Nietzsche accused consciousness for having the role of making things non-immanent, of transcending everything from its place (including itself and its role) and bringing it under itself. It makes its mode of existence the only possible, not for itself alone, but for all things and absolutely — the source of anthropomorphism. It conceals in order to make itself the alpha and the omega. Its role is to regulate active force, to give active force a direction, which history showed was towards itself, it was internal. All forces under the rule of consciousness are directed towards the body that is their host.
Genealogically and immanently, we are forced to ask, why was this necessary ? – presupposing a necessity, of course, for the sake of exploration. What if we take nature, i.e. the planet, as the immanent ground for our thought process. (Please do not confuse nature with some anthropomorphic deity. I’ve written as if it is because language is anthropomorphic and it bestows it with that appearance, but I do not intend for it to be so. Nature is simply used as a ground, a necessary ground from which to build our thoughts, like many bricks that lay heavy and bestow a weight upon us. The question regarding the conception of nature will be the last to be tackled.)
The human is supposed to be the predator at the top of the food-chain, the non-regularly predated predator. Predation, if seen immanently, one can infer, is nature’s way of regulating the living organism. Ultimately of regulating itself, of stopping one organism from rising to such a degree that it destroys and contaminates the planet it inhabits, including itself. It stops the possibility of its own cancer. Such a cancerous state is the becoming of every creature capable of reproduction. An attribute that Nietzsche seemed to bestow on all living organisms, an attribute of active forces. One can stipulate that any organism can achieve this, no matter how small, and only in so far as it can find a means of maintaining and reproducing itself in collaboration with the planet. All plants require is oxygen, water, soil and sunlight. The plant organism (at least most) seems to be the simplest as concerns conditions for maintanance and reproduction, as it does not rely on another organism to live and reproduce – given a manner of reproduction that is other than sexual. This lack of reliance on another organism is necessary but insufficient for us to give a full account of the historical and genealogical proceedings.
If plants were first introduced into nature, and plants seem to be self-maintanable, then how did organisms other than plants arise? Nature, it seems, still needed to find a way of getting rid of the remains of plants, and thereby, to regullate this organism, to stop it from reaching the limit of destruction. The bacterium that feeds on dead plants arises. The single-celled bacterium – the possible beginning of sentience.
All this sounds ok, but we’ve still left open the leap from planet and conditions (water, air, soil and sunlight) to plant organism. If you allow me to drop this big hole in our reverse engineering and go back to the real point of this post: human consciousness. Likewise If you allow me that the point of the food-chain is the regulation of one species by another, a link between one organism and another such that no organism goes too far with its reproduction, with itself, then we maybe proceed to my point. Yet, this seemingly interesting equilibrium of nature is broken the instant the human enters the picture and rises above all animals to the top of the food chain. Where the human has nothing but natural disasters and itself to regullate it. What then regulates the human? What is that predator that will stop the human from becoming cancerous to the planet and itself. Cancer is a stupid disease, for in eatings away its host completely, it eats its means of survival. Cancer’s end, it’s aim, is death. It’s the purely destructive force.
How does nature create an animal that can regulate itself? It gives it self-awaress. It gives it the ability to see itself and juxtapose itself to its surroundings. It gives it consciousness. Is this a prerequisite of reaching the top of the food-chain or an after-effect? More likely the former, but chances are we’ll never know for sure.
The food-chain is an interesting approach to the distinction between humans and animals, because it maintains the immanence by encouraging the view of holism in terms of the Earth. If humans have no predator, and if predation is regulation, then what regulates the human? The human must regulate itself. How does it do this? By first having to be aware of itself, by first having consciousness. Not to make consciousness synonymous with self-awareness, but rather to make self-awareness a necessary component of consciousness, even if it insufficient. Again, I must presuppose the notion of self that is problematic here and leave self-awareness as simply being able to be aware of one’s own actions — with no emphasis or import on the notion of “one”.
If consciousness is but a regulating force, it becomes the predator of the human. A force that maintains an equilibrium in numbers of the organism, to stop those numbers from overflowing through reproduction. We are at a loss however, how did this organism reach such a height in reproduction that there is over 6 billion of it and rising in one planet, and it is endagering itself and the planet with its means, with its becoming. Where and how did consciousness fail at its job? Did the human conquer its own predator (itself) using the predator itself?
Nietzsche maintained that consciousness failed when morality was created, when it found a way to reproduce a mode of itself in every human. It created its own parasite in the form of a belief. The belief itself was cancerous, it ate everything but itself. It found all manner of ways of enforcing itself upon the human: punishment, seduction, sublimation, war, peace etc. He saw a necessity for war and subjugation between humans (for embracing aggression and strength) as, perhaps, a way of regulating the forces themselves.
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