Teleology

And the Influence of .Ideas

The links in the table on the left take you to sub-headings in this article.

In this chapter I give a view of evolution that has shaped my ethics. I accept that life has purpose, that evolution has a teleological theme.

Western intellectual thought usually holds that evolution occurs only through random selection – chance, not design, is the basis of life. This view does not always relate to empirical experience ; it is too simplistic, and only partially true. The history of Western society since the Reformation illustrates a transpersonal source of activity operating on the general level of subconscious and unconscious motivation. This source I take to be God. This source produces a mass response (the transpersonal effect) to creative stimuli, which is more than an individual person can produce.

Perhaps the first mass response in modern times was the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. The nineteenth century is particularly striking in examples to support my view, especially if we stretch its beginning and start it in the 1790s. There has been a mass spontaneous change in political awareness at certain times and events, for example the French revolution, and the revolutions of 1830 and 1848. These revolutions focused on a resurgence of the human spirit, and so were qualitatively different from the revolutions of the twentieth century.

The revolutions of the nineteenth century were aspirational in their core, that is, they were people-centred and reflected the influences of ideas that were socialist, anarchist, or communist (by communism I mean ideas of communal life that were current prior to the influence of Karl Marx). The revolutions of the twentieth century were party-centred and only reflected ideological reactions (Bolshevik, Fascist, Nazi) to current political challenges or disasters.

More particularly, the nineteenth century was the century of widespread awareness of forms of psychology: beginning with Mesmerism in the 1790s, developing into hypnotism, then into psychic phenomena such as seances, and culminating in the major upsurge of psychological preoccupations that began about 1870. These events all indicate a widespread change in a positively qualitative way. Although capitalism can foster qualitative change (but not on this scale and not at this rapidity), primarily it produces only quantitative change.

Attraction and Repulsion

There is continuity of design in all forms of evolution, whether physical, vegetative, animal or human. This continuity means that the dynamics of the evolution of physical systems transposes into the dynamics of the evolution of life forms. I am primarily interested in human evolution and so I focus on this.

Physical creation – the creation of suns, planets, solar systems – is a process governed by laws of matter. These laws ultimately derive from the two basic principles of attraction and repulsion.

When consciousness enters into creation, the laws of its evolution become laws of psychology. Now attraction and repulsion become transposed into love and hate. These two emotions are the basic dynamics of the evolution of consciousness. These two emotions are the extreme ends of a continuum in which all other emotions can be placed. In my view, slow forms of evolution can use emotions such as pride, greed, jealousy, guilt ; but rapid evolution demands a focus on love or hate, or an oscillation between them.

Love produces uniformity ; hate produces diversity. Within evolution, the new has to be built, and the old destroyed. Love builds new structures of thought and form, within new boundaries ; hate destroys out-worn structures and obsolete restrictions. Without hate the aggregate of consciousness (the collective unconscious mind of humanity) could never evolve into individuals: no one could be different in any way from anybody else. Without love the aggregate could never consolidate into community. Change is a continuous battle against love. Stability is a continuous battle against hate.

Influence of Ideas

When I look at history before the time of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment there seems to be no obvious direction in which mankind is evolving. But from the Enlightenment focus on rationality, plus the upsurge of psychological awareness beginning in the nineteenth century, I have a clear idea of the teleological development of consciousness. For me, the evolution of mankind means:

a). The evolution of mind (including the expansion of the intellect),

concurrently with

b). The unfoldment of self-consciousness.

The model of consciousness that I use is that it has three modes, those of will, mind and feeling. The purpose of life becomes the interaction of will and feeling on mind. By interacting with mind, will produces desire, and feeling generates emotion. Both desire and emotion revolve around ideas. Hence this interaction produces ideas about human life in its various domains, such as sexuality, politics, religion, etc.

