From personal to transpersonal? An evolutionary stance and ‘self’ as the centre of narrative gravity

Abstract

For an ‘evolutionary thinker’, storytelling may be considered a shared derived trait (synapomorphy) of the human lineage. Once we began to tell stories, they became a key trait shaping our subsequent evolution. Furthermore, whether the ‘centre of narrative gravity’ is cosmological (as in creation myths) or focused on an individual character, the form of narrative is itself evolutionary, describing a process of transformation from an initial situation to subsequent states (with or without ‘resolution’). This article articulates the basic logic of an ‘evolutionary stance’ and applies this heuristic to a consideration of narrative, epistemology, religion, and the status of ‘self’. In the process, insights from evolutionary biology (including the concept of ‘major evolutionary transitions’), cognitive science (including predictive processing and relevance realisation as well as computational definitions of ‘self’) and analytical psychology are drawn upon. The article ends with a consideration of practices – from meditation and active imagination to psychedelic-assisted psychotherapies – aimed at suspending the activity of the personal ‘self’ and shifting the ‘centre of narrative gravity’ to reveal transpersonal elements of the psyche. Although we inevitably resume narrativizing our existence, the experience of temporary breaks in our personal narratives may enable us to tell more inclusive stories.

Keywords:

• Narrative
• self
• evolution
• Jung
• psychology
• cognitive
• epistemology

Introduction

In the context of this special issue, it should not be controversial to assert that stories are central to human life. In biological terms, narrating – or ‘narrativizing’ – is a quintessentially human functional trait. A key evolutionary innovation of the human lineage, one of the very few such innovations which may even be unique to humans. In the ‘post-modern’ era, it became fashionable to deny the possibility of the function of metanarratives. Since all meaning is context-specific, so the argument goes, distinct narratives will emerge in distinct contexts and it will be formally undecidable which is ‘true’ – indeed the very notion of universal truth is questionable, and thus we should abandon all attempts at generality. Whilst this is an important critique that should not be summarily dismissed, it fails as a global refutation of metanarrative for a number of reasons. In fact, context-specificity goes far deeper than the interpretation of texts, arguably right to the ‘bottom’ of reality – the metaphysical picture that emerges from a deep consideration and integration of the results of the special sciences is one in which relations appear primary. In other words, all ‘things’ emerge from, and can only be understood in relation to, particular contexts. Perhaps counter-intuitively, the context-specificity of all things preserves the role for metanarrative in human culture by demonstrating that what it is to be a human is to be the product of a particular evolutionary and ecological context. Thus, there are universal characteristics of the human condition (with all its context-specificity) that make metanarrative not only possible, but necessary.

This necessity arises in part from the fact that we humans – ‘Homo narrans’ – are inveterate storytellers (Niles 2010). The storytelling trait is part of the human evolutionary context, part of our historical legacy as a species. We could not stop telling ourselves stories about ourselves even if we wanted to. The deconstructive refutation of metanarrative is impotent against the weight of this legacy. Whilst a criticism of the hegemony of particular dominant metanarratives is a crucially important driver of cultural evolution, such a process must lead to the development of more apt (or ‘fitter’) metanarratives. If we deny the possibility of shared narrative, we will not cease telling stories about ourselves, but will retreat into ever more solipsistic personal narratives. Arguably, the oft-remarked-upon ‘fragmentation’ of contemporary western culture and the resultant ‘culture wars’ are partly a consequence of this pattern, which is not to deny that they might also be the ‘growing pains’ associated with a positive evolutionary trajectory towards more inclusive narratives.

The distinction between a personal narrative and a metanarrative concerns the ‘centre of narrative gravity’. In other words, it’s a distinction between the level at which the protagonists(s) (and antagonists) are found. Daniel Dennett has described the ‘self’ as ‘the centre of narrative gravity’ (Dennett 1991; 1992). This conception of self is roughly similar to the role of the ‘ego’ in analytical psychology, which Carl Jung, the founder of analytical psychology refers to as ‘the centre of consciousness’ (Jung 1931, 124). Jung preferred to use the term ‘Self’ (often with a capital S in translation) to refer to the ‘transpersonal centre and totality of the psyche’ (Edinger 1986). Thus, the distinction between the ‘ego’ or ‘narrative self’ (qua Dennett) and the Jungian ‘Self’ marks the distinction between personal narrative and collective, meta- or transpersonal narrative. This essay describes an approach to the recovery of metanarrative which may result in a shift of the centre of narrative gravity from the personal to the transpersonal. Jung saw the potential for facilitating such a shift in the processes of psychotherapy, active imagination, and contemplative practice. I will go further by arguing that this shift is the natural corollary of the biological evolution of new forms of individuality.

As Wilfrid Sellars observed, a central task of philosophy is to understand how ‘things hang together’ (Sellars 1963). If we take the contemporary results of science seriously, even whilst acknowledging that our knowledge is incomplete and always will be, it becomes hard to deny that ‘we are all in this together’. Indeed, given the range of existential threats we currently face, taking science seriously makes it not only difficult, but foolhardy, to deny the expanding picture of ‘we’ that an evolutionary and ecological stance suggests.

Narrative and skepticism

A persistent theme that the present essay ‘circumambulates’ is the function of narrative. As a scientist and philosopher deeply influenced by the pragmatism (or ‘pragmaticism’) of Charles Sanders Peirce and the fallibilism of Karl Popper, I consider myself a (kind of) skeptic. Why then, do I insist on the need for metanarrative, when my own core principles insist that all claims to propositional knowledge are necessarily provisional and not ultimate? In this I follow in the footsteps of a long and transcultural line of skeptical philosophers who, whilst asserting that our knowledge was necessarily incomplete and our capacity to discover ‘Ultimate Truth’ was limited both by our nature and by the expressive capabilities of language (and symbolic systems in general), still preserved a role for positive theses. A skeptical thinker may respond to the impossibility of certain knowledge by arguing that whilst withholding judgement concerning the ultimate truth of any proposition (or any perception), one should nonetheless pragmatically accept the customs of one’s socio-cultural context, as well as ‘one’s own feelings, experience, and common sense’ (Empiricus 1985, 7). Indeed, one must pragmatically accept all sorts of things as ‘given’ in order to move through the world without being constantly assailed by doubt. Further, in engaging with the knowledge claims of others, a skeptical philosopher might limit herself to employing only reductive arguments – i.e. attempting merely to refute the positive theses of interlocutors. Alternatively, a skeptical philosopher might engage in the game of ‘conjectures and refutations’ (Popper 1963) by erecting counter theses and then cooperating with others in the attempt to refute these positions in turn. These two options, which might be described as ‘reductio only’ and ‘positive thesis’ skepticism, respectively (and broadly) characterise the Prasaṅgika and Svāntantrika schools of thought within Madhyamaka Buddhist thought, one of the world’s richest strains of skeptical philosophy (Yakherds Forthcoming).¹

The pragmatism of C. S. Peirce and the fallibilism of Karl Popper converge in that both are forms of ‘positive thesis’ skepticism. Both considered the pursuit of knowledge to be an iterated game of (to use Popper’s term) ‘conjectures and refutations’ played by a community of investigators. Whilst Peirce labels this form of inquiry ‘scientific’ (Peirce 1955) and Popper articulates the model in the context of a ‘logic of scientific discovery’ (Popper 1959), the latter subsequently generalises the concept and argues that conjectures and refutations are characteristic of the evolutionary logic of all processes of knowledge acquisition (Popper 1963, 1990). Peirce’s pragmatist model has also been described as arguing that ‘the solution to poor opinions is more opinions’ (Legg 2018). In any case, both models suggest that constructing a ‘best guess positive thesis’ (i.e. a conjecture), which can then become the target of further criticism (i.e. refutation), is the central dynamic through which knowledge evolves. If this principle is combined with Sextus’ principle of pragmatic acceptance of certain customs and the acknowledgement that telling stories is a universal human ‘custom’, it becomes clear that a skeptic engaged in constructive (as opposed to merely deconstructive) thinking is entirely justified in the telling of stories and in arguing that some stories are ‘better’ than others. Whilst a thorough discussion of the principles that may be deployed in judging the appositeness of a story (or a ‘theory’ of any kind) is beyond the scope of this essay, suffice it to say that typical principles such as conformity with empirical evidence, coherence, and pragmatism (i.e. the consequences of a story) are amongst them.

