Cosmic Entitlement and the Human Becoming

The difference between wolves and dogs is the same as the difference between ape and man. Really there isn’t any except a dulling of the instincts through cultural conditioning, and ultimately by means of the rational cognitive faculty; this cosmic sense of entitlement, as if the universe owes you the metaphysical “bail-out” from the fundamental choice between life and death. That very choice is the essence of life. To be human is to be torn between being and nonbeing, between heaven and hell—it is the grey suspended beyond the pillars of good and evil. This concept of the “Human Being” is just that—a conception—one that is little more than an ideal, never to be manifested physically—a universal ideal manifested only by a collective conscious understanding of what the Human ought to be.

This other concept of ‘lower’ animals, hah! To be animal is to have accepted your place in this universe, to roll with its temporal punches as they come. Humans, the great storytellers, walk around in a mental-story of their own creation, constructing a coherent (hi)story out of the content of memory, and projecting assumptions about reality onto a coherent ‘future.’ These acts of the rational faculty of man are little more than expressions of man’s impulse to construct story (coherency, drama, movement) where none exists, and thereby provide the spatially navigable mental arena we occupy. Man cannot untie himself from his construct of reality, his story, because he, with all his comic entitlement, expects that ‘now’ is not all there is, that we are being pulled from something and drawn toward something else.

This is the tragic flaw bestowed upon us by Logic, that abstract concept which exists purely in the structure of our rational cognitive faculties, and with which our instincts struggle for dominance. Logic, by its nature immaterial, is not bound to the laws that imprison the human. Logic is always in the process of (VALIDLY) moving from premise to conclusion. Our rational faculties insist on imprinting this format onto empirical reality when it simply isn’t there. We reject time as an illusion but depend on it for our existence, we never realize that we are the 'something else' we think is coming.

For animals, valid or invalid exists only at the spur of a single moment, where instinct must decide between life and death.

The “Human Being” conception is the human who has finished becoming human, has finished validly moving from premise to conclusion. The human is always in the state of becoming, he never reaches a plateau where he just is. Maybe one day humans will enter a period of post-consciousness when the Human Being is a reality, but until then, it is fairer to call ourselves ‘human becomings.’

What are humans becoming? -- transhuman? Man is becoming ... Uberman?

rhinogrey, thanks for posting this. I'm going to give it a read this evening...

I do not see how "human becoming" fits any better than "human being." Would not plain old "human" work the best? Becoming suggests that their is a final conclusion that one eventually attains, when it is impossible for one to conclude that. It is silly and prone to start pointless semantic arguments when you add the un-needed suffix of "becoming" or "being." Also, you did a good job of telling us what a human is in the second and third paragraphs, when you maintain that they cannot be. Semantics aside, you concede the fact that the "we" imprint logic onto empirical reality. Must the "we" not exist before it can imprint this "process of validity" on empirical reality?

I believe that some of your point may also have been lost in grandeur. I fail to see the similarity between the states of being and non-being and the concepts of heaven and hell and good and evil.