The Dream Project

Dreams Ingress the Irreducible Ambiguity of Beauty, Sublimity, and Horror 

There are uses for dreams that have nothing to do with their usefulness. The scientific reduction of all phenomena to their material causes leaves an irreducible remainder of what does not disappear under this procedure but appears in the play of the imagination as useless ambiguity. In the anthropology of psychological processes, the material reduction is applied to all imaginal processes, so that dreams are reduced to the prediction processes of uncertainty reduction in which ambiguity must be vanquished for the sake of clarity and good judgement. When we are reduced to prediction machines, we dream because processing the various scenarios of the day contributes to greater efficiency and advantage in our material transactions with the world. But if dreams are not only about scenario rehearsal, then their aboutness includes what cannot be reduced to prediction processes. This dream project seeks not to disclaim that we are prediction processors, but to insist that our waking as well as our sleeping intentions are not only for uncertainty reduction, and therefore, we are more than prognosis programs. There are other, scarcely hidden intentions only just barely beneath the surface, that continually break through this thin veil of prophetic practicalities in the unintended parapraxes of ticks, and slips, and dreams. 

Dreams witness to our intention, even though mostly unconscious, to ingress uncertainty into our world, which stands at odds with the uncertainty reduction for which most neuroscientists imagine thought was designed. We not only desire the knowable and the predictable but what can’t be grasp or rationally determined. These unthinkable objects of our unconscious drives stand outside the grasp of our concepts because they refuse to be objectified, yet they insist as the ill-formed, ghostly impressions of our free-spending, aesthetic values, values that stand outside of the parsimonious causal chain of materialism when materialism is thought of as determined by the necessary and the sufficient, as it is in the modern sciences.  

Dreams may be causally related to the biological, electrochemical brain processes of material necessity, but their content, or their “aboutness,” doesn’t seem to be entirely determined by them because there seems to be some content of dreams that isn’t easily reducible to the physically requisite. Perhaps there is another selector at work for the content of dreams other than that of “Natural Selection.” The same might be wondered about other, waking, artistic and religious projects, which evince some access to degrees of freedom beyond the material determinations of our biology. Art and religion have mostly been reduced to what is materially determined about them by anthropological, psychological, and neurobiological analysis, but there is a numinous remainder of irreducible ambiguity beyond the material reduction that may cause one to ponder if there might be some other desire in us for what isn’t directly useful or evolutionarily advantageous.  

Might there be a selector in us that did not evolve entirely by the dictates of natural selection, but whose intention was also there from the beginning of the evolutionary story, not only of biological evolution but of the non-living universe as well? It may be true that the religious compulsion to make sacred is reducible to forging the necessary bonds and boundaries of society as most anthropology and religious studies scholars hold. The sociological function of religion was most famously outlined by the French Sociologist Emile Durkheim. But might it also be true that whatever it is that incites our desire for the sacred may arise out of a somewhat independent desire for aesthetic transcendence for its own sake? This latter possibly would be something like Soren Kierkegaard’s notion of the human predicament as an impossible combination of biological determination in body and spiritual freedom in imagination. Maybe the entire point of the mythic narratives at the center of many religious practices is to give its adherents a shared identity and prepare its people for practical future scenarios, but it may also be the case that religious mythologies demonstrate the intention of a people to ingress beauty, sublimity, and horror into the world according to the freedom to imagine and touch the infinite. And in this age of the material reduction to economic values, dreams may stand as a last bastion against the instrumentalization of all things for use. Perhaps, that’s because they are not things to grasp like tools for our advantage, but indicators of the beauty, sublimity, and horror that brought us into being. 

It may be the case, although unproveable, that artistic intentions come before the merely material, which would be something like David Graeber’s and David Wengrow’s hypothesis in The Dawn of Everything that aesthetic values may have played some role in the organization of human life rather than emerging from the surplus of sedentary societies as post facto addons. Graeber and Wengrow note that there is much archeological evidence for societies choosing ways of life from a variety of options on an aesthetic basis. For example, they point out particular people groups who seem to go back to hunting and gathering after trying sedentary, agricultural, and urban forms of life because they preferred nomadic existence for its relative freedom, sense of adventure, and lack of hierarchy. Dreams, like these nomads, resist civilizing because they tarry with Jacques Lacan’s Real, which is whatever resists symbolization and civilization’s over-coding of dreams with its transactable values. Dreams present the Real as the failure of the Symbolic’s predictive processes. 

The peoples of the Ancient Near East’s ambivalence about cities and hierarchy is well documented in the Bible. For example, it may be that YHWH’s enigmatic rejection of Cain’s sacrifice in favor of Abel’s in the book of Genesis has to do with the former’s association with the fruits of agriculture and the latter’s with those of the hunt. And the doubtfulness on display in 1 Samuel 8:10-18 about Isreal's cry for a king to rule them witnesses to the general reservations of the Levant about the tradeoff between the relative freedom of loose tribal associations under judges versus fealty to a king. It is not at all as clear as it once seemed that the Neolithic’s agricultural revolution and movements towards coercive, urbanized hierarchies was determined by material advantage alone. It looks as though there were many who did not relish being organized into the sorts of hierarchical civilizations that once seemed the inevitable result of human progress, which may be a part of why the book of Numbers rails against censuses and the counting of peoples.  