‘Deconstruction’, in the Derridean sense, may be considered akin to a form of ‘evolutionist fallibilism’. ‘Il n’y a pas de hors-texte’ – ‘there is no outside-text’ (Derrida 1976, 159) is a central evolutionary-ecological tenet – all things and all statements exist in specific contexts which make them what they are or confer their meaning upon them. Applied to the analysis of texts, a deconstructive contextualism consists in highlighting the ‘metaphysical baggage’ associated with particular positions and arguing that such presuppositions are culturally contingent rather than universal. This is a standard anti-essentialist argument that would find favour both with evolutionary epistemologists such as Peirce and Popper, and with the process philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, who once described philosophy as ‘an attitude of mind towards doctrines ignorantly entertained’ (Whitehead 1938, 171). Derrida’s concept of ‘différance’ in part refers to revelation of those doctrines that, to the extent that they remain hidden behind the veil, or in the depths, animate and constrain our perspectives, making one conclusion seem obvious and another ridiculous. Any attempt to create a ‘complete’ system of knowledge can be refuted by demonstrating that it is ‘founded on that which it excludes’ (Bass 1978, xviii). Jungian psychologists will note the clear similarity here to psychodynamic conceptions of psychology in which unconscious processes influence our beliefs and behaviours.

Certainly, the role of critical philosophy is to criticise assumptions, bringing them into the light of day to reveal their context-specificity and thus (potentially) the inappropriateness of their application to broader circumstances. However, a thoroughgoing evolutionary analysis reveals the contingency not only of conventions, but of all ‘real’ things. One might say that it’s ‘conventions all the way down’. Traits of all kinds evolve and are selected for in specific contexts. Depending on the generality of the contextual property that a trait is adapted to, it may or may not be adaptive in another context. To give a trivial example, koalas (Phascolarctos cinereus) are specialised for feeding upon leaves from a variety of trees in the genera Eucalyptus and Corymbia. These trees are not only prevalent in Australia but are difficult to digest and poisonous, meaning that koalas (along with a number of other species that feed on these leaves) have little competition for food. Unfortunately, however, if a koala is transplanted to an environment dominated by pine trees (or if the koala’s forest is logged and replaced with a pine plantation), what was adaptive in the folivorous marsupial’s evolutionary context becomes maladaptive in its novel context.

Ideas and the frameworks constructed from them are no different in this sense from any other contingent ecological trait. What works in one context might not work in another. However, not all contexts are created equal – some are highly specific, whereas others are extremely general. Oxygen respiration has been adaptive in most of the Earth’s terrestrial habitats for the past two billion years or so. Prior to the time of the ‘Great Oxygenation Event’ (or ‘catastrophe’, depending on your perspective), it was not adaptive across the vast majority of the planet. Thus, what was once an extremely marginal or even non-existent context became one of the most widespread. The evolutionary (historical) and ecological (contemporary) context of any species is comprised of a spectrum of general and specific properties. Thus, oxygen respiration is a general component of the koala’s context, whereas feeding on particular types of leaves is far more specialised. Humans are no different from any other species in this sense, and this is reflected in our narratives. Thus, the complex work of a philosopher engaged in ‘deconstructing’ narratives or worldviews is to ascertain which components of these complex aggregates of ideas are general, and which are particular. Today, we might refer to more particular notions as ‘socially constructed’ and the more general ones as ‘biological’. However, it’s important to once again emphasise that all components are constructed, all are contingent, and that some are merely ‘more contingent’ (more recent, plastic, or ephemeral) than others. Arraying concepts and practices along an evolutionary spectrum from most general (which is likely to mean ‘most ancient’) and most particular (often ‘most recent’), is a far from trivial task. Regardless, the assertion of this essay is that telling stories, and living in communities united by metanarratives, is one of the most ancient and general components of the human toolkit of traits.

The function of narrative

If storytelling is one of the most ancient and thus ubiquitous of human traits, what is its function? The answer to this question is gestured at in the final sentence of the preceding section, and also by the name we give to the most pervasive form of systematised metanarrative in human history – religion. The word ‘religion’ is derived from the Latin words religare, ‘to (re)bind’, and religio, meaning ‘bond’. To bind or be bound to what exactly? Durkheim defines religion as a system of ‘beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them.’ (Durkheim 2001, 46). Religious beliefs and practices bind communities together. Narratives are a central component of religions, but these are not stories that are simply told, listened to, or believed, they are stories that are also embodied. In fact, it may be argued that naked propositional belief has a deleterious effect on the function of religious narrative and that this partly underlies the declining influence of religion in the western world, and has led to increases in religious conflict worldwide (Carse 2008). The deconstructive criticism of texts and the facile criticism of religion by ‘new atheism’ may be related cultural currents, but a rehearsal of such arguments is once again beyond the scope of the present essay.

A worldview, partly constructed from narratives, is part of the inheritance of an individual human born into a particular sociocultural context. A narrative framework, ‘given’ to a child born into a particular culture, becomes part of the lens through which that child views and interprets the world. According to the neo-Kantian philosopher of biology Jakob von Uexküll, all organisms inhabit an umwelt that is specific to their species. This umwelt is the a priori structure of ‘apperception’ which brings the world of that organism into existence. Uexküll memorably illustrates this by describing the ways in which the umwelt of a tick is likely quite different from that of a human (Uexküll 2010). Thomas Nagel does something similar in his famous essay on the nature of conscious when he asks ‘what is it like to be a bat?’ (Nagel 1974). Whilst Uexküll’s conception of the umwelt is explicitly derived from Kant (Kant 2007), acceptance of it does not commit us to ‘subjectivism’ in which the worlds inhabited by individuals are private and do not relate to anything beyond themselves, nor does it commit us to ‘idealism’ in which consciousness is the ultimate reality. The concept merely indicates that different organisms relate to the ‘ground of being’ in distinct ways, by virtue of their different sense organs and different ‘values’. Each organism has a different a priori ‘lens’ through which it sees (or indeed constructs) the world. In keeping with our deployment of evolutionary thinking, we should note that the a priori ‘categories’ are not simply ‘given’ or ‘timeless’ – they evolved, like everything else (see below). Thus, we might perform an evolutionary inversion by asserting that the a priori of the individual is the a posteriori of the lineage.

