process. A creature that cannot think must solely embody its Being. It can
merely act out its nature, concretely, in the here-and-now. If it cannot
manifest in its behavior what the environment demands while doing so, it will
simply die. But that is not true of human beings. We can produce abstracted
representations of potential modes of Being. We can produce an idea in the
theatre of the imagination. We can test it out against our other ideas, the ideas
of others, or the world itself. If it falls short, we can let it go. We can, in
Popper’s formulation, let our ideas die in our stead.^147 Then the essential part,
the creator of those ideas, can continue onward, now untrammeled, by
comparison, with error. Faith in the part of us that continues across those
deaths is a prerequisite to thinking itself.
Now, an idea is not the same thing as a fact. A fact is something that is
dead, in and of itself. It has no consciousness, no will to power, no
motivation, no action. There are billions of dead facts. The internet is a
graveyard of dead facts. But an idea that grips a person is alive. It wants to
express itself, to live in the world. It is for this reason that the depth
psychologists—Freud and Jung paramount among them—insisted that the
human psyche was a battleground for ideas. An idea has an aim. It wants
something. It posits a value structure. An idea believes that what it is aiming
for is better than what it has now. It reduces the world to those things that aid
or impede its realization, and it reduces everything else to irrelevance. An
idea defines figure against ground. An idea is a personality, not a fact. When
it manifests itself within a person, it has a strong proclivity to make of that
person its avatar: to impel that person to act it out. Sometimes, that impulsion
(possession is another word) can be so strong that the person will die, rather
than allowing the idea to perish. This is, generally speaking, a bad decision,
given that it is often the case that only the idea need die, and that the person
with the idea can stop being its avatar, change his or her ways, and continue.
To use the dramatic conceptualization of our ancestors: It is the most
fundamental convictions that must die—must be sacrificed—when the
relationship with God has been disrupted (when the presence of undue and
often intolerable suffering, for example, indicates that something has to
change). This is to say nothing other than that the future can be made better if
the proper sacrifices take place in the present. No other animal has ever
figured this out, and it took us untold hundreds of thousands of years to do it.