In Genesis Joseph’s dream interpretation is that of prediction processing because it is an accurate auguring of a future famine, which benefits Pharo and his rule. Pharo’s dream is the instrumentalized product of a hierarchical, agricultural civilization. The sorts of dreams that preceded their instrumentalization are still dreamt, even in our day in which whatever there is, can be reduced to an economic value. Sedentary hierarchies have not entirely escaped the forces of their undoing barely contained within the Freudian Unconscious and in the Lacanian Real. Dreams may be mostly for the prediction processing of scenario rehearsal, but some of their aboutness seems forever reserved for uncivilizable mystery. 

It would be hard to argue against the thesis that at the center of much religious mythology and ritual was a dream or a dream-like state. This conjecture would accord with Kelly Bulkeley’s famous declaration in his book The Spirituality of Dreaming that at the bases of religious mythology and practice are dreams. And there is much anthropological evidence for religious practitioners referring to dreams as the reasons for establishing certain stories, rituals, and practices. The Shaman figures of pre-agricultural societies seem to have been something like a journeyer into the liminal realms where the Symbolic’s failure at the hands of the Real was sought out for its strange sort of transcendence. The Shamen or holy women weren’t above the others of their tribes in the sense that the hereditary priests of cities were, but rather they were holy because they were the servants of the otherworld bringing back tales of its unclassifiable beings and their tricky ways. 

From the perspective of evolutionary biology, aesthetic considerations are epiphenomenal after thoughts because life is determined by material necessity or advantage and not by religio-artistic values. The twin struggles for survival and reproduction take precedence over beauty and sublimity to such an extent that whatever may appear as beautiful or sublime can be reduced to practical desideratum. For the evolutionary biologist, what is beautiful signifies some sort of evolutionary edge, mastery, or superiority, so beauty might be a lure to reproduction, consumption, or something of the like, but it always can be reduced to a material advantage of some sort. If something is seen as beautiful, then the origins of its attraction are in some useful, material purpose, which might be thought of in economic terms as indicating an advantageous transaction. If a bird displays what may seem like unnecessarily elaborate plumage, mellifluous song, and intricate mating rituals, each can be reduced to their “necessary and sufficient reasons” relative to reproductive competition.  

Sublimity is more difficult to reduce to its necessary and sufficient reasons, but in general the anthropologist reduces it to an overwhelming sense of a vast possibility space. But it is still hard to make sense of the enjoyment of being overwhelmed because it is the sort of excessive enjoyment that Lacan described with his concept of “Jouissance” and its connection to the Freudian Death Drive. We may experience the sublime as an overwhelming possibility space often associated with “vertigo,” but we may not want to reduce our uncertainty by determining its possibilities, in which case we are directly enjoying our vertigo. Lacan’s Jouissance and Freud’s Death Drive can also account for our enjoyment of the horror that is one step beyond the sublime, but psychological anthropology must reduce our “pleasure in pain” to material gain, as if the pleasure we take in struggle, disorientation, and terror were only one of the life drives of Freud’s “Pleasure Principle” in disguise. 

What appears as if extravagant, or irreducible to material advantage, for the psychological anthropologist must be seen in economic terms as a display of transactional value in the register of Homo Economicus, which at its most basic level is thought of in evolutionary terms as the equation: the extra equals the necessary, or the advantageous for the predictive processor. This equation usually contains some form of the phrase “just is,” as in beauty “just is” a lure for reproduction, so that beauty equals health, fitness, and fertility. Like any other economic transaction, a cost benefit analysis might be performed on any instance of beauty. For example, how much does a given display of beauty increase the odds of passing on viable, well-adapted, genetic material to the next generation? Or more simply put, is the energy in terms of caloric expenditure worth the payoff. Evolutionary Biology has generated many of these economic analyses of various adaptations relative to their use value, and the most difficult of these equations to balance has been evolution’s most extravagant, calorie-expensive mechanism of the brain. There are on-going debates as to how something as seemingly wasteful in terms of energy requirements as a brain could ever justify the amount of energy it requires to run. The brain has presented one of the most difficult chicken or egg conundrums of all time because to feed the brain one must be able to obtain massive amounts of protein, but to obtain the necessary quantities, one must already be a highly accurate prediction machine.   

In the equations of evolutionary biology, beauty has a value that can be calculated in terms of benefit relative to survival and reproduction. There is no art for art's sake, even for those notoriously pretentious, human animals that proclaim the pure gratuity of their artistic productions. However, when human beings enjoy the beautiful displays of other animal species, or even those of plants, as in a field of blooming wildflowers, it is hard to know what they find attractive because these displays aren’t for them. But from the general perspective of the economic worth of beauty, perhaps other animal species appreciate the transactional value of it in other forms not directly related to them in some abstract, economic sense. But what is even more mysterious from an evolutionary biological perspective is when humans and other non-human species seem to be awed by a sublime landscape for no clear, economic reason.  

There is something irreducibly ambiguous about the ways in which the beautiful and the sublime are enjoyed that is beyond their necessary and sufficient reasons. Wolves are known to pause their nightly hunts to stare and howl at the moon for hours in an apparently extravagant waste of time that has nothing to do with acquiring calories or mating rituals. Jane Goodall observed Chimps taking long journeys to gaze at a particularly beautiful waterfall for no other obvious reason except to be awed by its sublimity. Of course, these speculations commit the cardinal sin of anthropomorphizing in what is supposed to be “objective” observation, but all interpretations of non-human, animal behavior anthropomorphize its subjects, especially the supposedly “objective,” material reduction to necessary and sufficient reasons. Perhaps, non-human animals are also capable of awe without advantage, and if the scientific study of their behavior excludes it a priori, then it has been infected by a kind of anthropomorphic assumption that it claims to disbar. 