Every known human culture utilises narrative. Indeed, it is hard to imagine ‘culture’ without narrative – is mere mimesis ‘culture’? As Robert Bellah has pointed out, all human cultures interweave both narrative and mimetic elements. In many cases these cultural streams are so interwoven that it would be hard to definitively separate them – they feed into each other like an ouroboros, a snake biting its own tail. In any case, Bellah argues that ‘humans cannot function without’ such cultrual streams (Bellah 2011, xix). In the course of human evolution, more sophisticated forms of sociality emerged. Michael Tomasello describes the transition from group foraging, in which ‘joint attention’ moves towards ‘joint intentionality’, eventually leading to highly cohesive group activity and competition between groups: ‘This competition meant that group life as a whole became one big collaborative activity, creating a much larger and more permanent shared world, that is to say, a culture.’ (Tomasello 2014, 5, emphasis added)

As this shared world stabilised, it faded into the depths of the human psyche and became, for the members of the culture, an ‘objective’ ground of being. This, according to Tomasello, ‘meant that individuals could now reason ‘objectively’, from the group’s agent-neutral point of view’ (Tomasello 2014, 5). The creation of these shared frameworks is therefore a condition of the subsequent evolution of human culture, including art, science, and technology. Again, just as Whitehead, Derrida, and others assert, criticism of such a ‘framework’ becomes part of the task of the philosopher. As Jung might say, reality (or the psyche) contains ‘hidden depths’, and as Hamlet tells Horatio, ‘there are more things in Heaven and Earth … ’ (Shakespeare 1975, 1080). Derrida refers to ‘deconstruction’, whereas in evolutionary studies we might speak of ‘reverse engineering’, as we apply the same mode of reasoning to all organismal traits, and indeed the history of the universe in toto. Nonetheless, attempting to reveal and even explain some of these ‘priors’ should not be about explaining them away. Rather, just as the goal of depth psychology is to bring unconscious elements of the psyche into the light of consciousness in order to integrate them, dredging the depths of human cultural evolution should ultimately be a constructive process. Unfortunately, in the West we seem to love breaking things apart in order to explain them, but frequently forget to put them back together. Is this not the modus operandi of eliminative reductionism, just as it is of some ‘deconstructionist’ philosophers?

The basic logic of the evolutionary stance

Throughout this essay I have been using the term ‘evolution’ and its derivatives in a manner that may seem somewhat extended. What do I mean by it? It is a common misconception that ‘evolution’ and Darwin’s ‘Theory of Natural Selection’ are synonymous. They are not. Indeed, Darwin did not even use the term ‘evolution’ in the first edition of his magnum opus On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (Darwin 1859), preferring the phrase ‘descent with modification’. Whilst Darwin had his reasons for avoiding the term, which was associated in nineteenth Century England with ‘human progress’, he added it to subsequent editions after readers pointed out that if he was going to write about evolution he might as well use the word. Etymologically, ‘evolution’ means ‘unfolding’, but the standard definition of the word is (following Darwin) ‘descent with modification’. This means nothing more complex than that the future is descended from the past and is different from the past. Unpacking this assertion provides us with a few basic principles, namely that change occurs, and that evolutionary change is in some sense continuous (or contiguous) – if the future is observably descended from the past, this means that the past constrains the future. We might say that the specific arrangement of future states of any given system is contingent upon the specific arrangement of past states of that system. Evolutionary change is thus ordered in this manner.

In an influential article, Richard Lewontin distilled the logic of natural selection down to three basic principles: variation; heritability; and differential survival (Lewontin 1970). Natural selection per se is actually a form of constraint on (biological) evolutionary change, the way in which the environment ‘selects’ some variants rather than others. Thus, strictly speaking, ‘natural selection’ corresponds only to ‘differential survival’ – Darwin’s theoretical achievement was profound, but we should recall that he neither explained the origins of variation, nor the mechanism of heritability, in biological systems. Rather, he was able to take variation and heritability for granted as observable facts in the absence of a mechanistic explanation for either of them. A unit of heritability – the gene (though Mendel used the ambiguous term ‘factor’) – was discovered by Mendel, and the rediscovery of Mendel’s work paved the way for the neo-Darwinian ‘Modern Synthesis’ (Huxley 1942). The mechanism of genetic inheritance was finally elucidated by Watson and Crick’s discovery of the structure of DNA (Watson and Crick 1953). These twin discoveries instigated a profoundly successful research programme that had the unfortunate side effect of neglecting the additional dimensions of heritability operative in the biological domain. This shortcoming has more recently been addressed by the call for an ‘Extended Synthesis’ which incorporates epigenetic, behavioural, and cultural dimensions of heritability alongside the genetic (Jablonka and Lamb 2014). Achieving a detailed understanding of the origins of variation and novelty within biological systems remains a significant challenge for contemporary evolutionary biologists (see e.g. Jackson and Koludarov 2020).

Lewontin himself recognised that the ‘logical skeleton’ of Darwin’s argument could be a ‘powerful predictive system for changes at all levels of biological organisation’ (Lewontin 1970). In fact, the logic can be ‘imaginatively generalised’ (Segall 2018, 62) well beyond biology. The bare bones of the evolutionary stance require merely that contiguous change (descent with modification) occurs and suggest that such change is typically characterised by the existence of a range of variation in one (loosely defined) ‘generation’, and a principle that ‘selects’ a subset of that change for propagation into the next generation. In such a view heritability becomes a kind of ‘hidden third’ that is already implied by the core definition of descent with modification. To account for the origins of genuine (as opposed to merely ‘apparent’) novelty in non-deterministic evolution, there must be an influx of ‘arbitrary’ (from the ‘perspective’ of the system as a whole) variation in each generation. This constant addition of novel variation ensures that the range of ‘standing variation’ is always broader than the selected range – selection is a process of ‘canalisation’. Novel variations need not be intrinsically directed towards any particular outcome – the telos in evolution is supplied by the principle of selection. On the other hand, the basic evolutionary logic does not require novel variation to be ‘random’ – what is operative is that the process which generates variation and the process which selects are distinct and that the latter canalises the former (effectively turning the ‘noise’ of variation into 'signal'). In cultural evolution, for example, many of the novel ideas in each generation may be carefully designed and directed, but their designers will suffer from imperfect foresight regarding the results of selection (which is effected at a collective level). Thus, we cannot predict, even in a system with a designed input, the outcome of the evolutionary process. These basic principles are no more than that – the ‘axioms’ of the evolutionary stance. In itself, the observable fact that systems ‘evolve’ is trivially true. However, application of the principles of evolutionary logic to analyses of the evolution of complex systems in the real world is a non-trivial task, and the mechanisms producing variation and constraint (and indeed heritability) differ widely from domain to domain.

The evolutionary form of narrative

This broad understanding of ‘evolution’ captures both the common parlance usage of the word and the technical aspects of evolutionary change studied by systems science (Capra and Luigi 2014). The basic form of narrative is itself evolutionary, as a story typically follows a character or characters through a series of events that change both the characters and the world they inhabit. ‘How-to’ guides that purport to distil the essence of storytelling and character development will typically say that a character should begin in a specific situation; something should happen to disturb or destroy that situation; the character must respond to this challenge, perhaps by going on an adventure; during the course of the ‘adventure’ (be it internal or external), the character should come to new knowledge of themselves and their place in the world, enabling them to transform both (see, e.g. Brody 2018). This is a transparently evolutionary process in which an influx of novelty (AKA a ‘change of circumstance’) generates a range of possible outcomes (e.g. death; triumph over the forces of evil; the end of the world; the saving of the world; etc.) which forces the character to become an agent who selects a specific subset of outcomes that are (hopefully) positive. This evolutionary parallel is often made explicit, as when John Truby notes that ‘a great story is organic – not a machine but a living body that develops’ (Truby 2007, 5, emphasis added) and that ‘the dramatic code, embedded deep in the human psyche, is an artistic description of how a person can grow or evolve’ (ibid., 7, emphasis added). Perhaps it will be labouring the point to note that the ‘Hero’s Journey’, distilled from the structure of many myths by Campbell (1949), is a quintessential example of an evolutionary narrative form (which, indeed, many screenwriters still take their cues from).

