Life Evades and, in Darkness, Plays

Our consciousness is not privy to most of life. William Carlos Williams has written, “We are blind and live our blind lives out in blindness.” John Gray substantiates this in perhaps the most enlightening coherent collection of philosophical musings ever written, Straw Dogs:

“As organisms active in the world, we process 14 million bits of information per second. The bandwidth of consciousness is around eighteen bits. This means we have conscious access to about a millionth of the information we daily use to survive.”

Gray's numbers give precision to Williams' insight: we navigate existence with access to a millionth of what sustains us. Consciousness accesses only a minuscule fraction of the processes that constitute our existence. It’s a narrow spotlight in a forest of darkness. The vast majority of what keeps us alive (from cellular regulation to sensory filtering to motor coordination) operates entirely outside our awareness. What remains hidden vastly exceeds what appears. Life operates primarily in this hidden domain. Life lives in hiding.

Life, it seems, is accurately represented in the instance when your name appears in thought but not yet in writing. To be not even a name, but just an idea, a floating image, even more lively. Most so, in a passing flash, fading as quickly as you appeared. The way a face surfaces in memory and dissolves before you can hold it. This elusiveness is life in its native state. Life is most alive precisely where it resists capture, most at home in the darkness before articulation.

To be alive is to be indeterminate, to appear on the surface, hiding a void underneath and a forcefield above. In the void lies the depths of our own being we cannot access, the fourteen million bits running in darkness with no one home to witness them. Pressing down from above are the forces that were there before we were, the accumulated weight of structures and histories and systems that continue to shape the surface, bending it toward ends not our own. Whether we're examining biological processes or social systems, the same pattern emerges: life operates overwhelmingly in hidden domains. The cold profit logic that structures our world, like the cellular processes that sustain our bodies, unfolds beyond the threshold of perception.

Our daily schedules are organized around wage labor because survival requires purchasing commodities. Our diets consists of industrially processed animals because that's what the supply chain delivers. Further, we consume cheap clothing stitched by workers locked in sweatshops for sixteen-hour shifts, electronics assembled from cobalt mined by enslaved children in collapsing tunnels, household cleaners and plastics leaching carcinogens that accumulate in our tissues and trigger cancers years later, all because capitalism's profit motive drives production toward the cheapest possible labor and the least regulated raw material inputs.

This harm gets distributed across supply chains designed to keep it hidden. We might know abstractly that someone suffered to produce our shirt, that toxins lurk in our cleaning products, but this knowledge remains informational rather than experiential. The suffering happens in factories we'll never see, embodied in individuals whose experience we can never feel. The life (and just as much so, the theories!) that appears on the surface emerges from this vast hidden background. What we experience as our daily existence is generated by processes occurring in darkness, all operating continuously to produce the narrow band of reality that reaches our awareness.

If life operates primarily in hidden domains, then what presents itself to our awareness must be understood as fundamentally partial, a thin surface layer floating on depths we cannot penetrate. This has profound implications for what we can claim to know about anything at all.

Life shows itself to us only ever superficially. What we see is shaped by what we cannot see. A million more magnitudes of depth, we know it to contain, yet we are completely precluded from conscious access. All we have are appearances, which portend to be one way but in hiding most of their underlying reality, reserve the right to transform, even reverse their configurations.

This becomes most consequential when we consider other people. Any person might surprise us completely, acting in ways that contradict everything we thought we knew about them. Groups and societies can transform or reverse direction with shocking speed. This makes perfect sense when we consider the complexity involved: the hidden processes that generate a single individual are already vast beyond comprehension, and when individuals interact in pairs, groups, collectives, entire societies, this complexity multiplies exponentially. We form expectations based on the surfaces we can see, but those surfaces emerge from hidden depths that retain the capacity to produce entirely different configurations. What we thought would happen may reverse itself entirely.

Let’s explore the intricacies of this. Everyone was raised differently, developing ways of acting and understanding themselves in relation to certain personalities. Formative early moments and relationships install unique habits in each of us, most of which persist beneath awareness. The particular household, the sibling order, the timbre of a parent's voice when they are proud compared to when they are stressed, whether you were abused sexually, physically, or verbally, or whether you were loved, encouraged, and respected intellectually and emotionally—all of this deposits into our musculature, posture, and expectation, with the body carrying what the mind has long forgotten, perhaps what it never knew in the first place. Our more visible coordinates, seen in the social constructs of race and gender, place of birth, era of birth, sexual orientation, physical attractiveness, wealth and status in late capitalist society, legal classifications and identities, cultural norms, literacy level, and physical ability each interface with systems of meaning that precede any individual by centuries. Each variable exerts chaotic influence on the direction of a life.