It is widely held that agriculture developed as a more efficient use of land, which could support larger populations and created the standing surplus that ensconced hierarchy, made large scale wars possible, and built radically unequal wealth. Aesthetic values are thought of as secondary displays of surplus accumulation in the materialist paradigm because whatever is materially necessary is primary. When hunter-gatherer societies were thought of as living close to the margins, it was believed that they had very little interest in aesthetic pursuits because they had very little surplus to expend on these extras that were on such extravagant display in the sedentary cities of the Neolithic. The less surplus a society has, the less aesthetic productions it will engage in, the equations of necessary and sufficient reasons insist. And it is for this reason that the life of the hunter-gather is commonly portrayed as sparse, brutal, and largely dictated by the whims of nature without time or energy for religio-aesthetic pursuits.  

However, some recent archeological developments like that of Gobekli Tepe (10,000 – 8,000 BCE), seem to suggest that cultural choices may have more of an imaginal origin, than was previously thought. In the material reduction, what is imaginal, or virtual, contains the illusion of degrees of freedom but is determined by material necessity. The primary archeologist at Gobekli Tepe Klaus Schmidt quickly noticed that the site was a temple for hunter gathers and not a city for a sedentary, agricultural society as it was first thought to be. Temples had been assumed to come after cities since the previous most ancient cities such as Catalhoyek (7500 – 5600 BCE) had no public works, and the former earliest temple structures such as the one at Uruk (3517-3358 BCE) as well as other Mesopotamian Ziggurats in general had appeared much later in association with sedentary, hierarchical societies with heredity, priestly classes and kings. Gobekli Tepe is rife with the engraved religious mythologies, most associated with the overly general and ill-defined religious practices of “Animism.”  Animism is thought of as the worship of the personified forces of nature, including undomesticated animals, before there were structured pantheons of gods. 

Gobekli Tepe was a seasonally inhabited city that seems to have been erected for large festivals among loosely affiliated bands of hunter-gathers and for the religious intention to commune with the transcendent world of the awe-inspiring and otherworldly. Schmidt described the site as something like a “prehistoric zoo.” Scorpions, snakes, feral pigs, foxes, storks, vultures and a variety of other figures associated with liminal spaces, death, virility, and a tricky sort of wisdom line the walls at Gobekli Tepe. Along with the animal figures, there are human-like figures and human-animal hybrids, all of whom have prominent penises. This riot of living things makes feasts, dances, perhaps works magic, and musically tells stories depending on how one interprets what she sees there. This was a place erected for the awe of religious rites and for the celebration of egalitarian festivals rather than for the stratification of society and the coercion of labor associated with later places of worship. 

There are of course many purely material explanations for Gobekli Tepe that reduce any apparent desire for the sacred to evolutionary advantage, but there are those in the anthropology and religious studies communities, most famously Jacques Cauvin in his book The Birth of the Gods and the Origins of Agriculture, who cogently argued that the sacred figures at the center of the Animism at Gobekli Tepe didn’t necessarily serve an ordering function for sedentary, hierarchical societies. Cauvin argued a somewhat reversed order of events than what had previously been assumed in religious studies, in which the imaginal space of hunter gatherer religion created the holy sites of nomadic pilgrimage that became the first cities. This thesis changes the origins of religions from their authoritative, stratificatory, coercive functions to their transcendent, mystical, celebratory roles. The imaginal, or conceptual, intention for religio-aesthetic expressions at Gobekli Tepe may have been enabled by surplus, but it was the surplus of loosely bound, non-hierarchical, hunter-gather clans and not the surplus of agriculture.  

And it was Cauvin’s conjecture that it was the indeterminate, in the sense of “noncoercive,” binding together of building, stone carving, necklace and bead making, feasting, storytelling, song, dance, and religio-artistic expressions evinced at Gobekli Tepe that created the intention for larger, more complex societal formations, which in turn gave rise to the intention for agriculture and not the other way around. It may be that the desire of people to be together in large formations was not determined by the material advantage of agricultural and hierarchy, but rather that its origins were in passing on cultural products, celebrating rites, and feasting, which means that it is possible that religious mythologies and rites were for enjoying and sharing wonder and awe about the world before they were for binding one to a sedentary identity. Nomadic identity may have been more open than that of the sedentary city dweller because there might have been less of a need to structure concepts into the models or molds of categories and hierarchies. It is not that the animism of Gobekli Tepe is less sophisticated than that of the temple at Uruk, which is what has been assumed because the former’s concepts are less structured or schematized and the latter’s contains a developed pantheon. The concepts of nomads reflect their more spacious and open lives and promoted a sense of exploration and discovery necessary for obtaining undomestic prey and wild fruits and grains. Creative, on-the-fly thinking is necessary for the hunter gather while classifying and controlling are necessary for the sedentary city dweller.  