For Jung, the content of certain dreams provided evidence for his assertion that ‘the human psyche is unique and subjective or personal only in part, and for the rest is collective and objective’ (Jung, CW Vol. 8, 1960, 291). His discussion of these ‘big’ dreams is thoroughly evolutionary, both in its connection of such experiences to the individuation process and in his analysis of the narrative form of the dreams themselves. The Jungian notion of individuation describes the psychic evolution of the individual, much as developmental biology describes the physiological evolution of the individual. According to Jung, ‘big’ dreams are characterised by ‘numerous mythological motifs that characterise the life of the hero’ and ‘dangerous adventures and ordeals such as occur in initiations’ (ibid. 293). The parallel with the evolutionary form of narrative and character arc described above is clear. According to Jung, the mythological motifs – ‘things which in no way touch the banalities of everyday’ – are drawn upon because such dreams concern ‘the realisation of a part of the personality which has not yet come into existence but is still in the process of becoming’ (ibid. 293, emphasis added). In his discussion of the form of such dreams, he outlines another typically evolutionary narrative schema which moves from an ‘exposition’ (or ‘initial situation’), through a ‘development’ to a ‘culmination’, and finally ‘lysis, the solution or result’ (ibid. 295). A detailed analysis of this interesting model of transformational dreams is beyond the scope of this article, but it is worth noting that to make it properly evolutionary it should be emphasised that the ‘solution’ should never be considered ‘final’ or ‘optimal’ – evolution is a never-ending process in which no optimal solutions are ever reached, or even exist, since the ‘situation’ in which the organism (or lineage, or dreamer) finds itself in is highly dynamic, i.e. itself evolving quasi-independently from the evolution of the individual. Thus, the individuation process, as with all genuinely evolutionary processes, is a ‘never-ending story’.

Heroic journeys are not the only kind of narrative, of course, but all stories typically deal with transformation to some degree. This highlights another important point about non-deterministic evolution more generally – it is transformative and constructive. The future is constructed from the past, but in the process of construction the past is transformed into something novel. Another ancient form of narrative is the creation myth (see von von Franz 1972, for an interesting analysis of the form). Creation myths are stories that describe the evolution of the cosmos from some primordial state to a descendant state recognisably similar to the world in which the storytellers found themselves. Creation myths highlight the way in which stories typically combine both ‘essentialist’ and evolutionary components. Essentialism, the view that the ultimate reality is comprised of timeless, eternal ‘forms’ and that all change is merely apparent (or ‘illusory’), is the antithesis of evolutionism. In the latter position, the process of change is fundamental, and all stasis is merely apparent or relative. Since they have definite beginnings – indeed they are often referred to as ‘origin stories’ – creation myths combine both these elements. ‘In the beginning was’ … something. It might be a cosmic egg, a void, a ground from which Being bubbles up, a pair of opposing principles which bring forth all of creation by their union, etc. To have a definite beginning, a story must posit a specific situation which is, in itself, outside the timeline of the narrative. The primordial situation or entity is therefore ‘atemporal’ or perhaps ‘eternal’ (these are not quite the same thing). Once the timeless origin is posited, the evolutionary form of the narrative can take over, but linear narratives must have beginnings and the form of creation myths makes the ‘essentialist’ character of such beginnings clear.

Big history

‘Big history’ is an influential attempt, based on contemporary science, to formulate a narrative outlining the evolution of the universe – it is no coincidence that the historian David Christian titled his popular introduction to the approach ‘Origin Story’ (Christian 2018a). Big history charts the approximately 14-billion-year evolutionary history of the universe by placing time on the x-axis and complexity on the y-axis. Thus, over time, new levels of complexity evolve. ‘Big historians’ identify eight key ‘thresholds’ at which these levels emerge, from the Big Bang and the origins of matter through to the technological revolution (see Christian 2018a, for details). As mentioned, Christian explicitly identifies the framework as a ‘story’ and notes that it is an attempt to tell the first ‘origin story for all humans’ (Christian 2018b). A complementary approach is the ‘Tree of Knowledge’ formulated by Gregg Henriques, which groups the emergence of complexity into four levels: matter; life; mind; and culture (Henriques et al. 2019). Both systems utilise the same approach to graphing a ‘hierarchy’ of complexity utilising the axes of time and complexity. In addition, the Tree of Knowledge maps each of its levels to a relevant domain of scientific inquiry, from physics to the social sciences.

Such pictures can be further nuanced by introducing a third axis – a ‘z-axis’ – which maps relative ‘stability’ across time. When considering the entire universe through an evolutionary lens, it becomes clear that some ‘things’ (or patterns) last a lot longer than others. A thoroughgoing evolutionist would prefer to avoid the positing of eternal essences as much as possible but would readily admit that ‘essences emerge’ in the process of evolution. Thus, it may be possible to avoid treating (e.g.) the ‘laws’ of physics as eternal, by treating them as merely the earliest ‘habits of the infinite’. If the classical laws began to coalesce (perhaps as the result of some propensity to interact or ‘process of concrescence’ – Whitehead 1978, 26) sometime after the big bang with the emergence of the strong nuclear and the electromagnetic force, they are not ‘timeless’. They are, however, stable enough to have constrained all subsequent evolution (so far). Another evolutionist ‘move’, this time in the domain of epistemology, would be to identify each of the domains of scientific inquiry with a specific ‘level of description’, thereby avoiding the threat of ‘eliminative reduction’ which can sometimes bedevil hierarchical conceptions of the sciences. Yes, humans and their experiences and behaviour – the explananda of psychology and the social sciences – are comprised of organs, cells, molecules, and ‘ultimately’ fundamental particles (or indeed fields). However, this does not mean that the social sciences could, even in principle, be ‘reduced to physics’ (or indeed molecular biology).² Levels of description provide us with different affordances for interaction with phenomena at relevant levels. They are not, therefore, ‘mere stories’ we tell ourselves because we lack complete knowledge of the ‘ultimate reality’ of which such systems are a coarse-grained manifestation. Fields are appropriate to the level of description of quantum field theory, but they are not ‘more real’ than cells, organs, or organisms.

Major evolutionary transitions in individuality

The concept of ‘major evolutionary transitions’ predates the Big History framework. In 1995, the biologists Eörs Szathmary and John Maynard Smith published a seminal book titled the Major Transitions in Evolution (Maynard Smith and Szathmary 1995). In a follow-up they described the goal of that book as describing the major transitions that have taken place in evolution as developments in ‘the way that information is stored and transmitted, starting with the origin of the first replicating molecules and ending with the origin of language’ (Maynard Smith and Szathmary 1999, 3). Like Big History (but presumably coincidentally), the book describes 8 major transitions, in this case limited to the domain of biology. As well as describing transitions in the mechanisms of information storage and transfer, each level is associated with a transition in the relevant level at which an ‘individual’ is defined. Whilst life was likely a collaborative/network phenomenon from the get-go, these evolutionary transitions in individuality become transparent in transitions 4 through 8, which describe transitions from individual cells, to colonies of cells, to multicellular organisms, to colonies of social organisms, to human societies.