The complexity giving rise to each individual entangles itself with the complexities giving rise to everyone else. Every encounter is a collision between individuals or groups each shaped by complex histories, each unknowable in their totality, not least because their totality is unceasingly unfolding, that is, being updated, transformed, and further mystified. Further, we may look in the other direction, towards the past. Each individual is the living embodiment of an unbroken chain of life, spanning thousands of years in civilizations, hundreds of thousands as hunter-gatherers, millions as upright walking apes, more millions as mammals, billions as living beings, and even more billions as star dust. We carry both the genetic history of the past as well as the experiential history.

We carry both the genetic inheritance and the accumulated experience transmitted across these spans. Consider what this means in practice. A peasant in medieval France lived according to cultural norms and expectations utterly foreign to us, they moved with different rhythms, sung different songs, and lived in differently organized villages, yet something of that life gets passed down through generations, both through explicit teaching and child rearing and through that same deposition into bodies mentioned above. We have no way of knowing how far back our own mannerisms stretch. The way you hold your fork, the cadence of your speech when angry, your instinctive response to being watched by strangers, these could trace back centuries through lineages we cannot reconstruct. Major historical events we've heard of, the Black Death, the Reformation, colonial conquests, and countless minor events we haven't, a particular famine in a particular village, a family's forced migration, a single act of violence or kindness between strangers, all of these shaped the people who shaped the people who eventually produced you. The transmission happens invisibly, through trauma that alters how parents hold their children, through survival strategies that become personality traits, and through adaptations to specific environments that persist long after those environments have vanished.

Given this vast hidden complexity in every person, and given that we encounter each other with only surfaces visible, misunderstanding becomes inevitable. Groping through this darkness, misrecognitions proliferate amongst humans. Projections layer upon projections, amassing into a whole spectacle unto itself, which is now displayed seemingly everywhere.

In the spectacle, reality gets abstracted onto screens, compressed into images, and filtered through algorithms that decide what we see and when. We see photographs of protests without witnessing the events themselves. We encounter people through their social media profiles, while the platforms process us as data points sorted into demographic categories for advertisers. The onslaught of targeted advertisements that ensue colonize our mental space to such an extent that we wouldn't know what to want, what to value, or how to think without them. Herbert Marcuse understood this dependence. Writing in One-Dimensional Man, he argued that we have become so reliant on the advertising and entertainment systems that shape our consciousness that their removal would be catastrophic. He wrote:

"the mere absence of all advertising and of all indoctrinating media of information and entertainment would plunge the individual into a traumatic void where he would have the chance to wonder and to think, to know himself (or rather the negative of himself) and his society. Deprived of his false fathers, leaders, friends, and representatives, he would have to learn his ABC's again...To be sure, such a situation would be an unbearable nightmare. While the people can support the continuous creation of nuclear weapons, radioactive fallout, and questionable foodstuffs, they cannot (for this very reason!) tolerate being deprived of the entertainment and education which make them capable of reproducing the arrangements for their defense and/or destruction."

Marcuse’s crucial point is that we have become so accustomed to the spectacle’s distortion that the distortion itself becomes desirable, even necessary for our psychic equilibrium. The spectacle that warps our perception is precisely what allows us to tolerate mind-numbing jobs, poisoned food, genocides, nuclear arsenals, and ecological collapse. Without the mediation, without the entertainment and advertising that structure our consciousness, perhaps we would confront the horror of what we're participating in directly simply because we would have less to look at.

Thus, even the minimal slice of reality that reaches our consciousness doesn't arrive clean but refracted through layers of mediation, each one bending what we perceive further from its source. The incessant entanglement amongst individuals creates a web of such density that supposing any knowledge or analysis determinately represents what is actually happening would amount to falling into the seductive trap of appearances, which lies in how appearances always present themselves as real, not as just the surface of some deeper complex web of factors in the flow of change and transformation.

And yet, despite the drastic limits of our conscious awareness that we have been detailing, at some deeply buried level, we are aware of those very limits. We can sense life’s affinity for remaining hidden, it’s desire to stay opaque and remind us of its unintelligibility. Indeed, it is in sensing mutual incomprehensibility that we feel most connected to life.

Sometimes it feels as if others seem most human, most like us, when we haven't yet reduced them to characters in our own narrative, when we don’t feel like we know them in any sense, when they remain irreducibly Other. When we see a man on the metro or pass a family in the street, or most vividly, when we see a homeless woman sleeping on top of a street vent to stay warm, do we ever consider that we are just as strange to them as them to us? In spite of the vast epistemic gap, what arises in those moments where we perceive and are perceived by the other is a jolt of energy, sparked by a gripping realization of our similarity, which impugns our apparent diversity. This energy arises from the recognition that those around us are human as we are human, that they think and feel, suffer and elate, hunger and thirst, wish and spurn as we do. Despite not being able to know them at all, this spark of energy insists that we can know them in some way, that our connection to their existence, our identification with it, is real since we too understand what it means to exist and be unknown. Yet these moments of self-awareness remain fleeting.