The point of the phrase “art for art’s sake” is for the artist to proclaim her independence from necessity and determination. However, all religio-aesthetic expressions are determined to some degree by necessity. There may be some artistic expression that is utterly free from any prior material determinations, such as in Absurdism or some other similarly untethered artistic outburst, but it isn’t necessary to find such absolute examples to say that there are degrees of freedom in any religio-artistic expression, including those of urbanized, hierarchical societies. In classic art theory crafts contain less degrees of freedom than modern art because crafts are still tied to use. But the possibility space for the adornment of a useful item maybe as vast as that of the useless. It is often the fact that restrictions create more possibilities, which in the case of crafts is use value. The potter may have as many degrees of freedom, if not more, than those of the abstract expressionist.  

But for the materialist determinism of the modern sciences, neither arts nor crafts and neither nomads nor city dwellers contain any degrees of freedom. Whatever variation may emerge in human concepts it is, like natural selection, a chance variation, and whatever probability space may appear to an intention, it is the illusion of a choice already determined by the material necessity of natural selection. For Example, the Makapansgat Pebble, found at a 3,000,000 year old Australopithecine site in South Africa, was selected but not made, so this selection was made from a given variation of pebbles naturally formed in Jasperite by the forces of a river. Speculation is that the pebble was selected and keep as a prize because it happened to have face-like features. While this selection of the otherwise useless pebble was made before humans had the concepts for carving faces into pebbles, the Australopithecine that choose it had an abstract concept of face that it could apply to that particular pebble. But this concept, however abstract it may have been, contains no degrees of freedom for the material determinist because it is determined by the arrangement of a physical face and its similarity to the pebble. This relation of resemblance for the “scientific” semiologist may indicate the beginning of symbolic thinking, but abstract representation does not indicate any freedom from determination because the resemblance determines the choice of the pebble no matter how distant or abstract this resemblance may become. And the same binding of resemblance would be operative when human species incrementally gain the concepts for carving faces into rocks themselves. The artist may appear to choose from his own imaginal intention how to represent a face in a rock because he is no longer bound by the random variation of happenstance, but the artist’s intention is determined, nonetheless, by a matrix of natural causes disguised as abstract concepts and the choices of a possibility space.  

But maybe, our love of the beauty, sublimity, and horror found in the stories at the foundation of religious mythologies preceded their instrumental uses in the history of religions. It isn’t necessary to gainsay that these religious mythologies where determined by the material necessity of binding a people together in a shared identity because concepts that mold can also contain degrees of freedom. The concepts expressed at Gobekli Tepe both identify people groups in the manner of a totem and allow the liminal to continually morph its appearances according to its ambiguous nature, which is to frame mystery without molding it to the Procrustean bed of a hierarchical pantheon. This is how the transcendent is made immanent in religio-artistic expression without reducing its degrees of freedom to material necessity.  

Cauvin suggested that cities were constructed for religio-aesthetic purposes, and that the idea for agriculture and hierarchy only arose secondarily out of a desire for cities. This reverse order of events may witness to actual degrees of freedom in the possibility space of human ideation. Simply put, the imaginal realms of concepts and open intentions preceded, and therefore, were not entirely determined by material advantage, which seems to suggest that there are some degrees of freedom, or “under-determined,” actual choices available to the human intention outside of the strictly determinate necessities of material causality. Dreams, stories, art, music, dance, and ritual are not a reducible excess of material necessity and the prediction processes that serve it, but aesthetic values may indicate an irreducibly open intention for beauty, sublimity, and even horror as goods in themselves, in addition to the “selector” of natural selection, regardless of whatever contributions they may also make to uncertainty reduction.  

The material reduction as it applies to the human imagination need not be rejected to assert that the intention to ingress beauty, sublimity, and horror is not entirely determined by material advantage, which is to say that the intentional possibility space, particularly that of thought, is somewhat indeterminate or open. An Acheulean flint handaxe with a shell inserted into it head, “The West Tofts Handaxe (300,000-500,000 years old), is often cited as an example of the beyond of pure function because the adornment made the axe dysfunctional and unbalanced. But adornment need not be detrimental to be seen as containing enough degrees of freedom to be unnecessary or irreducible to mere use value. 

Our desire for the uselessness of irreducible ambiguity cannot be proven because it is always possible to find some material concern within any given religio-aesthetic expression that might be necessary or determinate, but it is at least interesting that we should care about our freedom in this way. Why isn’t it a simple matter of clearing up the illusion of choice, as many in the sciences feel they have done, and then going on about our business aware that are intentions our given to us by necessity like everything else. There is sometimes a somewhat silly game that is played by the aesthete or by the religious to find a pure act of indeterminate uselessness in the case of the former (art for art’s sake), or of disadvantageous altruism in the case of the latter (disinterested or unconditional love). But the determinist will inevitably find some determinate reason for each extravagant artistic expressions, no matter how bizarre or absurd, as well as for each religious act of self-sacrificial love, no matter how disinterested or unconditional. A determinist cannot concede any degrees of freedom within the space of human possibility, not even within the human capacity for concept creation. For the determinist a concept is the product of material necessity, even though it is experienced as an immaterial, mental phenomenon. However detached a concept may seem from material determinations in its mental form, it is still bound by them and offers no access to any degrees of freedom. Again, the determinist rejects Kierkegaard's notion that while we are biologically bound, we are mentally, or spiritually, free. 

Dreams are a possibility space that contain some degrees of freedom from material necessity. There is a selector at work that chooses which images to ingress into this imaginal space who does not have the same concerns as those of the day. This is not the daytime selector of the ego whose concerns are for self-mastery and advantage. When the daytime ego is asleep our lack of mastery and of advantage are shown to us in dreams. These are the failures that grant us some degrees of freedom from the mastery and advantages of prediction machines and their determinations. In dreams we enjoy the failure of our concepts, which is the gap left open for us by the Real in which to ingress indeterminate beauty, sublimity, and horror.  