Identifying the relevant level at which to identify and describe ‘individuals’ remains challenging for theoretical biology. Indeed mereology – the start of part-whole relations – remains a challenging area in philosophy more broadly, one which underlies the philosophical naiveté of attempts to ‘explain away’ certain properties of complex systems by describing them in terms of the activities of their constituents. Recent discussions in biology have highlighted the fact that the level at which individuals are defined is relative to the specific questions asked by sub-disciplines of the field and that work on social organisms ‘demonstrates the possibility of individuality (existing) simultaneously at multiple organisational levels’ (Krakauer et al. 2020, 211). The relevant level of individuality is thus defined stipulatively (see Jackson and Fry 2016) according to the question being asked. Nonetheless, Krakauer et al., attempt to extend the work of Szathmary and Maynard Smith by defining individuals in terms of information propagation – ‘individuals are aggregates that preserve a measure of temporal integrity, i.e. ‘propagate’ information from their past into their futures’ (Krakauer et al. 2020, 209). In the thoroughly process-based conception of contemporary biology, therefore, defining individuality requires the z-axis discussed above as an addition to the 2-dimensional graph of Big History approaches. ‘Individuals’ are a consequence of stability across time, at least in this information theoretic approach. In such a view, evolutionary lineages arguably qualify as individuals. Indeed, a ‘general lineage concept’ has been proposed in an attempt to solve the ‘species problem’ in biology (de Queiroz 1999). These concepts have arisen largely as a result of the ‘anti-essentialist’ core of evolutionary thinking – if everything is in flux and therefore smeared across a spectrum, how do we find the bright lines? How are we to ‘carve nature at the joints’ (Jackson and Fry 2016)? In an evolutionary cosmology such as that proposed by the Big History framework, these questions run very deep.

Individuality and the slippery self

Alongside and intimately related to the challenges of individuality are the challenges posed by attempts to define the level(s) and function(s) of various concepts of ‘self’. ‘Self’ is such a slippery concept that one can readily locate a spectrum of opinions ranging from the insistence that nothing to which the label applies exists (Garfield 2016; Harris 2014), to essays which list at least 8 distinct concepts of self being utilised within psychology and philosophy of mind (Gallagher 2011). For some, selves are a fundamental component of the contemporary biological image, as demonstrated by the assertion of Miller et al., that since ‘self-referential cognition is demonstrated by all living organisms, life can be equated with the sustenance of cellular homeostasis in the continuous defense of ‘self’.’ (Miller et al. 2019, 54, emphasis added). Similarly, one of the most influential frameworks in contemporary biology and cognitive science – the ‘free energy principle’ (and the associated theory of predictive processing) – suggests that a division of the world into self and other is fundamental to the functioning of ‘life as we know it’ (Friston 2013). In an attempt to define the ‘computational boundary of a self’, the developmental biologist Michael Levin proposes the definition of selves as ‘goal-directed computational agents regardless of implementation’ (Levin 2019, 4). Unsurprisingly, given the shared commitment to computational/information theorical models, this definition has much in common with the definitions of ‘individuality’ proposed by Szathmary and Maynard Smith, and Krakauer et al. Beyond discussing the ‘diachronic’ aspect of such ‘selves’ – their stability over time – Levin draws attention to the way in which information sharing amongst entities within a collective (e.g. the cells of a multicellular organism) results in a transition of the salient or functional level of the self. Cells in such collectives pursue goals that ‘can be much longer than a cell’s individual lifespan’, at a ‘time scale … that belongs to the collective’ (Levin 2019, 6). Thus, the level at which selves exist is not merely stipulatively designated, but shifts as a consequence of the functional unity of a complex system, itself emergent from information sharing amongst its members.

The picture that emerges from these views is one of nested hierarchies of individuals or selves. The salient level at which a ‘self’ exists may be a product of either the level of description utilised by a researcher, or a consequence of the functional organisation of a system. Cells don’t entirely abandon their selfhood when they form into collectives, they merely engage in ‘selfless’ patterns of behaviour so long as they continue to share information effectively with their collaborators. A normally functioning organism exists as a ‘meshwork of selfless selves’ (Varela 1991). In cancer, this information sharing breaks down, and cells become selfish individualists (Levin 2019).

Centre of narrative gravity

We have seen that transitions in individuality or ‘level of selfhood’ have occurred across evolutionary time, and also that an organism may be both comprised of many selves or individuals and also a component of a collective, ‘higher order’ self or individual. What does this have to do with narrative? Daniel Dennett distinguishes between a ‘biological self’ – common to all organisms, from the single-celled amoeba to the multicellular mammal – and a ‘narrative self’, unique to humans (Dennett 1991). He describes the way in which we language-using primates ‘spin a web of words and deeds’ which comes to define the boundary separating the world into ‘self’ and ‘other’. As the name suggests, the narrative self has something of the character of a story. We tell stories about all sorts of things, but fundamentally many of our stories are about our place in the world – they are stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. Hence, Dennett arrives at the concept of the self as the ‘centre of narrative gravity’ (Dennett 1991, 1992). Like other forms of self, Dennett argues, the narrative self constitutes a sort of ‘semi-permeable’ boundary, which has, amongst other things, a protective function. It is comprised of ‘memes’ – cultural units of selection – and has no existence independent from these memes (Dennett 1991). Susan Blackmore has developed this idea by defining the self as a ‘memeplex’ (Blackmore 1999), and seems to use it in support of her eliminativism about the self – it is ‘nothing but’ memes, for Blackmore. Dennett, on the other hand – though he is often painted as the arch-eliminativist – is careful to note that the narrative self is ‘as much a biological product as any of the other constructions to be found in the animal world’ (Dennett 1991, 416). By this I take him to mean that such a self is as ‘real’ as any other product of biological relations, and as we have seen and will return to below, in an evolutionary worldview it’s relations (and ‘conventions’, or ‘habits’) ‘all the way down’.

We might think about this kind of self model as another nested hierarchy – this time of beliefs and knowledge. At this point things start to get a little bit ‘fractal’ – the narrative self is one form of self, nested within a hierarchy of selves, and its own structure is that of a nested hierarchy of beliefs and knowledge. In this context we should note, using cognitive scientist John Vervaeke’s helpful schema, that knowledge need not be merely propositional (i.e. beliefs), but is also procedural (‘know-how’), perspectival (associated with a particular context or locus of awareness), and participatory (embedded and embodied) (Vervaeke and Ferraro 2013). A helpful image (but one we should be careful not to hypostasise) for the Dennettian self is that of a ‘meme pyramid’, with ‘axioms’ in the basement that constrain all higher-level beliefs and knowledge. Such axioms are like gatekeepers – if a new piece of information cannot be squared with our most deeply held beliefs, it is typically rejected. The vertical axis of the meme pyramid is also correlated with time – typically the longer we hold a belief or engage in a practice, the more deeply ingrained it becomes, and the more difficult to dislodge. It is a core component of our identity. Such a pyramid is therefore another representation of a typical evolutionary hierarchy of temporal stability. Whilst the Dennettian ‘narrative self’ seems very ‘personal’ – akin perhaps to the Jungian ‘ego’ with elements of the ‘persona’ – Jungians will recognise immediately that most of the ‘memes’ inhabiting the basement of such a pyramid are not really ­personal at all. In fact they are transpersonal (to use Edinger’s [1986] term) elements of the collective unconscious. We, as individual organisms, did not ‘invent’ such archetypal patterns of belief and behaviour, we inherited them – they are traits of our lineage(s). Jung was deeply influenced by Kant’s epistemology, and thus he saw these deepest elements of the human psyche, typically hidden in the unconscious, as part of the a priori filter through which we interpret our experiences. Once again, the evolutionary thinker can avoid essentialising archetypes by understanding that the a priori of the organismal individual is the a posteriori of the lineage (c.f. Popper 1990).

