hands of the most secret of all secret wills, that of the unknown all-knowing. Born from the gnosis which cannot other but exceed what can be known by humans it is the evaporation of that within society which is radical critique and radical envisioning of the terrestrial and cosmic truth to come. The collective consciousness still is what the Old Testament`s prophets might have evoked with their praise and worship for the omniscient god: “If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there. If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; Even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me.” Only from those “eyes which did see my substance yet being unperfect and in whose book all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them” can come a real answer to the most intriguing and challenging questions of any time and culture. Echoing what Heinz von Foerster said, namely that “only unanswerable questions have the legitimacy to be answered”, only that which has not yet been an answer, that which basically cannot be and has never been known can improve the harmonies and qualities of life. Ethical Life and the Reality Bracket The Prophet thus, in the tradition of Abraham, is a great bracket (see Figure 1). He is bracketing and embracing the individual realities through the power and will of a sacred no and co-gnosis of the divine truth which is a divine vision of a harmonized and thus ethical life as Hegel describes it in the Encyclopedia of philosophical Sciences. “Throughout ethical life the objective and subjective moments are alike present but both of them are only its forms. Its substance is the good, hence the objective is filled with subjectivity” and the prophet blended as all: divine gnosis, heart devotion and terrestrial life amid the collective consciousness’s omniscience. By this the prophet refuses, as Jeremiah arrogates, to resemble those who contrary to their role, words and aspirations become a Sodom accompanying the Gomorrah of existence, “a horrible thing: they commit infidelity, and walk in lies: they strengthen also the hands of evildoers, that none doth return from his wickedness.” Within living the true prophet one no longer professes one`s free will neither a morality in which the general is still a makebelieve, a sham “and as an occasional event for the subject something that still can turn


against the good, become wicked”, as Hegel fears. The relative ideology of integrating person or system with an environment is superseded through latency, the latent maintenance of patterns, which is the coalescence of walk and talk. It becomes imbued with the highest psychic reality, so to say. The ethical life as both the transcending and transcendent of any stuck, broken, obsolete and backward immanent truth within social practice and autopoiesis as well as the imminent of that immanent in its prescience future`s liberties and goals, integrations and reciprocations, selections and selective retentions, short, in all its relative manifest forms, derived from collective consciousness, is the prophet`s way of moistening the silken slumber of latency, that which maintains existence, with dreams of advance in perfection. The ethical life takes over the prophet`s being and, in tearing apart and transforming free will and morality through the forces of higher altitudes of love and light within society, turns him into an image of divine gnosis, in her “own image, in the image of God created she him” as was so powerfully soothsaid by Moses. The prophet thus gives birth to the reality bracket: the sacred no and the truth incarnate of the most pristine and inexhaustible field of permanent and essential future, truth knowing and collective conscience as all spaces` and times` wills for terrestrial and cosmic manifestation derived from social realities, as society’s communications, and the forgiving and responsible embrace, or bracketing, of all individuals and systems. Their consciousnesses, wills, moralities and lives as contained in the omniscient consciousness of the consciousness of it all, the divine gnosis. The prophet thus becomes the reality bracket. The bracket which generates and harmonizes life within a higher vision.

Figure 1: The Prophet as a Bracket and the different Functions within different Systems of Thought

Resources Aurobindo, S. (2005). The life Divine. Pondichery: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust Derrida, J. (2007). Psyche: Inventions of the Other. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press Durkheim, E. (1915). The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. London: George Allan & Unwin Ltd. Foerster von, H. (1993). CybernEthiks. Berlin: Merve Verlag. Hegel, G.W.F. (1991). Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences. London: Bloomsbury Luhmann, N. (2012). The Theory of Society. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press Nietzsche, F. (1967). The Will to Power. New York, NY: Vintage Books Parsons, T. (1991). The Social System. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd. The Holy Bible (2001). King James Version. Iowa Falls, IA: World Bible Publishers Zenger, E. (2012). The Prophets. In E. Zenger et al. (Eds.). Introduction into the Old Testament (pp.510-520). Stuttgart, Germany: Kohlhammer GmbH.

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