II: The Actualized Possibility Space Given to Us by Dreams 

At the foundations of psychoanalysis, in someways taking its cue from Kierkegaard’s notion of anxiety as awareness of the possibility space of one’s and of the other’s freedom or indeterminacy, is the rejection of the basic, scientific, psychological principle that mental phenomena are materially determined, which is not to deny material influence, but to say that there is an irreducible remainder of indeterminacy through which to access immaterial degrees of freedom. Sigmund Freud’s discovery of what he called the “Death Drive,” is the ineluctable drive for what is beyond life’s drive for material advantage. This is the yearning for the infinite and transcendent that is most obvious when it is the Death Drive at odds with the life drives, but which is evinced even in the life drives whenever they include the excessive drive for beauty, sublimity, and sometimes horror in addition to the bare life of survival and reproduction. One way of understanding Death Drive is to see that it is the part of us, usually hidden away just below the surface in the unconscious, for freedom over material determination. Tell someone that they are unfree, and they’ll do something absurd and disadvantageous, even to the point of death, to prove you wrong. Death Drive is why we go to dangerous extremes to feel unbounded by our material determinations. 

But it isn’t necessary to go quite so far to see our desire to be free as constitutive of our paradoxical human “nature.” Concepts can either mold and determine like the steady states that the life drives seek, or they can frame the difference of what is indeterminate, or of what deviates from the model, or from material necessary. It is necessary that we eat nutritious food, but not necessary that we adorn it with spices, color, prayers, songs, friends and family, and so on. The materialist claim is that spices are employed as lures for us to eat beneficial food, but nutritious food is beneficial without spices, so why would these lures be necessary? The bland diets, especially of Europeans, were legendary before they were introduced to the spices of the East. And other animal species don’t need spices and other adornments to be lured to the right sorts of foods for their nutrition. The irrelevance of spices to nutrition has caused some theorist to associate them with the Death Drive’s excesses. If eating is aligned with a life drive, then it is for nutrition. Eating is excessive, if it is for something besides nutrition. Overeating is obviously detrimental to health; therefore, it is a sort of eating that has become opposed to the life drives and could be thought of as a sort of Death Drive. Spices are not necessarily opposed to the life drives, but they are either neutral or have a negligible effect on nutrition, so they evince some degree of freedom beyond the material determinations of nutrition.  

The extravagant expenditures of time-energy on the pursuit of unnecessary adornments such as spices for our foods has almost nothing to do with material necessary and everything to do with our aesthetic values. Freud’s Death Drive is whatever is beyond the life drives governed by the “Pleasure Principle,” which in this case might be thought of as what is beyond the determinations of the life drives for nutrition. When the drive is bound to bare life, it is determined by survival and reproduction. When the drive becomes unhitched from the determinations of bare life, it becomes the indeterminate drive for beauty, sublimity, and horror. The religio-aesthetic argument would be that the impulse to decorate or adorn is the artistic, or spiritual, urge to make beautiful and holy, and that these adornments witness to our intention for enough degrees of freedom from material necessity to emblazon our world with what is not necessary for bare life.  

These aesthetic additions are not exactly unnecessary because we have an excessive intention for what is caparisoned, which is what makes us the beings that “directly” enjoy our alienation from the determinations of nature if “nature” means what is necessary and sufficient. This alienation is sometimes thought of as nature standing outside of itself in philosophy and theology, which is the “ecstasy,” entomologically “standing outside of oneself,” of the subjective intention in phenomenology. Nature, or whatever there is, sometimes just called “being” in traditional philosophy becomes a subject to itself when it relates to itself as an object, as outlined by GWF Hegel’s materialistic form of Idealist monism. Hegel employed the productive contradiction of something like a material Idealism to describe being as the unresolved relation between matter and spirit, in which one produces the other in a kind of impossible paradox.  

Hegels’ notion of spirit is being’s self-alienation in thought rather than the common notion of spirit as an immaterial body, self, or soul. Spirit for Hegel is being’s awareness of itself that allows it to intervene in its determinations through thought, which is why he called this recursive feedback loop of self-alienation “thought thinking itself.” The scientific materialist does not consider the feedback loop of Hegel’s spirit to be a part of what is, so it has no ontological reality, which is what the scientific materialist means when she says that both aspects of Hegel’s spirit, which are consciousness and some relative degrees of freedom, are illusions that material processes have about themselves. In the paradox at the heart of the material reduction, the scientific materialist doesn’t deny that this illusion appears to the subject, but that both are immaterial hallucinations inherent to matter at some level of integrated complexity. The subject and its intention are produced by matter but have no substance or “reality” in themselves, which leaves open the enigma of how material processes like brains produce immaterial appearances like minds and their intentional phenomena and concepts.   

For Hegel spirit is immanent to being in the enigmatic way that He tried to capture with his esoteric phrases, “Spirit is a bone,” and “Subject is substance.” Spirit is then a substantial, or real, subjective intention, which is wherever being is aware of itself as an object and can intervene in its material determinations to some relative degree as if turning itself into a virtual possibility space. This is the strange, recursive loop of being as a determined substance somewhat de-substantializing itself through thought, so that it becomes indeterminate enough to contain some relative degrees of freedom, or virtuality. Material being in certain configurations creates the subjective intention associated with the imaginal virtuality of a mind.  