Predictive processing and relevance realisation

One of the most influential and well-supported hypotheses in contemporary cognitive science – ‘predictive processing’ – also understands cognition and perception in terms of priors and posteriors (see Clark 2015a, for a detailed treatment). In this case, the terms ‘prior’ and ‘posterior’ come from Bayesian statistics, but the basic evolutionary logic is the same, and the framework is justifiably considered neo-Kantian (Zahavi 2018). In this case, the priors do not inhabit the ‘depths’, but are ‘top-down’ constraints on perception derived from prior experience (thus priors result from ‘elevated’ posteriors). In brief, the model suggests that incoming sense data (which is ‘bottom-up’) is met by the descending predictions of a model built from patterns detected in previous sensory sampling. Whenever the priors fail to accurately anticipate the incoming sense data, they are updated by an ascending process of ‘prediction error’ or ‘surprisal’. This logic almost exactly mirrors the evolutionary epistemology of Karl Popper’s iterated rounds of ‘conjectures and refutations’ (Popper 1963). Top-down predictions are the equivalent of conjectured ‘theories’ which are derived by a process of abduction – inference to the best explanation – based on previously acquired knowledge and principles of reason. Such priors are then tested against the incoming sense data. If they are ‘refuted’ they get updated, and the process iterates. As Andy Clark has noted, this is ‘bootstrap heaven’ (Clark 2015b) and provides us with a hint of the ways in which the linearity of much Western thinking might benefit by being augmented with a healthy respect for ‘loops’ (‘strange’ or otherwise – Hofstadter 2007).

As with Bayesian statistics and the progress of science (which have previously been analogised in the movement known as ‘Bayesian Epistemology’, see e.g. Sprenger and Hartmann 2019), predictive processing is a transparently evolutionary process in which priors are ‘selected’ in terms of their capacity to accurately predict incoming sense data. Part of this process must also include something akin to what John Vervaeke calls ‘relevance realisation’ (Vervaeke, Lillicrap, and Blake 2009). There is vastly more incoming sense data than we could possibly attend to, thus our priors must also function to narrow this ‘blooming, buzzing, confusion’ (James 1890) down into that subset of the data that is relevant to us as agents with specific goals. Again, note the basic evolutionary logic in which a range of variation (sense data) is selected or canalised into that subset which is functionally salient. This is a process which turns noise into signal. It is also the process by which the ‘world’ – the umwelt of Uexküll alluded to earlier – is constructed. Uexküll’s neo-Kantian assertion is that different species of organism do not inhabit the same (phenomenal) worlds. Such worlds – what is real to an organism or lineage – results from a combination of our most ancient priors (e.g. the kinds of sensory processes our lineage utilises) with our more recent priors, including, for humans, our narratives. Again we find a temporal hierarchy, and one might argue that the most ancient priors of a lineage are the ‘most real’ things for that lineage. But it is relations all the way down – as Kant argued, we do not perceive the ‘thing in itself’ directly (Kant 2007), but as JJ Gibson argued (Gibson, 2014), we do perceive affordances directly, and affordances (functional ways of interacting) are what umwelten are made of. Umwelten are the realities that organisms are embedded within - our realities are constructed from real relations.

Shifts in the centre of narrative gravity

For Dennett, the centre of narrative gravity is the (small ‘s’) self of the individual human organism, i.e. a ‘personal’ self. However, as multicellular organisms we are comprised of selves or individuals and, as highly social organisms, are ourselves embedded in higher order selves or individuals – families, communities, cultures etc. Such higher order selves are lineages at different scales of generality – beyond our cultural lineage lies the lineage we share with all members of our species, further beyond lies the lineage we share with all living things on this planet, etc. As we’re nested in such hierarchies, is it possible for our centre of narrative gravity to shift from the personal level to a transpersonal (or indeed the sub-personal)? In his commentary on Richard Wilhelm’s translation of the classic Chinese (Taoist) text The Secret of the Golden Flower, Jung describes such a shift. A long quotation is required: ‘ … if the unconscious can be recognised as a co-determining quantity along with the conscious … the center of gravity of the total personality shifts its position. It ceases to be in the ego, which is merely the centre of consciousness, and instead is located in a hypothetical point between the conscious and the unconscious, which might be called the self.’ (Jung 1931, 124, emphasis added).

For Jung, the ‘Self’ (often, but not in this excerpt, given a capital S) was the ‘transpersonal centre and totality of the psyche’ (Edinger 1986). In his commentary, Jung is describing a gravitational shift occurring as the result of meditative practices described in Wilhelm’s translation of the main text. He is, of course, also speaking of his own method of analytical psychology. As readers of Jung know, he typically referred to all Eastern meditative practices collectively as ‘yoga’. Whatever we might think of this lumping today, it does highlight an intriguing etymological link between ‘yoga’ and ‘religion’. ‘Yoga’ literally means ‘union’. The etymological roots are the same as our notion of ‘yoking together’ – in the practice of yoga, what is being ‘yoked together’ is typically described as ‘mind and body’. As we have seen, ‘religion’ is derived from a root meaning ‘to (re)bind’. Thus, ‘yoking together’ mind and body – making conscious the fact that we are embodied organisms embedded in contexts, not disembodied and unconditioned minds – is intimately related to the ‘binding together’ of communities which is the (ideal) function of religion. We’ve come to associate religion with dogma, but Jung described the ‘authentic religious element’ as the ‘living relationship to and direct confrontation with the extramundane’ (Jung 1957, 21). Living in relationship to something greater than ‘oneself’. Thus, we might consider being ‘religious’ in these terms as living in relation to the ‘higher order’ selves of which we are constituents, i.e. shifting the centre of narrative gravity from personal to transpersonal.

If we (provisionally) accept the model of the psyche provided by predictive processing, what exactly is going on in one of these ‘shifts in the centre of narrative gravity’? Answers (equally provisional) to that question may emerge from a brief consideration of Buddhist philosophy alongside recent results in clinical and theoretical research utilising psychedelic substances. One of the central doctrines of Buddhist thought is anātman (Sanskrit) or anattā (Pali) (the following discussion draws upon Garfield 2015). These words, literally translated, mean ‘no (or not) self’. As one of the ‘four marks of existence’, anattā may be interpreted metaphysically as a refutation of the Orthodox Hindu conception of ātman – the essential self possessed by all living beings, which is a fractal sliver of the divine ground of being, Brahman. More broadly, anattā is an anti-essentialist refutation of svabhāva or ‘own-being’. ‘All things are not self’ may thus be interpreted to mean that all ‘things’ lack ‘own-being’, and rather possess only a conditioned form of being – being in relation to all other things (Hamilton 1995). This might be seen as a form of relational realism (though some interpret it as a form of anti-realism, and the details of such debates are far beyond the scope of this essay). Moving out of the realm of metaphysics and into that of embodied (and soteriological) philosophy, anattā may be understood as an injunction to ‘stop selfing’. How do we do this? By engaging in meditation practices and attempting to walk the Eightfold Path. In mindfulness meditation, one of the things we are practising is the ability to stop telling stories – observe phenomena, do not interpret them. For this practice I cheekily coin the term ‘anarrata’. The basic idea (shared by the Greek Stoics) is that whilst we might not always be able to control what happens, we can regulate our reactions. Further, it is our reaction – our framing and interpreting of phenomena – that is more responsible for our sense of suffering than the phenomena themselves. Interestingly, what seems to happen when we take a break from telling our own personal narratives is that a bit more information ‘gets in’ from ‘outside’. When we return to the narrative state (as we surely must), there has been an expansion in our conception of the ‘protagonists’ of our narrative – our stories become less solipsistic, in other words. Of course, even in deepest meditation our cognition and perception likely remain conditioned by priors and all observation is ‘theory-laden’ (Popper 1959), but we can nonetheless do our best to minimise the influence of such ‘kleshas’ for a time.

