The World as Real-Idea

Why idealism and pantheism got stuck in a dumb deity

Baruch Spinoza believed that Nature, or ‘God’, is the one infinite Substance, with everything being a ‘mode’ of this eternal Substance. All things are a mode of the one Substance that possesses an infinite number of attributes each expressing an eternal aspect of Nature. But this deity doesn’t act by design, purpose, or free will, it acts out of necessity and couldn’t do otherwise.

Almost one and a half centuries later Arthur Schopenhauer wrote his famous opus magnum entitled “The World as Will and Representation” where he argued that all the world we observe is only a ‘representation’ in our conscious awareness, not the world with its things in themselves. Schopenhauer’s ‘Will’ is a blind and unconscious will devoid of any aim and knowledge.

More recently philosopher Bernardo Kastrup built upon this vision a theory of analytical idealism where he conceives the universe as a ‘Mind at large’ (a term borrowed from Aldous Huxley)—that is, a universal consciousness—which, by a process of self-dissociation, fragments itself in many ‘alters,’ as minds, bodies, and people (a sort of ‘cosmic dissociative identity disorder’.) Ultimately we all are these individuated alters projected by this universal consciousness in itself, with our specific personalities, characters, and traits. A point of view that reverberates with several mystic accounts, especially those of the Eastern tradition.

Are we self-dissociated subjects of a ‘universal Subject’?

The problem I always had with Kastrup’s metaphysical interpretation is that it isn’t up to date with modern scientific insights (Spinoza and Schopenhauer could be forgiven since they lived in a very different epoch.) We know that there has been an evolution that developed from insentient, unconscious, aimless, and goalless dead matter, living organisms that are surprisingly sentient, conscious, goal-driven, and purposeful.

Since evolution is now commonly accepted as an established scientific fact (leaving creationists aside), I ask the following: If this universal or cosmic consciousness, or Mind at large, or God or whatever you might like to call it, is blind, unconscious, aimless, without knowledge, just a primitive and instinctive will, then I find it utterly incomprehensible how it could be so powerfully creative. What this unknowing and almost comatose Being supposedly did bring into existence is an amazingly complex universe, and that reflects by all means not at all the works of a dumb intelligence. Not only that, but it led to its opposite by the emergence of (relatively) intelligent and purposefully driven living organisms like us. I can’t see any logical reason and mechanism for how all this could manifest without an immanent higher form of intelligence and will at work. Because combining gazillions of blind instincts will not result in the emergence of a self-aware and intelligent being. This is even less credible than believing that throwing randomly into a pot 10,000 Lego pieces will make them (automatically, or ‘instinctively’) assemble in an Eiffel Tower. Thus, while I have some sympathy for analytic idealism, it still suffers from a huge explanatory gap.

The metaphysician might reply that the initial ‘instinctive divinity’ could just ‘will’ things until the ‘willed’ thing is perfected (by trial and error). Which sounds a lot like the ‘evolution’ of the creation.¹ But if there is a ‘willed thing’ it means it had already an aim, a purpose, and an idea of how the willed thing had to look like and to deem it ‘perfect.’ It must have the knowledge of what is intrinsically possible. Or could one ‘will things’ without a particular aim, just to see what is possible to will? Perhaps, after one has done so, one then might know what is possible. Yet, it seems that there needs to be a second sort of principle that proceeds from the first which reflects what has been willed, maybe „truth“? We might posit that an initially transcendent but primitive or ‘instinctive’ Mind at large, or basic universal consciousness, might ‘learn’ by doing and experiencing the universal drama of matter and energy in space and time. Undoubtedly, the learning could make sense. But it can't start from blind instinct. Because, how can a transcendent ‘instinct’ become a higher transcendent intelligence only by plunging itself into an increasing material complexity? Ultimately, it makes only sense if a bottom-up Darwinian evolutionary process is complemented by top-down causation starting from a higher Intelligence that is immanent and dwelling but still unexpressed in the temporal manifestation.

