Our Teleological Selves

“Fifteen hundred years ago everybody knew the Earth was the centre of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was flat, and fifteen minutes ago, you knew that people were alone on this planet. Imagine what you’ll know tomorrow.”

— Agent K, Men in Black

Hegel’s most significant contribution to philosophy is his view of history as inherently teleological. For Hegel, human history is a dialectical unfolding toward a harmonious truth, a process of self-actualisation whereby Spirit (Geist) becomes conscious of its own freedom. This process involves the reconciliation of contradictions and conflicts, a historical engine that culminates in a state of social and political order that marks a fulfilment of history’s overarching purpose, where thought and reality meaningfully coincide. For Hegel, every conflict contains the conditions of its own reconciliation.

Philosophers from Friedrich Nietzsche to Karl Popper fundamentally rejected this view. In his late notebooks, Nietzsche mused: “If the world had a goal, it could not fail to have been reached by now. If it had an unintended final state, this too could not fail to have been reached.” And Popper accused Hegel of looking upon history “as a stage, or rather, as a kind of lengthy Shakespearian play” that justifies human suffering. Many philosophers and thinkers have long since moved on from Hegelian dialectics.

For Thomas Kuhn, knowledge never approaches a comprehensive, objective reality. It does not evolve toward an absolute truth, but merely moves further and further from “primitive beginnings.” Reality consistently exceeds every framework that we build to understand it, and knowledge finds no resting point or ultimate resolution. It is, instead, an infinite approach. Stanley Cavell wrote of a similar pattern in regards to what he called the ‘next self’, the act of “endlessly taking the next step […] toward self-knowledge,” though without a “final state of the soul.” To this end, reality unfolds like a pier that is being built as we cross it.

This strange tension is less a ‘fusion of horizons’ in Gadamer’s phrasing, and more a process of moving through successive horizons. We spend our lives trying to keep pace with the horizon, and just when we think we have settled into a clearer and more authentic reality, another horizon looms. The moment we click the shutter on a camera, the scene before us has already started to morph into something new. Our truths arrive already marked by their own demise. Each moment contains its own antithesis, as Hegel noted. So every victory brings with it the question of how long it will be before the pendulum swings back the other way, before anything novel and fresh starts to rot. Like Rilke, the taciturn poet Freud writes of in his essay ‘On Transience’, a garden in full bloom is already dead to those who can never fully inhabit the present.   

A medieval Christian would not have viewed themselves or the world in such a way. They would have seen themselves as inhabiting a world ordained by god, a world of enduring truths. We believe ourselves to be superior to this worldview. With the arrival of the Enlightenment, society became more self-correcting and self-referential. We learned to look outside of history while being forced to live within it as it unfolds, and came to understand that we are historical creatures who are occasionally reminded that we are historical creatures. We survived the devastating revelations that Nietzsche, Marx and Freud—the ‘three masters of suspicion’ as Paul Ricœur called them—exposed. We now knowingly inhabit temporary worlds whose truths are contingent. At least that is what we believe on a theoretical level.

We have undergone several paradigm-shifts since the first flurries of revelation. Many ‘truths’ we championed have since been repeatedly challenged, debunked, and replaced. The earth is not the centre of the universe. The Martian canals are not canals. Humans are not the unified, rational beings that antiquity had us believe. And the universe will become a cold graveyard of stellar entropy. But these contemporary truths are just as vulnerable to scrutiny, and enjoy no special immunity. Many are already becoming historical. We have greater awareness of this reality than ever before. And yet for all our self-awareness, we continue to act as though our truths are impervious, and behave as though our own present is exempt from history. Modern consciousness has become aware of its own historical contingency, but remains psychologically incapable of living in accordance with that knowledge. So it is no longer a question of meaning alone, but a question of what kind of mind emerges once we realise that every meaning we create is historically contingent, and what it means to inhabit a world that never stops becoming.

One of the first things we learn as children is to inhabit a contradiction. When a child builds sandcastles on the beach, they quickly realise that these castles will be washed away by the tide. And yet as this child matures and builds a life of their own, this lesson is forgotten. The institutions we enter into feel indestructible, but have the same impermanence as the sandcastle. As we approach adulthood, the moral worldview of one’s childhood begins to collapse as the knowledge of human nature takes hold. We are introduced to new, contingent truths, and mourn the loss of older truths that no longer serve the purpose they once did. The experience can be disquieting, sorrowful, terrifying, bleak, absurd, sacred, beautiful, humbling, or liberating. It may be all of these things and more. Some will forever live their lives in a vain attempt to discover the world anew.

What follows is a period of negotiation as we attempt to reconcile the following paradox: we inhabit a world whose defining characteristic is ceaseless momentum, but we are instinctively teleological creatures oriented toward directionality. From then on, consciousness itself fractures between abstract and existential knowledge. One part knows and the other must continue living. We accept, on an abstract level, that we will die and that our lives, like our truths, are a temporary arrangement that will eventually be superseded. But we cannot orient ourselves fully toward this knowledge. We are not capable of doing so. As Freud noted, “no one believes in his own death, or, to put the same thing in another way, that in the unconscious every one of us is convinced of his own immortality.”

We learn to live existentially, rather than abstractly, so that we can act as stewards against collapse, driven as we are by Gramsci’s “pessimism of the intelligence” and “optimism of the will.” The more self-awareness we gain as individuals or as a society, the more adaptable our denial becomes.

This ordinary denial makes life bearable, but only to a degree. We never truly work through these contradictions, as Hegel believed, because we are incapable of overcoming them entirely. So, in our first forays into existential knowledge, we are forced to subconsciously choose one impulse over the other (generally denial over despair) in order to recover, and our choice depends secretly on selective blindness to the other.