In predictive processing, perception emerges from a combination of top-down ‘theories’ and bottom-up sense data. The relative influence of top-down and bottom-up constraints on the evolution of the ongoing stream of perception is modified via a process known as ‘precision weighting’ (Clark 2013). More ‘gain’ (or precision ‘weight’) on top-down theories means more constraint from priors; more gain on bottom-up sense data means the opposite. Perhaps what we are training in meditation practice is a quasi-voluntary form of gain modulation – learning to decrease the gain on top-down priors, loosen the grip of our pre-conceived models and narratives, and increase the gain on incoming sense data. When we adjust the dials in this manner, we perceive more of the world around us and may spontaneously perceive ourselves as embedded in a hierarchical network of relations – our thinking becomes more ‘ecological’. This interpretation fits with recent research utilising psychedelic drugs to investigate the experience of ‘ego dissolution’ (Lebedev et al., 2015; Nour et al. 2016) and ‘relaxed beliefs under psychedelics’ (REBUS – Carhart-Harris and Friston 2019). Altered states of consciousness experienced under the influence of these substances have frequently been compared to meditative states. Moreover, the potential therapeutic value of such experiences may be similar. Psychedelic research is now enjoying a ‘renaissance’ and these substances are being investigated as therapeutic interventions for a wide variety of mental health disorders. They may be used according to either a ‘psychedelic’ (aiming at full-blown ego dissolution) or a ‘psycholytic’ (a ‘loosening’ of the typical constraints of ego) model (Grob and Bravo 2019). One of the features of this work is its demonstration that taking a break from the habitual patterns of the narrative self can have a therapeutic effect. A benefit of psycholytic therapy utilising MDMA for treatment-resistant post-traumatic stress disorder is that it allows subjects to engage with past events from a novel perspective and ultimately to frame a different, healthier, narrative about what has happened to them and how to move forward (Sessa 2019; Mithoefer and Mithoefer 2021).

Telling fallible stories

The ‘mystical-type experience’ reliably occasioned by high doses of classic serotonergic psychedelics like psilocybin and LSD is characterised by (amongst other things) ‘ineffability’ and ‘oneness’ (Griffiths et al. 2008; Griffiths et al. 2011; Barrett, Johnson, and Griffiths 2015). That such experiences are ‘ineffable’ – literally unspeakable or indescribable – indicates that they involve a suspension in the narrativizing activity of the (personal) self. That people feel a profound sense of connection with other humans, and even with all life, the universe, and everything, suggests that suspension of the solipsistic personal narrative results in a profound shift of the centre of narrative gravity. Perhaps, when precision weighting is adjusted to a certain ‘sweet spot’, the relative dominance of bottom-up data results in the top-down model being updated so fluidly that we lose ourselves – our sense of ‘being’ a determinate subject – in the pure process of ‘becoming’. At such times, so much of the world floods in that the ego dissolves (or awareness of the ego is suspended), resulting in a breakdown of (the perception of) the opposition between subject and object, a realisation of the constitutive presence of the ‘other’ within our own subjectivity. Such a shift is not permanent – we always ‘come down’ – but it can have a lasting effect on our perspective. Put simply, it can transform the narratives we tell ourselves about ourselves, making them more inclusive and appreciative of our relational – ecological – context.

Narratives are part of the a priori assemblage of ‘theories’ that constitutes the lens through which we view the world. They cannot be ‘ultimately true’, but as I am arguing that we cannot stop telling them – and that to attempt a refutation of all metanarrative can only result in an increase of solipsistic personal narrative – I would be remiss in omitting a consideration of the criteria we might use to judge whether some narratives might be ‘better’ than others. As inveterate storytellers, we must consider the criteria that can help us to tell a ‘likely myth’ (Plato 1965) with a chance of having a positive impact in the world. This essay is not intended as an epistemological treatise, but I will introduce three criteria we can use to judge the ‘aptness’ of metanarratives. These criteria – empirical adequacy, coherence, and practical consequence – together can be taken as the basis of ‘fallibilist narrativising’. Firstly, an apt narrative should be in accord with the best empirical (including, but not limited to, experimental) data available to us. Secondly, an apt narrative should be coherent – internal contradictions should serve as beacons for criticism³, though we should note in passing that much apparent contradiction in the history of philosophy occurs at the semantic level, i.e. is not ‘substantive’.⁴ Thirdly, an apt narrative should be pragmatic – its consequences should be useful, and not nihilistic or abhorrent. Applying each of these principles to any given narrative is, like the application of simple evolutionary logic, a non-trivial challenge. Furthermore, the existence of these ‘criteria of aptitude’ in no way imply that we will ever have a ‘best’ narrative, rather they simply offer terms in which any given narrative might be criticised – they are selection criteria. Far from asserting the possibility of a single, definitive narrative, these criteria leave open the possibility (indeed the likelihood) of there being many equally apt narratives (the equivalent of theoretical ‘underdetermination’ in philosophy of science), each of which is inevitably ‘not-all’ and ‘suboptimal’, but which nonetheless captures some relevant perspectival information not addressed by other, potentially complementary, narratives. Finally, this view should not be conflated with the assertion that ‘every story contains something worth knowing/preserving’ – some stories are simply not ‘apt enough’ and may be deleterious. They should be negatively selected.⁵

As the content of this essay hopefully makes clear, I believe that an apt metanarrative should ultimately acknowledge the results of various scientific fields which indicate that we are evolved organisms, embedded in an ecological context comprised of real relations. The metaphysical picture emerging from such a view might be called ‘relational realism’ (Epperson 2020) or ‘speculative realism’ (though it is different from some recent approaches given that name – cf. Harman 2018⁶), but it could equally well be called ‘evolutionary metaphysics’. Evolution, as repeatedly emphasised, is a process of construction through the formation of relations. This may well apply at the quantum level (Epperson 2003; van Fraasen 2010), just as it applies at the biological, psychological, and sociological levels. When we acknowledge this reality, we are moved to adopt an ‘ecological stance’ – ecology is the corollary of evolution.⁷ The ecological stance is an epistemic position that attempts to understand complex systems in nature by acknowledging the all-encompassing role of context (Calvete et al. 2021) – as in relational realism, it posits that ‘things’ are only what they are as a result of their relations (Jackson, Jouanne, and Vidal 2019; Jackson and Koludarov 2020). In biology, ‘function’ is an entirely relational concept (Jackson and Fry 2016) and ‘meaning’, including the meaning of the stories we tell, arguably emerges from function – storytelling is a functional trait.

Though I cannot provide an exhaustive review of the evidence here, not only is such an evolutionary and ecological narrative coherent and in accord with the empirical data, it is also pragmatic (i.e. once again, functional). This is because it emphasises the role of agency in co-creating the world. Agents embody yet another version of the basic evolutionary logic – a range of possibilities present themselves and an agent selects some subset of those possibilities in accordance with a particular set of goals the agent embodies. In these ‘times of radical transformation’, various possibilities confront us, not all of them in keeping with some of our most fundamental goals (e.g. continuing to survive, which requires an inhabitable planet). For these reasons, metanarratives which emphasise our role as agents in shaping the future are required. It has long been popular, particularly since the early successes of modern science and Pierre Simon Laplace’s vivid depiction of a deterministic universe based on Newtonian mechanics (Laplace 1902), to tell stories which minimise or even deny the role of human agency (or agency in general) in shaping the universe. Even if such stories passed the empirical and coherency tests, they would dramatically fail the test of pragmatism. This is not the place for a detailed refutation of universal determinism, but it should be easy enough to recognise that such a narrative (and it is, of course, a narrative) is not going to help us come together and make the effort required to ensure a sustainable future for our species and our co-habitants on this planet.