Matter-energy “spiritualizes” itself by standing outside of itself in such a way as to make what has been physically determined into a possibility space containing some relative degrees of freedom. It is widely accepted that the mechanism by which this occurs has never been described by Hegel or any other thinker in philosophy or the sciences. Giles Deleuze described the virtual as the actualized possibility of a possibility space that could be realized either conceptually or physically, but that each new realization created more actual possibilities. How matter-energy actualized a possibility space from the raw, unusable potential of “Difference-in-itself" without a subjective intention for there to be something rather than nothing isn’t explained. So, he simply asserts that the Universe as a single point, which he called “Difference-in-itself,” like Hegel’s “Being-in-itself," has an immanent intention, which he called “Desiring Production,” to rhizomatically expand along the “Plane of Immanence” as the process of differentiation that he called “Difference-for-itself.” “Desiring-production” is something like Arthur Schopenhauer’s “Will,” or Fredrick Nietzsche's “Will to Power” because these are the forces that drive the Universe into deeper levels of integrated complexity. But how exactly these forces relate to matter energy is unclear. Difference does not seem to be like any of the other laws of nature, nor is it a necessary result of the physical laws relation to matter-energy. 

The continual problem has been that the sciences measure the determined, or physical, aspects of matter, and philosophy, especially phenomenology, describes the conceptual aspect of matter, particularly that of thought, but every attempt to give a causal explanation for how these two aspects of matter are related have failed, and there are many who believe that no progress has been made on this problem since Rene Descartes tried to suggest that the Pineal Gland was the mechanism by which the physical was translated into the spiritual and vice versa. Hegel’s position is that matter is translated into spirit when it self-alienates as a subject, but the material mechanisms for this are unknown to this day. 

All “scientific” explanations of this translation reduce the mental to an illusion of sorts. Even what is called “Dual Aspect Monism” usually reduces the mental to the material substrate that somehow produces it, so that mind is a projection of the brain, but it is unlike any other material projection because it isn’t composed of a detectable or measurable substance. The mechanisms by which material generates this illusion for itself are unknown because the illusion can’t be directly studied, except from the first-person perspective, which is the subjectivity that the “objective” sciences seek to rid themselves of. The perceptual screen that is called “subjectivity” in philosophy doesn’t have an independent, quantizable reality, so it is unobservable from the third-person perspective, so it is often conceptualized as something like a hallucinated interface with the world in neuroscience. Whatever the ontological status of this interface, it is the appearance in the subjective intention of material transcendence, or of matter to itself, which is what is meant by the term “consciousness.” However, for those thinkers who take both the physical world and the mental to be real like Hegel, consciousness is so immanent to nature that it is somehow internal to, or even a feature of, the most basic level of being, which in the physical sciences is matter-energy.  

For the Materialist, spirit is an illusion, and for the Idealist, matter is an illusion, but for a certain type of monist, both matter and ideas are real, which is also true for the much-maligned dualist. In GWF Hegel’s version of monism transcendence is immanent to matter as spirit in the self-alienation of consciousness. However, most monists who take consciousness to be real simply assert it as a “raw fact” immanent to matter without any explanation of what this means in terms of causal relations. So, for a monist matter “just is” conscious, or consciousness just is an aspect of matter as if the whole mind – brain duality was just an optical illusion reducible to a perspective shift from the first-person to the third. However, this identification of matter with spirit doesn’t do any better than dualism with explaining the material causes for the illusion of spirit because the perspective shift from the third-person to the first doesn’t work. Third person observers can’t see what is going on in another’s mind. Observing the brain through an MRI, or any other possible measuring device, does not allow one to see thoughts or the mind, but only correlations that must be verified by the subject. This blindness is because electrochemical brain processes aren’t anything like the thoughts, impressions, or emotions of first-person experience. 

Regardless of how it is produced, if consciousness is not merely an illusion manufactured by materially determined processes, then it contains some relative degrees of freedom to make its own determinations. For most versions of monism, especially dual aspect monism, any degrees of freedom are an illusion created by the mechanisms of matter, which is why for these sorts of monists the imaginal can be reduced to its material determinations. The subjective, first-person interface, which is called the phenomenological “intention” in philosophy, may appear to allow the subject to make choices, but these apparently free selections are predetermined by material causes. Consciousness observes but doesn’t have any influence on the selections made in what appears as if the possibility space of an interface but is the necessary illusion of choice that has evolved for some unknown, materially advantageous reason. 

However, for those monists who believe is degrees of freedom, consciousness influences the choices of the subject in addition to its material determinations. Aesthetic concerns are both gratuitous, in the sense of not entirely bound by material concerns, and essential, in the sense that bare life is unbearable for those subjects who are subject to the drive beyond mere material concerns. Our nature is both immanent and transcendent at once because it requires both the determinations of a material instantiation and the indeterminacy of spiritual freedom. The appearance of being to itself is the foundational, unsolvable mystery of why there is something rather than nothing. This mystery, which is called an irresolvable “Antinomy” by the founding father of German Idealism and of modern philosophy Immanuel Kant, is the constitutional contradiction of something coming from nothing, or of time having a beginning, or of freedom from determination. The basic contradiction of something from nothing and then the further gratuity of awareness of it, doesn’t seem to have a material cause. Even the Panpsychist must claim this incomprehensible gratuity as the “raw fact” of the matter, so to speak, which is to utter the cogent nonsense that matter “just is” conscious.  