But even when many of us feel as though we have come to terms with these contradictions, an unconscious prickling remains, a persistent itch, a feeling of Unruhe (restlessness). The opposing impulse is always lying dormant in the psyche, and threatens to resurface at any time. For most of us, the first rush of denial loses its hold, and despair re-emerges, and we must learn to deny our own denial. For the nihilist, a bleaker fate awaits them. A stubborn hopefulness returns, uninvited, with the promise that history can be redeemed. This is because hope is the last illusion to die. Even Camus wanted us to imagine Sisyphus happy. Just as Hegel had confidence in reconciliation, Camus had confidence in revolt. But hope rarely survives its own return, and even Camus rarely sounds fully convinced by his own prescription. The nihilist has already learned to distrust such hopes, and so hope is remembered only long enough to be mourned all over again, and despair returns with greater force.

But we cannot help but let ourselves be fooled, because life itself depends on recurring acts of self-delusion. The history of philosophy is itself a history of denial, because despite what we abstractly know, our truths still feel durable, and history still feels directional. Our truths become historical long before we lose our desire for them. So we cannot help but commit to a teleological temperament. The teleological impulse does not simply disappear because we will it to. It persists as a structural feature of consciousness. As Nietzsche noted: “the old habit of thinking about all events in terms of goals, and about the world in terms of a guiding, creating god, is so powerful that the thinker is hard-pressed not to think of the goalessness of the world.” Even Nietzsche himself could not escape this impulse. For a philosopher who took a hammer to historical teleology, Nietzsche was remarkably teleological in his works. He wrote much about the future, about dawn, about bridges, about preparation, about overcoming, and about becoming who one is. He could not wholly relinquish the teleological impulse even as he sought to demolish it. More recently, the late Alasdair MacIntyre, who declared that society had lost its telos, still longed for its restoration, and called for its renewal.

Throughout our lives we repeatedly discover new contradictions which make the nature of our existence untenable. Every time we get closer to reality, we recoil all over again, pivoting maniacally from denial to despair and back, all while vainly seeking a third option. At this point we realise that the choice we made was no choice at all, as despair and denial continually undermine each other in the same fractious psyche, since neither one can achieve a stable victory. A nihilist may believe that the universe is meaningless but nevertheless find themselves unable to stop hoping, while a denialist may profess faith in endurance yet be unable to wholly ward off despair. So we are forever torn between what we feel as existential creatures, and what we know as occasionally-rational ones.

Viewed this way, contradiction is not a phase on the way to reconciliation, as Hegel so ardently believed. Instead, contradiction is a permanent fixture of consciousness itself, the defining condition of being-in-the-world. We are insomniacs whose longing for sleep will forever keep us awake. We cannot endure endless becoming, and so we greet every dawn as an arrival, and every dusk as a departure. But every dawn is night in its youngest form, and every dusk is day rehearsing its return. Every beginning enters the world in league with its own end.

We therefore tend to think of time as something deceptive, but it is not time or history that deceive us in this regard, but our own temperament. Even if we accept on some level that many systems lack predetermined goals, individually we live as teleological creatures moving toward an endpoint or final goal. Life is therefore a perpetual struggle to reconcile the asymmetry between our worldview and our existential temperament. The mind never stops craving the illusion of ‘arrival’, even after it becomes aware of its impossibility. The psyche is never wholly swayed by the abstract truths that it learns, but nor is it ever completely free of them. It is an existential condition that will never resolve itself, unless we discover a truth or create an illusion great enough to sustain us through multiple horizons. And even then, who will be the one to decide which is the truth and which is the illusion?

For Nietzsche, this asymmetry between the structure of consciousness and the structure of reality is precisely what keeps philosophy itself alive. It is a triumph of becoming: “If it were capable of standing still and remaining frozen, of ‘being’, if for just one second in all its becoming […] then in turn all becoming would long since be over and done with, and so would all thinking.” But what is essential to philosophy is precisely that which makes life itself unbearable for some.

For most of us, we make enough room for the illusions that are necessary to function in everyday life. These illusions are not ‘false’, however. They are simply the way that we, as historical creatures, orient ourselves. All consciousness is structured this way, but the true insomniac experiences this state without anaesthesia, without reprieve. The true insomniac has achieved a kind of clarity that makes them unable to return to the fictions that ordinary life demands. They become what Muhammad called “a soul that is not satisfied.” Existence, for the true insomniac, is less like walking a bridge that is being built as you cross it, and more like being a time traveller forever attempting to return to the present which recedes with every step toward it.

For the true insomniac, this knowledge constitutes a complete failure of their being. While ordinary consciousness repeatedly forgets the conditions of existence, the true insomniac cannot. What others experience as occasional moments of existential unease becomes the true insomniac’s primary mode of inhabiting the world. The true insomniac is never cured of their state. They are a tragic figure whose capacity for hope outlives the possibility of its fulfilment. They are not merely sad or frightened, but exhausted by ceaseless becoming, suspended between mourning a perpetually vanishing present and longing for a refuge that never quite arrives, until eventually there is nothing left but longing itself. Since the true insomniac knows that every truth and worldview is temporary, longing becomes detached from all objects and becomes the condition of existence itself. But even the true insomniac cannot rid themselves of the teleological impulse. It survives even after its object has long since disappeared, and so it turns inward and becomes its own object.

The true insomniac is not an exception to existence, but an extreme form of a more general condition: none of us can stop orienting ourselves toward teleology even after we have relinquished the very idea of a teleological world. God dies, but the longing for god remains. Even after we discover that there is no final telos, consciousness cannot stop looking for one.