As I have suggested, narratives need not be merely told or believed, they can also be embodied in the drama of life. Thus, apt metanarratives may include within them suggestions for practices that are designed to undermine the very process of narrativizing itself. This is not because we can or should ever stop telling stories, but because apt metanarratives not only acknowledge the ubiquity of evolutionary process but must themselves continue to evolve. In a fundamentally processual world, to stop evolving is to die. Dogma is dead narrative. Thus, practices such as meditation and the (safe and judicious) use of psychedelics, or simply “getting out of ourselves” into nature, may help ensure that we avoid the dangers of ideological possession and never make the mistake of confusing ‘map’ with ‘territory’ (Korszysbki 2010). All stories, theories, and models are ‘maps’ and thus should not be literalised. However, one should not confuse this crucial injunction with the idea that we can do without a map. Maps are useful, indeed they are indispensable; they just aren’t the territories they represent. Contemplative, mystical, and psychedelic experiences are classically described as ‘ineffable’, but the truth they reveal is the ‘ineffability of all things’ – we can describe ordinary experiences far more readily than non-ordinary experiences, but only because they are ‘ordinary’ and thus we have a shared language for them. Whatever I tell you about the very ordinary tree outside my window, however, can never “capture” that tree – the tree is, both in-itself and in my perception of it, ineffable, inexhaustible. An apt metanarrative recognises its own limits.

Metaphors and metanarratives for times of radical transformation

Recognising the limits of language involves understanding that a majority of words are metaphors (Lakoff and Johnson 1980). Some metaphors are perhaps ‘more metaphorical’, or ‘poetic’ than others, and we should have a sense of this spectrum. However, recognising that even the most ‘literal’ of descriptions is nonetheless metaphorical may aid us in recognising the utility of the poetic usage of language in extending our understanding. Hopefully, this will help us shed some of the contemporary aversion we have developed for the metaphors utilised in narrative frameworks other than our own personal favourites. I have described our situation as that of selves or individuals nested in hierarchies of selves or individuals. At certain levels, both ‘below’ and ‘above’ those at which we habitually consider our individuality, we are comprised by and members of communities that include other members who seem very different from ourselves. As holobionts, part (a very large part) of the community that we as ‘individual organisms’ are, is made up of bacterial cells and parasites that share very little of our genetic identity (Gilbert and Tauber 2016). Similarly, the ecological communities we inhabit include humans with very different beliefs and practices from ourselves, as well as myriad non-human organisms. When we zoom all the way out to consider the largest communitarian ‘selves’ that we are part of, we reach the level of the biosphere, the planet, or even the universe as a whole. Ancient and modern metaphors have treated such maximal selves as living organisms – from the ‘world soul’ of Plato’s Timaeus (Plato 1965) to Lovelock and Margulis’ concept of ‘Gaia’ (Lovelock and Margulis 1974). Yes, these are ‘just’ metaphors, but they might be useful ones.

Humans have been using the narrative form to organise beliefs and practices into coherent cultural frameworks since time immemorial. They are a mode of formulation for worldviews or, as Jung might call them, weltanschauung (Jung 1970). In a Sellarsian sense, therefore, the formulation of apt metanarratives is one of the highest goals of philosophy – narratives are attempts to describe (and enact) 'how things hang together’. Whether we want to be traditionalists and call such metanarratives ‘religious’ or prefer to abandon that word as too heavily laden with baggage is a matter of personal preference. In this essay, I have described a small amount of the evidence that supports the view that the most coherent descriptions of reality are those that recognise its evolutionary, ‘processual’, nature. It might not be a coincidence that the basic form of narrative is itself evolutionary. Furthermore, being ‘evolutionist about evolutionism’ requires an application of evolutionary principles to the content of narrative, i.e. allowing it to ‘keep up with the times’ and not devolve (or perish) into dogma. Aside from its empirical support and coherency, the great virtue of an evolutionary narrative is the ecological stance which emerges from it, which encourages us to understand ourselves as interdependently embedded in contexts. We are communities embedded within communities. Selves made of selves, constituent of selves. The kind of metanarrative we need for these ‘times of radical transformation’ is one that binds us together.

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Notes on contributors

Timothy Jackson

Dr Timothy Jackson is a transdisciplinary researcher and lecturer working in the fields of toxinology, neuropsychopharmacology, and philosophy of science/biology. He is currently co-head of the Australian Venom Research Unit in the University of Melbourne’s Department of Biochemistry and Pharmacology. His work in evolutionary toxinology has centred on investigations of the evolution of venom systems, from the molecular evolution of toxin-encoding genes to the evolution of associated anatomy and the ecology of venomous organisms. In clinically oriented toxinological work, he has written extensively on snakebite and the importance of adopting an evolutionary and ecological stance in order to address this multifactorial neglected tropical disease. He is also involved in an antivenom distribution programme in Papua New Guinea and epidemiological investigations of venomous injury in Australasia. He lectures to pharmacology and neuroscience students on venom toxins, the human relationship with drugs, addiction, and psychedelic-assisted psychotherapies. Philosophically, his investigations have focused on the centrality of ‘function’ in biological explanations, and more broadly on ‘evolutionary thinking’, which involves the application of an ‘evolutionary stance’ to questions ranging from the metaphysical to the mundane.

Notes

1 Prasaṅgikas or ‘reductio wielders’ (Garfield 2015) ‘deny that talking about the fundamental nature of anything makes sense even conventionally’ (Yakherds forthcoming, 9), whereas Svāntantrikas ‘are committed to the idea that – at least conventionally, although not ultimately – entities have distinguishing characteristics, or essences,’ (ibid, 9).

2 This argument recalls Dennett’s argument against ‘greedy reductionism’ (1995, 83) or Anderson’s (1972) classic paper ‘More is Different’. Indeed, the use of the simple term ‘different’ to describe properties of wholes as opposed to those of parts should be preferred to the common claim that wholes are ‘more than the sum of their parts’. The reasons for this are manifold and cannot be rehearsed here, however, the simplest question to ask is which metric is being used to determine whether these properties are ‘more than’, ‘less than’ or ‘equal to’?

3 In this fallibilist context, there is no conflict between the assertion that contradictions serve as ‘beacons for criticism’ and the Hegelian view that contradictions are ‘fundamental’ and we must ‘reconcile’ ourselves to them. In an evolutionary epistemology of conjectures and refutations, ‘successive resolutions lead to more and more appealing contradictions’ (McGowan, 2019, 18), and an evolutionary metaphysics is simpatico with the view that ‘contradictions’ are constitutive of ‘reality’ or ‘the absolute’ (cf. McGowan, 2019, 21).

4 Which is not to say that the words and their meanings are not important, they are crucial, but their symbolic relations nonetheless track a relational superstructure that is in excess of any given ‘narrative model’.

5 ‘Negative selection’ being the ‘force’ that acts to remove deleterious mutations/phenotypes from a population via the decreased fitness of individuals carrying or exhibiting them.

6 One key difference which will require elaboration in future essays, is that Harman, Grant, Meillassoux, and Brassier appear united in their antipathy towards Kant and Hegel (if in nothing else – see Harman, 2018). However, there is no intrinsic conflict between German Idealism and the position articulated in this paper.

7 Strictly speaking, ‘ecology’ describes an organism’s extant – i.e. synchronic – relations, whereas ‘evolution’ is typically used to refer to an organism’s phylogenetic – i.e. diachronic – relations.