The history of human thought seems to always wind up in the same place when it tries to follow the causal chain back to the origin of all things, which is the antinomy of an “uncaused cause,” an “unmoved mover,” or a “necessary being.” Whatever there is, i.e., the “the Universe,” seems to have started without the necessary and sufficient reasons essential for rational propositions, so whatever it was, it was neither reasonable nor inevitable, but rather an utterly ambiguous gratuity. Whatever was before the beginning, sometimes called the “singularity,” or “Being-in-itself" by GWF Hegel, never began but was the ground from which the beginning was begun. The singularity can’t be gotten to, not even mathematically, because it is before countable things, because it is before the relations that allows for numbers. All the matter-energy package into one place is an unknowable concept because it describes something that can’t be known as an object. 

Both Parmenides, the thinker of being as one, and Heraclites, the thinker of being as many, were right. Parmenides imagined being as a singularity standing outside of time and space, before there was any separation to form the illusion of difference. Heraclitus imagined being as always becoming different from itself, like his famous river, without any unity to form the illusion of wholeness or completion. The singleness of what is beyond space-time is made manifest whenever we imagine a unified or completed whole within the continuous flow of becoming, like the apparently whole objects that appear to us on the subjective screen or our perceptions. The continuous difference of what is within space-time is made manifest whenever we imagine what cannot be contained within a whole like the excess of that which doesn’t fit our concepts, and which produces an irreducible ambiguity that resists the material reduction of scientific knowing.  

The causal chain necessary for the sciences’ material reduction was begun by whatever there is before causes. The causal chain central to the material reduction ends with the ultimate absurdity of a cause that caused itself, so that the appearance of being to itself is the paradoxical “groundless ground” of GWF Hegel’s “thought thinking itself,” or of Zhuangzi’s dream that he was a butterfly dreaming that it was Zhuangzi. And the Uncaused cause before the Universe seems to be reflected in the quantum fields that are most basic to it, in which the particles of being flicker in and out of existence uncaused. This strange paradox led the Catholic theologian and phenomenologist Jean-Luc Marion to assert that love proceeds being, which is like saying that the desire that there be something is the reason why there is something, but this desire grounds itself, in the recursion of a groundless ground, without reason. For theologians this groundless ground has had a name in the history of theology but no reasons, which is “unconditional love.” For the theologian when love is without conditions, or reasons, it is an uncaused cause of the ground of being. 

Whatever is necessary and sufficient about dreams pales in comparison to what is gratuitous and ambiguous about them. Dreams are stories cut up and impressionistic because they are without the coherence so essential to accurate predictive processing. The nighttime narrator seems to value misrecognition over uncertainty reduction and liminality over accurate identification like the vast temple complex at Gobekli Tepe, in which “natural kinds” were remixed into fluid human-animal hybrids dancing between this realm and the next. But dreams display the coherence of their own aesthetic rational, which is the sacred logic of the cut-up art of collage and of the SP1200 sampler that birthed hip-hop and house music. Jacques Lacan taught that “The unconscious is structured like a language,” and dreams are where this language is spoken without fear of being overheard by the censure of the “Big Other” nor of the ego. The unconscious language of dreams speaks of the infinite within us on the far side of our material concerns, which is the mechanism that Freud called “Death Drive.” The imprudent Death Drive tastes experience for its own sake and not for what it contributes to longevity nor prosperity. Dreams are, as Freud initially thought, about wish fulfillment, but the wishes that they seek to gratify are beyond what prediction processors can foresee because they are the beyond of the Freudian “Pleasure Principle.”  

Dreams come both before and after the determinate rehearsals for the practical matters of economic life because they are indeterminate play, like that of James P. Carse’s “Infinite Games,” which do not have an end, except for the continuation of games. Play, like dreams, may be reduced to scenario rehearsal, and the beauty, sublimity, and horror that they ingress into the world may in the end be about survival and reproduction as the modern material reduction of the sciences holds. But this reduction must disavow what those who dream and play know they are for, namely: the useless, and sometimes destructive, waste of the merely aesthetic.  

At some point in the night, dreams disconnect from their uses altogether and return to the useless beauty, sublimity, and horror that birthed them in the first place. When we lose ourselves in play, and in the play of dreams, we return home to the infinite play from which we came. We don’t tell stories for the practical propagation of the species alone, but we propagate the species for the sake of stories. The material consequences of our embodied play give our stories gravitas, so that the skin we put in the game intensifies the value of stories beyond value altogether. What is a body’s value if not for journeying forth into what is invaluable, which is the transcendent immanence of an ecstatic yarn? Our access to the infinite is always through our finitude, and there is no way to better use up our finitude than by strutting and fretting for the hour that we are allotted on this stage with the reckless abandon of the idiot who tells all great tales that signify nothing except the non-fungible, what-it-is-like of being in it. 