The transient nature of our awareness of these others only goes to show how strongly we resist holding two truths at once: 1) that our consciousness, though severely limited, can momentarily pierce through to something real about existence, and 2) that we are only small, finite organisms adrift in the vast ocean of life. Ernest Becker, in his seminal work, The Denial of Death, pontificated as to why we go to such lengths to avoid holding the paradox of our existence in awareness. He wrote:

“The prison of one's character is painstakingly built to deny one thing and one thing alone: one's creatureliness. The creatureliness is the terror. Once admit that you are a defecating creature and you invite the primeval ocean of creature anxiety to flood over you. But it is more than creature anxiety, it is also man's anxiety, the anxiety that results from the human paradox that man is an animal who is conscious of his animal limitation. Anxiety is the result of the perception of the truth of one's condition. What does it mean to be a self-conscious animal? The idea is ludicrous, if it is not monstrous. It means to know that one is food for worms. This is the terror: to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating inner yearning for life and self- expression—and with all this yet to die. It seems like a hoax…”

Think about it. You are a human, amongst humans, amongst apes, amongst mammals, amongst animals, amongst multi-celled organisms, amongst organs, tissues, cells, nuclei, DNA, genes, chromosomes, molecules, and atoms all spawned and sustained by super novae, sunlight, the earth’s axis, rotation, and gravity, and chemical bonding and reactivity. What Becker calls our "creatureliness" is precisely this: the continuous entanglement that both generates us, giving us our life energy and our pulse, and simultaneously guarantees our dissolution back into the very processes that produced us. The same chemical bonds that sustain our tissues will unbind them. The bacteria that keep us alive will consume us. To be a creature is to be produced by forces that dwarf the conscious self. It is to be made of both stardust and bacterial processes. This is at once awesome and frightening.

For Becker, human life is a project to deny this tangled web that produced us. Nevertheless, those moments of self-awareness that arise in facing the Other, the fleeting identification with strangers described above, continue to surface as jolts of feeling, pulses of life, regardless of how deeply we've buried them in our subconscious or how insistently we try to suppress them.

Complexity’s sirens sing so beautifully we cannot ignore them. They request our diversion, introducing chaos and curvature into what seemed like a straight passage.

Life must hide almost everything for anything to surface in our consciousness and appear intelligible. What is seen stems from what is unseen. Without darkness, light illuminates nothing. Without silence, sound has no shape. What appears only appears against the backdrop of what does not. The visible is carved from the invisible.

Precisely in this way, the complexity buried beneath what appears subtly makes its presence known through that appearance. When we stare into the abyss of complexity hidden from us, the abyss stares back at us. We can feel its gaze. Don't we sometimes feel the premonition that something is wrong before we can name what it is? Haven't we distrusted someone whose words seem reasonable but whose presence feels off? The abyss announces itself in these moments without becoming visible. We sense vast processes operating beneath the surface without being able to map them. Such feelings, felt most vividly in the jolt of energy where the unseen makes itself known, suggest a way forward. Rather than treating hiddenness as a problem to be solved through greater illumination, we might recognize it as the necessary condition for anything to appear at all. The unseen reminds us that it is the true reality, a reality existing beneath awareness, a reality that to us will always seem to be unreality.

There is a normative implication here. Respect darkness. It cannot be overcome. Challenging light to illuminate the black hole only accelerates its plunge into the void.

When seen under full illumination, everything looks like an object of medical inspection. By the time something becomes fully analyzable, it has already been removed from the living process and converted into something inert, something we can handle precisely because it no longer moves on its own. Where is the life in a cadaver? This is the paradox of illumination: perfect visibility produces perfect death. The body under full light becomes an object of study precisely by ceasing to be alive. Like your teeth under the dentist’s light, brightness reduces life to the undead.

By contrast, when we play hide and seek, life feels fuller, more vivid, and more intense in the stretch before discovery, when attention sharpens, nerves heighten, and the body is alert. In the dark, with the lights off, the boogie monster takes on greater weight and presence for the child. Life intensifies in moments of openness and uncertainty. Life thrives in partial vision and shadow, in the margins that exceed our grasp. Perhaps this is how it should be. Hiddenness is the condition that allows life to remain alive, why should we treat it as a deficiency to correct?

Though illumination purports to bring unmediated clarity, in claiming objectivity, this dream of perfected perspective remains haunted by what it cannot see, which threatens at all times to alter, or abolish, vision itself. In seeking to vanquish all contingency and achieve total clarity, a flash of intense light is just as blinding, perhaps more so, than darkness.

What is left to do? Singing softly, the sirens whisper…

Can an injury really be measured

By a monetary system chasing treasure

Derived from an order that denies leisure?

There are many different worlds

Sitting around the tables.

Time obliterates the labels,

Which are only useful in fables,

That comfort adults still in cradles

Who fear the form that fills ladles.

Hurl yourself into the abyss,

Discover its a bed of flowers,

I promise, you will feel foolish

For believing in your past cowers.

Peter S. Baron (http://www.petersbaron.com)  is the author of If Only We Knew: How Ignorance Creates and Amplifies the Greatest Risks Facing Society.