Inner Worlds
Or, the intense experience of subjectivity.
How do you experience the world? Do you feel that your self lies directly behind your eyes? Do you grasp that you are unique, never born before, never to exist again? Do you know that you can never hear the thoughts of other people and never see the mental images which they conjure up before their mind’s eye? Do you hear your own inner monologue knowing that no other human being can hear it? Do you realise that you have to voluntarily express what is going on inside your head in order for you to communicate?
This is how all human beings live. We are physically separated from one another, yes, and forever. But, with far more profound consequences, we are mentally separated from one another. And we must communicate – there is no other option. So at the heart of the human condition something very strange lies: total isolation.
Today I’m publishing something new for my Substack. This piece is based on something that has been rolling around my mind for quite a while, inspired by books I read forty years ago. During my twenties I discovered the work of Erich Fromm, the great humanist psychoanalyst who became a famous author on topics of the human condition between the late 1940s and 1980. He wrote books still reprinted and published today, the most famous of which, though it is perhaps not his most profound work, is The Art Of Loving.
Fromm was the man whose The Sane Society inspired me to develop my own thoughts, and whose idea ‘the separation of human beings from one another because of the nature of the human condition is critical to all our experiences’ is what I want to expand on here. For Fromm, human beings were existentially separated, isolated inside their own minds. He knew nothing of recent ideas about subjectivity and consciousness, or about the notion of the social intelligence concept of consciousness, but he grasped that separation was fundamental to our real needs and to the human condition itself.
For Fromm, love was the experience which overcame that abyss of separation. He wrote about this in The Art Of Loving and other books, as he expounded his core ideas, ideas which did not vary as he grew older. True love was a creative and productive orientation in human beings, he wrote, one which was a real need since it overcame the felt sense of isolation deriving from living as a conscious individual. We know we are separate and isolated individuals in two ways: from observing the world and seeing how other human beings are born and live, and from contemplating our own subjective mental experiences. It is this latter feeling that is interesting when cast into the framework of evolution by natural selection.
What if an intense feeling of subjectivity – the same feeling that we all have today, and which I describe in my introduction – was quite an early development in hominids? What if it was felt by our most distance ancestors corresponding to homo sapiens, those humans who appeared around 300,000 years ago in north-west Africa? Or perhaps even earlier, by not-quite-homo-sapiens African species unrelated to the European Neanderthals? And maybe it was felt by Neanderthals too – surely it must have been if they were so like us, albeit not quite us. If this is the case, as is likely, since in terms of how such communities were living they were so similar to us when at the end of the last Ice Age we were gatherer-hunters, the question arises: what would that intensity of the feeling of a subjective mental world mean in terms of subsequent evolution?
There seems little doubt that, like Neanderthals, humans 300,000 years ago were not quite like us. Most likely they did not have the fully developed compositional language that we have. That seems to have appeared about 125,000 – 135,000 years ago, though nobody is yet certain; anatomical and recent genetic evidence points to this kind of time scale. Yet everything else that we take for granted – a full range of emotions, the experience of love, a sense of passing time, a sense of a soul or spirit that was believed to carry on after death – must have been present.
Our sense of subjectivity, of being an isolated individual somehow “behind” our eyes, is extremely strong. We are constantly aware that we are unique and separated from everybody else; and that everybody else feels the same. If this sense of subjectivity arose in our ancestors a long time ago, then an intriguing line of thought develops about what happened next.
Take love and things related. Human sexuality is not restricted to mere mating and the arrival of children. It is far broader. Ovulation is concealed, something which is generally thought to contribute to pair-bonding through sexual relations outside of the desire or need for children. Many anthropologists relate that to an increased need for male input from the female perspective, but that is surely a blinkered, binary view of archaic human communities, in which grandmothers were at least as important when it came to child rearing and childcare, not to mention the group as a whole. As usual, such commentators, often male, see everything in terms of biology. But what if one of the consequences of that intense feeling of subjectivity was an evolutionary shift to partnerships where the emotional connection between individuals – not least their sexuality outside the need to have children – was intensified into the sort of relationships we have today? What if evolution by natural selection favoured individuals able to deepen and intensify their emotional relationships in order to bridge that abyss which they felt so keenly?
Human societies would not have been able to survive if everyone’s sense of existential isolation was not overcome. Loveless, emotionless communities of human individuals, however well they could survive physically, were therefore never an option in the grand scheme of things. Any such communities were selected against. We are not like ball bearings, hard and shiny. We are much softer. Evolution by natural selection selected for individuals able to bridge the universal sense of isolation.
Certain human emotions would therefore arise from that intense feeling of subjectivity. Emotions are evaluative, their purpose being to communicate certain fundamental states of mind deriving from universal experiences, in ways which can never be missed by the experiencer or others. For instance, anger is the emotion communicating the fundamental experience of frustration. Embarrassment is the emotion communicating the fundamental experience of social ostracising or wrongdoing. The critical importance of communicating to other human beings these states of mind is obvious. We could not survive sane and healthy without such emotions.
All these emotions however depend upon one thing. They, like love, depend upon our sensation of subjectivity, of the wonder and value of life, of that intense sensation we all know that our subjective lives matter to us. And, crucially in my view, this is something visible to evolution by natural selection. If it is visible, it means that over long periods of time certain traits which aid human beings – the feeling of emotions, the experience of love – would be selected for. They were advantageous. They helped communities of human beings survive, not just physically and logistically, which is the comparatively easy part, but psychologically. That kind of survival – sane, filled with meaning, secure in a human community where bonds were of critical importance – is at least as important as having enough food and drink. I would argue that it is more difficult to survive psychologically as a human being than it is physically. With knowledge, insight, planning and co-operation, human beings in general can survive. There are various basic strategies; this we know. But surviving psychologically is surely more difficult. The whole point of us being conscious is to use ourselves as exemplars to understand the behaviour of others – not their hunger or their need for warmth and so on, all that is pretty obvious. Understanding human emotional needs is much more difficult. Any evolutionary development that helped us manage psychological insight was selected for over hundreds of thousand of years, and such developments must have included our full range of emotions and the experience of love, all of those contributing to the bridging of that mental abyss described by Erich Fromm. But it was perhaps an early, intense experience of subjectivity which took evolution in the particular direction that resulted in us.
The intense experience of subjectivity early in hominid development may have been the spark for a number of aspects of the human condition, all of which have the purpose of bridging the abyss between individuals. That profound sense that we are ourselves and nobody else, that our lives matter enormously, and that everybody else in our community is the same, is universal. It cannot be coincidence or random luck that anger, embarrassment and love developed over long periods of time in all evolving human communities. Those things must have an evolutionary explanation. They must therefore be critical to human psychological survival as existentially separated conscious individuals.