Of course, the materialists can tell themselves a very different story. One can believe in a goal-less and undirected Darwinian evolution that supposedly explains away everything with natural selection, random mutations, inheritance, variations, speciation, and whatever kind of evolutionary mechanisms. And, if things do not fit in the naturalistic paradigm, they can always resort to the magic wand of the so-called ‘evolutionary advantage’, with which one can always explain the emergence of everything and the opposite of it. But, while I have no reason to doubt that these mechanisms are real, when it comes to deeper questions of existential and philosophical nature about life and consciousness or (the lack of) aim, purpose, or design in Nature, I always found scientific evolution equally unsatisfying. It argues always by far-fetched extrapolations that aren’t more convincing (in my view even less convincing) than any other metaphysical speculation. Because, we are light years away from showing that evolution based only on mechanisms of natural selection, variation, and inheritance is, in itself, self-sufficient to explain the emergence and complexity of life. We know that these mechanisms can account for some aspects of evolution, such as how species change over time, but its generalization to all that has taken place in our natural history is a simplistic assumption and an extrapolation that has no proof whatsoever. We like to believe that, but there is nothing that shows this to be possible. Moreover, if so, at least the simplest processes would not be too difficult to implement in computer programs creating artificial life or some appearance of it. For several decades this has been tried out but with only very limited success. One can simulate cellular automata competing for resources or creating relatively complex structures based on genetic algorithm rules calling it ‘artificial life.’ But, overall, after decades of research, the results have been quite disappointing. And the crucial point is that every evolutionary algorithm always needs some intervention from an external agent to function properly.

Either way, whether one is an idealist or a Darwinist, the question of how an ordered universe and, even more so, conscious life could come into existence remains unanswered. Even the Eastern philosophies such as the proponents of Advaita Vedanta who tell us that all is Brahman and everything else is an illusion, the cosmic illusion of Maya, don’t tell us much about how this illusion came about, let alone furnish any insights on what fundamentally life and evolution are.

This is why I prefer the vision of the Indian mystic and poet Sri Aurobindo, who claims to have ascended to higher states of consciousness, to what he named the ‘Supermind’ and, from there, developed an integral picture that can unite idealism and evolution without contradicting science but also without presupposing a dreamy or amnesic divinity.

As in most Eastern philosophies, also in Aurobindo’s vision, central was the notion of a transcendent and ultimate Absolute. However, his cosmology comprised a multidimensional structure of planes and parts, not just a mind, body, and soul. In his cosmology, the Supermind is a delegate between the unmanifest and manifest, the transcendent and the immanent, and is the real creative agency that stands behind all the dynamics in the universe.

The suffix ‘super’ is because it is about a trans-rational gnosis, knowledge, and power–that is, a form of cognition of which the analytic mind, the cherished ‘scientific reason’ of the Age of Enlightenment, is only a redux and pale reflex. This Supermind manifests as a force of consciousness and an immanent will that, to our indirect mental apprehension and comprehension, appears to organize the forms, qualities, powers, and characters of things. While the mind sees, perceives, and thinks in terms of dualities, oppositions, and contraries and by an operation of fragmentation and separation, the Supermind always sees all the apparently separated objects and its relations in a comprehensive and holistic view without dualities or differences, but rather in an eternal view of unity which, nevertheless, is conscious of all multiplicity and diversity without separative oppositions.

In Aurobindo’s words:

“The fundamental nature of this Supermind is that all its knowledge is originally a knowledge by identity and oneness and even when it makes numberless apparent divisions and discriminating modifications in itself, still all the knowledge that operates in its workings, even in these divisions, is founded upon and sustained and lit and guided by this perfect knowledge by identity and oneness. The Spirit is one everywhere and it knows all things as itself and in itself, so sees them always and therefore knows them intimately, completely, in their reality as well as their appearance, in their truth, their law, the entire spirit and sense and figure of their nature and their workings. When it sees anything as an object of knowledge, it yet sees it as itself and in itself, and not as a thing other than or divided from it about which therefore it would at first be ignorant of the nature, constitution and workings and have to learn about them, as the mind is at first ignorant of its object and has to learn about it because the mind is separated from its object and regards and senses and meets it as something other than itself and external to its own being.” (The Synthesis of Yoga, Pt. IV, Ch. XIX, p.786)

This is a view that goes beyond the classical forms of Western or Eastern philosophical idealism. It is a vision of the world that sees more than just an image or figment of a universal Mind at large and extends its cosmology beyond a silent and immutable Brahman. Here, the universe is seen as an expression of a supra-conscious Being casting itself into what the mind interprets with ‘names and forms.’ By ‘names’ Aurobindo meant not just the words describing objects, but in its deeper sense, the powers, qualities, and characters (features and traits that distinguish one thing from another) being caught up by our consciousness. In this sense, all ‘names’ are already latent and inherent in the nameless and timeless Absolute, but are expressed by the Supermind in the temporal manifestation as qualities, powers, and characters of its forms.

