Darwin’s theory of evolution, as we know, was received by religious believers as a blasphemous denial of the existence of a benevolent divinity, creator of the physical world but above all of living things, and beyond that, of self-conscious humanity. And whereas at the outset of the modern era, Spinoza had simply removed the question of sacred intentionality from consideration, Darwin gave the drive to self- and species-perpetuation of living things, however it may have arisen from the lifeless universe, the central role in the “origin of species” and ultimately in “the descent of man.” The religious opposition to Darwin, which has not altogether ceased to exist, is in its minimal core the denial of such “intentionality” to matter, including that which leads to self-reproduction, or life. For the anti-Darwinists, the drive to perpetuate the species must be infused into matter “from above”—for matter in itself supposedly cannot acquire intentionality.
It is conscious intentionality that is at the core of what we call the sacred, and its primary gesture is what Derrida called deferral, différance, the interruption of the “natural” implementation of the drives that we understand as the impulses of our en-soi or merely physical being. Animal drives are subject to inhibitions acquired as the result of unhappy experiences associated with the attempt to carry out these drives in a given circumstance. Although Derrida himself saw différance as the source of what Sartre would have called the exclusively human pour-soi in contrast with the unreflective en-soi, in the larger scheme of things, he never concerned himself with the implications of the fact that the différance of the “natural” drives, as contrasted to the Pavlovian inhibition as a conditioned reflex, is a conscious act that marks a more advanced evolutionary phase, one that we must call in the absence of other examples the human.
The rest, as they say, is in the details. But once in possession of this fundamental understanding of what might be called “general ontology,” all the rest becomes understandable in every aspect except the details. In Chronicle 840, a propos of Pascal, I provided the skeleton of this idea, which I will develop here a bit farther. But it must be understood that this general theory, like GA’s theory of the origin of human language, is, except for the (unexciting?) details, quasi-tautological. Once one accepts that the possibilities of the stuff in the broadest sense of which the universe is composed included from the beginning the inherent possibility of self-organization and -reproduction, and then of the capacity to map the outside world onto a scene that would eventually allow creatures to talk about it, then to think about it, the rest is all details. And as we appear to be seeing, at least so far, the more such details we learn about the universe, the less we seem to know about it, as though our awareness of its inherent complexity can only increase the more we learn—an idea already implicit (for the first time?) in Pascal’s meditations on the “two infinities.”
The sacred may be understood as the representation on the scene of consciousness of the néant that Sartre (via Buddhist influence—see Chronicle 806) intuited as an empty space separating the willing subject (pour-soi) from the objects of its potential actions—starting, in our hypothesis, from the recognition that the human individual must subordinate his appetites to the needs of the community, his desiring complicity with which adds to these appetites a potentially conflictive mimetic element. It is necessary for humans, as opposed to less complex creatures, to be able to represent these desires to themselves so as to be able to judge on a case by case basis to what extent the pursuit of their satisfaction is possible.
As for the details of how this function is implemented in the human body/brain/nervous system, we can only bracket such questions in the context of a general anthropology uniquely concerned with the overall architecture of the human, realizing that this general understanding is on the one hand “parasitic” on the physical mechanisms through which it operates, yet on the other, can only be grasped in its overall purposes by means of such generalizations. What we call generative anthropology is an attempt at the most general possible explanation of our species’ functioning that permits us to mark the historical stages of its development—it being understood that such explanation is always speculative, given that it is writing a history that ever remains in progress.
So the question arises: what more remains to be said? Might the foregoing perhaps be construed as an involuntary demonstration that generative anthropology as I have conceived it is situated at the wrong level of generalization? Certainly, if asked why GA’s theory of the origin of language and of related developments such as scenicity remains virtually unknown, the average thinker/academic informed of these developments would agree that GA is situated at the wrong level of generality. With respect to language, for example, GA fails to intersect with either historical or structural linguistics. How can professional linguists be expected to accept this material within the realm of linguistics when they can find no use for it in the context of their research activities? And this is all the more true in the realms of physiology, psychology, psychiatry; or social anthropology or the study of religion…. GA takes for granted that phenomena like the scenic can remain in a kind of species memory to influence future actions, without in the least concerning itself with the details of its implementation in the bodies and brains of the creatures in question. And that GA claims that it suffices to draw the ultimate conclusions from what Pascal might have called the “infinitization” of the universe: of matter’s tendency, given sufficient time, following the tautological principle of “the survival of the fittest,” to create increasingly complex and durable structures with new levels of feedback/self-consciousness—this can be said to demonstrate merely that GA lacks any connection with truly creative thought that, firmly grounded on empirical data, generates new theories about the concrete steps in this demonstrably endless evolution.
Yet I would reply that such trans-empirical thinking, grounded only on the presupposition of the existence over an indefinite period of time of a universe of “stuff” capable of forming indefinitely complex and enduring configurations, on reaching the point at which there emerge creatures like ourselves, capable of re-presenting their observations of and about this universe in a form communicable to other similar creatures, thereby permitting them to create a praxis whose overall purpose is to incite a yet more effective evolution of their own fitness, collectively but also individually—that such thinking is the only objective ontology of which such a universe is capable. If, for example, the conflicts to which this process leads among different populations of these creatures may lead to setbacks and even—as the invention of nuclear weaponry has made possible—to the mutual destruction of a given set of such creatures, that should not prevent the eventual emergence of another group yet more fit to survive. Should we not then assume that, so long as the universe continues to exist, the survival of the fittest will continue to operate and, given presumably “endless” time, will necessarily generate ever more successful creatures, whose intelligence will have resolved, by means we cannot yet anticipate, the problem of mimetic rivalry that threatens the persistence of the human species?
Yet we cannot know a priori is whether such a process will eventually succeed in transcending the possibility of self-destruction, or whether on the contrary this possibility will ultimately put an end to the “survival of the fittest” by channeling its fitness into producing a force of destruction more powerful than the originary principle itself. Or else we may speculate that, given an unlimited amount of time and matter, either a positive outcome would emerge, putting to rest the ultimate danger—although clearly we cannot demonstrate the impossibility that at some future point the danger would again reappear—or the underlying process that has permitted this “Darwinian” evolution would itself terminate in destruction, followed perhaps by a new beginning from the original point of departure.
The human, and/or any similar creatures that may have reached the stage of deferral, language, and the sacred, can only be conceived as capable of self-destruction. Yet we cannot at this time conceive that such creatures could reach the point of being able to destroy, along with their species and its creations, the universe itself. For, were such self-annihilation to be the destiny of the universe, in the time that has already gone by it would already have occurred, and we ourselves would not exist.
Unless, as did the Hindus, we conceive the universe as subject to presumably unending cycles of creation and destruction. Such hypotheses are indeed advanced by scientists such as Roger Penrose. But given that any such hypothesis, which denies in principle the existence of a unifying dialectic uniting the cycles in a single history, requires that each one leave behind no evidence of itself, the revelation of its truth can take place only outside the process itself, in what we may call the province of the sacred.