The anthropologist holds that Homo Economicus grounds Mircea Eliade’s Homo Religiosus because the religious longing for the sacred is reducible to the profane necessity of the economically transactable, but it is the other way around because sacred dreams precede the dreamer just as the love of story precedes the telling, and love itself precedes the being of whatever there is, which is what Homo Religiosus knows when it knows that we journey for the love of the quest and not for any other boon at its end. The what-its-like-ness of first-person experience is why we live it, and even more outrageously it is why there is something rather than nothing. The dialectic of something and nothing that is the Universe makes for better stories than the non-event of absolute nothing, which is being all crammed together into one impossible nonlocality, sometimes called “the singularity” in contemporary parlance, or what Hegel called “Being-in-itself.”  The singularity is everything that there is crowded into one place, a place where there can be no movement or relation and no anecdotes. It was love expressed as the desire for stories that became the space-energy of the big bang venturing forth all the particles of the Universe into whatever crazy scenarios they might get themselves into, or the love of telling stories bursting into billions upon billions of anecdotes, which is what Hegel called “Being-for-itself.” 

Stories are not the accidental spandrels of predictive processing that the material reduction portrays them as, but the love of stories does use predictive processes to keep stories going when necessary. However, when predictive processes get too adept, as they have for those who can afford the near-perfect uncertainty reduction systems of today, like suburban homes, cell phones, reliable cars, a relatively stable government, decent credit scores, and medical insurance, it is necessary at times for our prediction processors to fail us, which is the secret knowledge of the Death Drive, and why the unconscious must inject inaccuracy, precarity, and failure into our journeys when there are not enough of these essential ingredients to drive an interesting plot. This is why most contemporary stories must begin with the loss or incapacitation of one of our layers of protection, usually cell phones, to create the conditions of an adventure. Very few horror movies take place with either operating cell phones, or much common sense on the part of the participants, which is probably the self-sabotage or lapse of reason given by the unconscious motivations of the Death Drive that good stories be tortuous. Stories can't occur without uncertainty.  

Play, like story, has been reduced to a rehearsal without anything at stake, which is why so many well-resourced people blow up their lives according to the hidden dictates of the Death Drive. We don’t want to know or control what is coming next even when we think we do. When dreams are reduced to their material causes, they are for the scenario rehearsals and information processing of prediction machines. Prediction machines “play,” if it can even be called that when it has a use, to practice possible futures and instrumentalize relations. But dreams are a last vestige of a place where we might still play without being reduced to prediction machine because dreams are where the unconscious can display its lack of concern for accuracy and advantage and play for its own sake. The play of dreams may be what little of play remains after it has been mostly banished from our increasingly predictable lives.  

And this is why dreams were once and remain the sources of our thriftless impulse for art, like that presumably first produced in our artistic ancestor's dreams and then depicted in our aesthetic inheritance as the countless and invaluable paintings, sculptures, rituals, songs, dances, and stories that were intended not only to make the world transactable, but also holy and new. These alluring works come from the divine realm of the immanent transcendent because they were fashioned in the liminal space in which our ancestors, and their shamans, sorcerers, and witches, used to dwell. But this is not nostalgia for a lost past because we can make sleeping and the life that it was meant to bless and renew more than solely economic once again. Afterall, it isn’t inexpensive to be in bed for eight hours every night. Imagine, as Homo Economicus often does, all that we could accomplish if we didn’t have to sleep. From Homo Economicus’s perspective, which is the core what Homo Sapiens have become in the modern era, sleep is the misspending of our hours. But Homo Narratiosus cannot let the sciences and health influencers reduce this sublime waste of time, to merely time well spent preparing for any sort of waking advantage.  

Dreams are for themselves as all of life should be. Dreams used to be the fount of religious productions of the most profligate kind. The shamanistic vision that produced Gobekli Tepe was not for the advantage or solidification of the wealth of a sedentary, urban people, but for communing with dispersed, non-hierarchical peoples, the ancestors, and the gods. Whatever myths it depicts where to make the transcendent immanent in feasting, dancing, song, story and in the dangerous presence of voluminous, liminal trickster figures, and their prominent penises, somewhere between the natural world and that of the alienated human. When the impulse for art is reduced from beauty, sublimity, and horror to its transactional value, it loses the magnificent ambiguity of what it was for. Preagricultural cave paintings, engraved geometric art, elaborate burials, sacred sport, vision quests, ecstatic dance, and temples were not primarily the advantageous transactions of Homo Economicus in hunter-gatherer societies as they would become in sedentism. But even when the commerce of cities overtook these nomads, the original uselessness of the impulse for the holy couldn’t entirely be over written. The massively wasteful investments of Homo Religiosus for the sake of its prodigious, aesthetic intentions of both awe and the awful are written deep in the archeological records of civilizations. Death Drive’s push into both infinity and infamy squanders whatever advantage accurate predictions and well-planned economies provide on the excessive and unnecessary time-energy of immoderate projects that have little to do with survival or reproduction. 

Prediction machines also need stories because they feed their algorithms with what is quantizable and consumable in them. But what is in us more than these digitized longings are our longings for our stories to be free of economic determinations. Predetermined stories are suicidally boring and not really stories at all. When Homo Narratiosus is told the ending of an already determined outcome, it will do anything to cause an unforeseen calamity just to be free. Homo Economicus desires uncertainty reduction, but Eliade’s Homo Religiosus desires the no-guarantees of ecstatic states. “Ecstasy” comes from the Greek for standing outside of ourselves, and it is this freedom given by ecstatic self-alienation that the love, which came before any material determinations, desires. Homo Religiosus is Homo Narratiosus and neither are reducible to economics because both are grounded in the love beyond conditions, the love that thought it better that there is something to tell stories about rather than the eternal silence of whatever the without of story is.