Contrary to a Spinozian Nature, or Schopenhauer’s World as Will, which are not self-conscious entities and which act by necessity, instinct, and blind will, the Supermind is the highest form of cognition, wisdom, and knowledge of a universal consciousness that works supra-consciously with its immanent powers, forces, and will. It determines the universe with a ‘Consciousness-Force’ and ‘Consciousness-Will’ in processes, structures, patterns and, finally, living forms according to a divine Intelligence that works by a creative power reflexive of an original Idea, or what Aurobindo called the ‘Real-Idea’ or ‘Seed-Idea.’

Such transcendent and Real-Idea is beyond matter, space, and time but translates itself into the manifestation of space and time as an expressive power of a conscious force. An Idea of oneness which throws into operation a dual and divided representation of itself, and thereby, manifests the world of dualities and divisions. It is the primeval perfect, divine, and undifferentiated Knowledge, Consciousness, or ‘Gnosis’ that, however, throws itself into mutable names and forms–that is, into what the mind conceives in more or less accurate symbolic images of this Seed-Idea. Something that, at the human apprehending and comprehending level, the intuition captures as archetypes, symbols, signs, with their meaning and significance in or of things and phenomena.

According to Aurobindo, the Real-Idea is a gnostic power where the Spirit and Knowledge are the two aspects of the very same Reality. It is a self-creative Knowledge and ‘Truth-Consciousness’ that organizes, by an arrangement of design, quantity, and number, a base for the manifestation of quality and property of its own Real-Idea, in ideas of forms that we perceive as a living and material world inside the spatio-temporal extension. Life, minds, and bodies are a partial expression of this original transcendent Idea, whose presence is only vaguely perceived in our ordinary state of consciousness, especially among philosophers as archetypes, platonic ideals, or universals. It is what we perceive as a vestige of significance, meaning, design, and purpose in Nature, that, however, the materialist denies and takes as an illusionary anthropomorphic misconception. In a sense, all that we indirectly perceive of the world with our mind and senses, from non-living matter, such as rocks, mountains, and rivers, to living entities, such as plants, animals, and ourselves—are all a ‘symbol,’ a ‘sign,’ or a ‘significant form’ of this ultimate Real-Idea that is contained, even though veiled, in their being as an essence.

This power of Knowledge, while ultimately of transcendent nature and beyond the manifestation, nevertheless expresses itself in the manifestation of matter, force, space, and time by plunging itself into the world of duality and separation and determining its processes that, however, still retain and manifest something of this Idea. Evolution is the outer reflection and appearance of this process expressed within the limitations of a material space-time universe. It is a process of self-finding of a Spirit-Idea already existent beyond mind and body, that, in matter, is expressed in ‘coarse-grained’ images, meanings, semantic representations of itself. A spirit struggling to emerge from the self-oblivion and ignorance by a trial and error drama, that we discover in the form of the Darwinian paradigm of natural selection and random mutations.

But the Spirit, which is perfect Consciousness, Knowledge, and Gnosis stands behind its own self-image of an ignorant and self-forgetful nature while it evolves in matter–that is, emerges in and through matter, expressing itself towards increasingly self-conscious representations of itself in life and mind. Life is the operation by which this conscious force and its Idea maintains and dissolves, constitutes and reconstitutes individual forms, and acts in them. It is the Supermind, the Real-Idea that determines the relations of all things that could be seen in terms of occult signs and codes by a higher form of intuitive cognition and that are only rarely realized at a mental level (like, for instance, in the DNA code with its genetic information.) This is what modern biology with the discipline of biosemiotics vaguely recognizes as the “myriad forms of communication and signification found in and between living systems.”

“Sign processes” in biological systems?

The Real-Idea develops things by a power of Knowledge and Will out of infinite potentialities, ‘rolling out’ (‘e-volving’) that what is carried internally in the oblivion of the form as a ‘seed’ contained and ‘transcribed’ in them. An apparent development or emergence, which is a self-development and the outgrowth of itself, by a gradual, sometimes abrupt, eonian process. The Real-Idea never ceases to exist, it is always a concealed knowledge and an indwelling spirit–that is, it is ‘involved’ in the mineral, plant, or animal–which, however, respond to the Idea and its will-force. It developed these by groupings and associations of elementary constituents, building significant forms, types, and species. These are the external signs of a conscious force playing with its own Idea creating all types in all its possible combinations.