These ideas vary from vague impressions (for example, revolutionary slogans such as liberty, equality and fraternity during the French Revolution) arising from vague awareness of emotion, to clearly-defined abstract concepts. Ideas which are important direct the course of human evolution. Evolution remains slow whilst influential ideas remain vague ; evolution speeds up as ideas begin to be clarified and contradictions and obscurities removed.

An idea remains vague whilst the current state of the intellectual vocabulary is insufficient to explain it in depth, that is, the current states of existing ideas and of terminology are inadequate when applied to that particular idea.

For example, Western practitioners of mysticism or ascetic contemplation have lacked the necessary ideas in which to place and explain their experiences. So they can only transmit inspirational feelings, but not any intellectual understanding. Hence such practitioners have had little effect on Western evolution. By contrast, theosophical ideas that have originated in Buddhism and Hinduism allow high spiritual states of mind to be understood. Intellectual understanding of such states can be attained. Therefore the Eastern theosophist can evolve much faster than the Western mystic.

Influential ideas direct the course of human evolution. If such an idea is vague, then the thinker has to rely on emotive appeals to sway his audience (a modern exponent of this approach was Henri Bergson). As the intellectual vocabulary expands, it becomes possible to think through the vagueness and to separate the component parts of that idea from one another, and so clarify that idea. Then that idea can be discussed rationally. This process illustrates the evolution of truth. Even truth evolves. The truth of an idea evolves from acceptance by feeling (the initial stage) to cognition by the intellect (the final stage). [¹]

In abstract terms, my perspective is that the evolution of mind means the evolution of form from formlessness. In the original formless nature of the unconscious mind there are no structures, no signs, no symbols, no directions, no labels. In the original unconscious mind, nothing is differentiated, nothing is separate from anything else ; this state of mind is a state of potentiality.

Within the process of evolution, the potential is transformed into the concrete ; potential being is turned into actual being. This process requires the dominance of symbols and of ideas or concepts. Formlessness is transposed into form first by the mediation of symbols, and then by the mediation of concepts ; this movement of thought from symbols to concepts requires the expansion within consciousness of the ability for abstraction. The mind grows in tandem with the growth of the intellectual vocabulary.

Evolution depends on Language

Evolution requires change. The continuous process of change means that as new problems are constantly arising, so new ideas are constantly needed in order to solve them. George Orwell postulated that if a state government eliminated the vocabulary of independence then no one would be able to rebel against that state. Nobody would be able to think about rebellion. Likewise, freedom cannot be attained until it can first be conceptualised in a way suitable for the age.

As mankind’s conceptual vocabulary evolves, so too political, social, ethical, religious, existential philosophies and psychologies will also evolve. The evolution of a person can only occur to the extent that his mind evolves. In colloquial terms:

The evolution of mankind rests upon the evolution of language.

In my early readings in Buddhism one factor puzzled me intensely. During his lifetime Buddha reputedly enabled hundreds of seekers to become saints, and many of them also reached Nirvana (at least for a time). Buddha changed Indian society. Why didn’t these hundreds of saints change it even more ? . Why did St. Paul change Christianity and middle-eastern history more than the combined efforts of the twelve disciples ?

The answer is that although good men and women can inspire other people, it is only ideas that change society.

St. Paul had more ideas than the other disciples had (whether he changed Christianity for the better or for the worse is debatable). All those hundreds of Buddhists did not contribute anything more in the realm of ideas beyond those that Buddha produced. Only when later Buddhist philosophers began to interpret the teachings in a new way did Buddhism move beyond its original boundaries and so carry on the evolution of the religious life. [²]

The number in brackets at the end of each reference takes you back to the paragraph that featured it.

[¹]. The evolution of truth, initially based on feeling and then progressing to cognitive (rational) understanding, is described in the article Confusion, sub- sections New Quest and Crisis of Faith. [1]

[²]. The circumstances and influences acting on a teacher are described in the article Dialectics & Evolution. [2]

Copyright © 2003 Ian Heath
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Ian Heath
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www.discover-your-mind.co.uk/

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