– Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (2011)
Little wonder, then, that Darwin shied away from the word evolution, citing its common mystical connotations as inappropriate to his own purely naturalistic understandings. Indeed, the word possessed (and still possesses) an especially rich background in German Idealism and English and German Romanticism. Such authors, drawing on ancient Neoplatonic notions of involution and evolution, the ancient image of the ouroboros (the snake biting its own tail), and the symbolism of the spiral, used the language of evolution to express the natural tendency or “way” (Weg) of the cosmos to “unfold” its own implicit consciousness or divine Mind. Schelling could thus write that “[h]istory is an epic composed in the mind of God,” and Coleridge could declare that “the nurture and evolution of humanity is the final aim.” Thus, to paraphrase the famous terms of Schelling, the God who is involved into the universe (Deus implicitus) manifests as the God who evolves out of the universe (Deus explicitus).
As a striking example of this pre-Darwinian understanding of evolution as a kind of cosmic Mind awakening through history and culture, consider M. H. Abrams’s reading of Hegel’s masterwork The Phenomenology of the Spirit. Abrams approaches this text as a “literary narrative,” that is, as a Romantic novel or myth of the mind coming into its own self-revelation. The hermeneutical results are certainly astonishing (and fantastically familiar) enough: in a world in which Spirit or Mind (Geist) constitutes both subject and object, as well as the plot of the story, the reader is as much a part of the text as the text is a part of the reader. We are all being written, even as we are also doing the writing. Hegel now reads remarkably like Philip K. Dick’s autobiographical descriptions of Valis […]
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