Therefore, all that constitutes the manifestation is a pale redux of this Idea. It is inherent in all cosmic existence, standing behind the action of all creation’s forces and the evolutionary process, which supports it by an indwelling presence in all forms, and which expresses itself in and through them. The undifferentiated and yet many-sided Real-Idea can split up into its many sides which become independent Idea-Forces and that, in the living being, we call our ‘character’ and ‘personality.’ We also, with our many-sided, diverse, and multidimensional psychology, are a ‘symbol’ of the Idea that can express itself in an infinite number of ‘ideas’ with its variety of individuated personalities.

When we become aware more or less intuitively that the world we see around us is not just a blind mechanistic automaton but somehow, despite all its mechanistic appearances, hides a meaning, an aim, a purpose and that is apparently developing a project–that is, an Idea–this is because our limited mind, nevertheless, can still intuit and vaguely perceive that transcendent Real-Idea, and begins to wonder if meaning, significance and semantics in and of things are exclusively proper to the human mind or, maybe, inherent in Nature, and beyond the human.

“In all material things reside a mute and involved Real-Idea, a substantial and self-effective intuition, an eyeless exact perception, an automatic intelligence working out its unexpressed and unthought conceptions, a blindly seeing sureness of sight, a dumb infallible sureness of suppressed feeling coated in insensibility, which effectuate all that has to be effected.” (The Life Divine, Bk.II, Ch. X, p. 570)

Thus, that automatic blind and dumb mechanism in Nature, is not the original starting point but the superficial expression and appearance of a divine Knowledge that creates forms and powers of itself. The interplay of all the constituents of the universe is not a mere play of unconscious phenomena but rather a working out of a Knowledge where, what we call the ‘laws of Nature’, are the expression of a Real-Idea that moves everything at each moment to what must be. If everything reveals itself as the result of an intelligent working, this is not due to our hallucination, but because deep down, concealed by our ignorance, there is a veiled intelligence at work. The Real-Idea of the Supermind is not an intellectual intelligence but a Supermental Force and Will that is active subconsciously in the plant or animal, and in the only half-conscious human as well. A transcendent and immanent Will and Force that realizes itself in time and space.

Evolution, thereby, can be seen as a two-way process: It was preceded by an involution of the Spirit into form, a “plunge of Light into its own shadow” (The Life Divine, Bk.I, Ch. XVIII, p.173). Spinoza, Schopenhauer, and Kastrup see only the shadow, and fail to see the Light it comes from. An evolution where forms, qualities, and quantities are then worked out by the divine Real-Idea from the inside-out. All forms and properties of the natural world are already held by an eternal divine archetype on other trans-material planes of existence. Every formation arising out of Nature is the expression of a preexisting Idea that our ordinary human mentality apprehends as names and forms.

Let’s turn back to the question of how a conscious, goal-driven, and willful life could emerge from unconscious, goalless, and unwilling matter.

When we look upon the world, the universe, Nature, life, and evolution from the perspective of Aurobindo’s Real-Idea, the mystery dissolves and many unexplained processes of Nature find their meaning. Admitting a subtler self-aware and cognizant will and spirit that subconsciously obeys an original super-conscious Knowledge and Idea structuring all things and life, is not inconsistent with modern science. Natural selection, random mutations, and other evolutionary processes that evolutionary biology discovered become the visible expression—or, better, a ‘sign’— of a self-limited and inconscient power which, in its oblivion, resorts to mechanical and apparently blind processes in matter and life to reach its goal to manifest itself in and through matter. Something that, at the present evolutionary stage, is perceived as a more or less approximated symbolic construction of That by which all exist. Life is a ‘sign’ that signifies a will and idea in matter whose origin is a unitary Real-Idea beyond the world of polarities of mind, life, and matter. The world and its natural phenomena are a symbol whose significance becomes apparent only at a gnostic level of consciousness. The world is molded by elemental and inherent influences whose power is found in a gnosis that goes way beyond a ‘mind’ or ‘Mind at large’, and is anything but a blind instinct or an unconscious and aimless necessity.

From this perspective, a materialistic understanding of evolution can be reconciled with idealism in a post-materialistic synthesis that goes beyond both.

1. Something along the lines of the theory of the ‘cosmological natural selection,’ proposed by the American physicist Lee Smolin,. It draws an analogy between biological natural selection and the evolution of the universe as a whole.