New Consciousness

Spatial Concept (Lucio Fontana, 1964)

I propose that the ongoing global upheaval on economic, cultural and psychological levels, which has resulted in moral polarisation but also in an unprecedented depth of moral introspection, is a symptom of a revolutionary transformation, of a new moral Enlightenment that will affect not only our moral beliefs but the degree of human consciousness. The new epoch, if correctly identified, will correspond to a new kind of humanity, accomplished not by the efforts of transhumanists, eugenists, or the ‘industrial revolutionaries’, who are just artefacts of the old epoch, momentarily raised to the crest of a wave in time that cares not for their ambitions, but by the ripeness of consciousness itself.

The moral challenge we are partaking in is not defined by ethnic or religious differences and offers no unambiguous recourse to tradition, but engages all of humanity on a level previously unexplored, compelling everyone to make a new choice, all at the same time but each deciding alone, with no cultural cheat-sheet. The choice comes down to what is fundamental, what matters the most, what is our highest value, and most believe that the consequence of a wrong choice will be a kind of death. A test of this kind is an opportunity to become more conscious, more faithfully grounded in the conditions of existence, but it also carries a discernible risk of a metaphysical downfall, of a depreciation of consciousness, resulting in the stratification of humanity into sub-types of moral agency. Some individuals are manifestly drawn to the ‘safety’ of deterministic, controlled realms, associated with diminished moral responsibility and autonomy, therefore with a lower degree of conscious agency, while others are drawn to the challenges of enhanced responsibility and autonomy, accepting the risk of the unknown for the sake of more agency, more reality and deeper consciousness. This polarisation corresponds to two mutually exclusive kinds of ethics, the former derived from the conditions of animal existence, focussed on enhancing security and comfort, the latter grounded in conscious transcendence of animality as the foundation of meaning.

The old ethic is characterised by an inherent lack. Lacan characterised this lack as “ab-sense”, which I interpret as the absence of sense capable of grounding the value of existence. The Self ruled by ab-sense could be sustained only by self-deception or continuous distraction, which were historically accomplished by religious dogma, violence and hedonism. The new ethic pursues self-integration with the dynamic structure of consciousness, discernible in the reflexive, socially-mediated propagation of the intrinsic value of the Self, and is therefore realist, objective, universal and inescapable. The said structure can be visualised as the infinitely expansive ‘inner’ space created by imperfect mirrors facing one another, where the reflected content of a mirror is an individual mind, separate and uniquely internalised but dependent on the reality of other mirrors, and on the act of reciprocal facing. All conscious but imperfect mirrors have something in common, an ideal or the meaning-essence of ‘what it is like to be a mirror’, that could be distilled from what every mirror does vis-a-vis one another. The reflexive structure of consciousness indeed necessitates such an ideal, the meaning-essence of Self, the anchor of identity, which can be Realised only indirectly, by means of other mirrors being there for and in one another. The ideal thus conditions and ‘creates’, or ‘makes real’, both the individual instances of consciousness and their content.

Practical implications of the new ethic are not evident to the traditional mindset, precisely because they require a higher degree of reflexion as an integrated instance of mediated consciousness. This lack (ab-sense) can be provisionally remedied by logically analysing the structure of consciousness, revealing its sense, which does not neatly conform to the old ethic focussed on the alleviation of suffering, but motivates the enhancement of conscious rational agency in principle (which is not synonymous with the transhumanist commitment to enhancing the capacities of the body). To be more conscious is to have a higher degree of existence to oneself, but since consciousness is conditional on social reflexivity and is diminished by devaluing any conscious rational agent, the ethical enhancement is functionally incompatible with the possibility of treating anyone as dispensable, therefore with any utilitarian, collectivised conception of net improvement. Returning to the metaphor of the mirror, by defacing a single mirror all other mirrors are reflexively defaced, and the reality of their content is universally degraded from the common ideal. The problem of ethics thus becomes practically more complex than traditional morality, given that the alleviation of physical or psychological suffering is not necessarily relevant to consciousness, but in another sense becomes simpler, since the underlying ontological mechanism can be analytically defined with absolute precision. The Golden Rule is now understood as a necessary condition of existence - those who violate it diminish their own existence by devaluing themselves by proxy - but the implied premise of the Rule (what we ‘ought to want’ for ourselves) is radically modified from its traditional ab-sense by the analytical demarcation of the structure of consciousness.

Transformative moral insights are not individual achievements but a nexus of countless historical contributions. Our capacity to explicitly articulate them is a testimony that humanity is ripe for an overt transformation and already undergoing an inner, metaphysical revolution. The rest is consequences.