Center of Theological Inquiry, Princeton, NJ, January 2000

John A. Teske, Ph.D.

Professor of Psychology

Elizabethtown College

Elizabethtown, PA 17022 USA

Research in evolutionary psychology and in the cognitive and neurosciences leads me to believe that some kind of social interdependence, and hence cultural support is in fact a necessary character of the species. We have evolved to require rather extensive neural shaping, however epigenetically constrained, to entrain extremely immature brains to the level of "independent" function. We continue to require extensive levels of social interdependence even for full adult functioning (however we may learn to hide this from ourselves). Finally, while the form and practices of a particular culture may not be a pan-species necessity, there are a wide range of cultural universals which suggest that the evolutionary contingency of these characteristics may run rather deep, and may undergird and constrain the variations and contingencies of history.

I think that our humanness, for both evolutionary and historical reasons, is constituted socially, and therefore depends on community. Nevertheless, like rationality, or identity, I think community is an end toward which we strive, at best a fragile achievement rather than a given, which is constantly at risk of fragmentation and erosion. What are some of the phenomena that bond humans to community, in terms of their self-understanding, and what are their evolutionary, historical, and ontogenetic roots in social interdependency?

Sentience. As in many other animals, we have nervous systems complex enough to provide unified sentience of the environment. Also shared is the ability to experience pleasure and pain, our ultimate obeisance to both natural selection and the law of effect, one means by which behavior is modifiable within our lifetimes.

Cognition. We are also "anticipation machines," whose ability to mentally represent pleasure and pain enables us to more flexibly seek one and avoid the other. A consistency of purpose in facing changing contingencies, an emergent power to simulate potential courses of action and to re-present chains of actions and their consequences, and to direct ourselves beyond immediate experience, confers sentient and reproductive advantage. Of course, most of this is likely to be learned from other agents of our culture.

Self-knowledge. We are not only symbolizing, conscious beings, but we exhibit self-awareness with enough frequency to worry about our limits, and our place in the universe. The very symbolic powers that constitute self-consciousness make possible the existence of needs beyond feeding, fighting, fleeing, and sex, colored by our awareness of our finitude. Nevertheless, limits to self-knowledge may be the rule rather than the exception, and may even be a requirement of limited capacity systems.

The human mind also has an evolutionary history requiring extensive social interdependency for its development. The immaturity of human nervous systems at birth, and their plasticity, results in a need for experiential shaping, which continues through the course of an individual’s life. The evolutionary hypertrophy of the prefrontal cortex in particular, which colonizes the neural regulation of arousal, and affects the very structure of emotional life, results in a need for extensive social scaffolding for normal human functioning. This dependency and support not only meets, but shapes our biological and social needs, building within each of us an identity and an interior life. This makes possible the emergence of a socially constructed virtual reality, a supervenient symbolic world transcending immediate experience, enabling novel and interiorized forms of socially constituted experience. Given the role of interdependence in the emergence of individual minds, any integrity we have as full individuals is likely to also be an achievement contingent upon the character of our relationships with other persons, and our memberships in larger communities.

Constitutive rules, like the rules of American Football, create new forms of behavior (touchdown, offsides) whose existence is logically dependent on the rules. Such "institutional facts" can be iterated. These iterated structures are what grant symbolic powers for the creation of meaning, deontic powers for the creation of rights and obligations, and make possible the logical structure of social power and even honor. Such rules may also account for a number of phenomena, conventionally viewed to be, by virtue of their locatability within individual subjective experience, "natural" properties of individuals. They may shape our emotional life, engaging evolutionarily constrained biological givens via foundational family interactions scripted by the culture. Even our higher cognitive abilities, and our very interior life, is likely to be inescapably social, produced by a psychological symbiosis in which a mature person provides the immature with internal states by interacting with them as though they possessed them. Our "internal states" may thus be a socially constituted and language dependent logical space which supervenes upon individual neurobiological functioning. Finally, it may be the historical sedimentation of such rules by which we are brought into being as separate, autonomous individuals, with capacities for self-direction and responsibility. One claims a personal identity the same way one claims agency, by representing one's actions as generated by a complex set of internal processes. Nevertheless, the evidence from other cultures and other historical epochs suggests that the kind of bounded and autonomous individuality which we presume to be universal is instead culturally peculiar as well as historically recent. Indeed, this form of individuality may be the spiritual problem of our time.

Our human being is fundamentally rooted in our animal nature. We are physical, mortal beings, with capacities made possible by our evolutionary biology, and by the historical developments made possible by virtue of that biology. Our genetic differences from our nearest primate relatives are relatively small, and our advanced cognitive and social capacities are largely produced by epigenetic and developmental variations. Nevertheless, those capacities are what undergird by the sociohistorically constituted realities into which we are born, and by which our particularly human capacities and concerns are shaped. We share much of our biology, our sentience, and even many of our basic cognitive capacities with our relatives in the animal kingdom. However, it is the socially constituted and supported extent of those abilities which grants us capacities far beyond. These include our capacities to live almost entirely in a world both mediated and constituted by symbolic virtual realities. We have the ability to be cognizant of realities extended in space and time well beyond the world of our immediate experience, and even beyond our own mortal origin and demise. Such capacities are also what allow us to interiorize, within the context of our social practices and even our individual lives, meanings and purposes that extend beyond them.

If we have a destiny, I believe that it has to do with our sacrifices to greater meaning. That meaning resides in our joint life, in the creation of living bonds of relationship, family, and community, in which faith and hope can guide us past the crises and pain that are inevitable in our lives. I believe that the egocentricity, even narcissism, of a sacralized self, of the notion of the immortal preservation of our personal identities may only serve to help alienate us from the real life of community in which we might otherwise find greater meaning. The spiritual lives of individuals, our destiny, may well be about the repair of our social covenant. My destiny is not that I will live forever, which given my flaws and limitations, I might well abjure, but that my life will have meant something, when the sands of time run out. It is this meaning, whatever long-range importance our lives will have had, to our communities, to the world that continues to exist beyond our individual deaths, that is our destiny.

Part of the problem is, of course, with what may be the ultimately anthropomorphic character of our beliefs about destiny or design, or notions of God’s will, or God’s plan, in which human beings might have some special place. To what extent can we understand our own limits better by understanding how we construct such notions, how they might be tied to our very limitations, and why they might, therefore, be human projections rather than supernatural truths? Much of this has to do with our own finite and limited temporality.

The central argument is this. First is that our experience, located within the short span of immediate, conscious, working memory, is made cognitively possible and evolutionarily valuable by the developmental constraints and temporal limits of biologically relevant, organismically scaled events. Second is that the limitations and finitude of these temporal constraints, nested within our limited longevity, is precisely what makes adaptive the mental representation of wider and more extended events in our lives. Third is that such cognitive processes, rooted in the neurophysiology of remembering and anticipating, are a sine qua non for the construction of meaning, personal relationship, moral action, community, and longer-term purposes and intents which may extend beyond our mortality. As such, must we not view this meaning-making as necessarily immanent to human embodiment?

Cognitive psychologists have recognized the reconstructive character of declarative memory for over a generation. Reconstructions of intent, important to our grasp of meaning, can certainly be fed back into, and have subsequent effects upon, ongoing actions and future plans. Nevertheless, it is clear that such "reconstructions" can also be accomplished during, or even after a relevant action, as when our intentions become clear only in the process of accomplishing the action itself or even subsequent to it. It is also apparent in our constructing an identity by "owning" events in our lives, by accounting for them in terms of directions or purposes, "as if" they were formulated ahead of time.

Our understanding of larger patterns of meaning in the universe, even if understood to be external to and inclusive of us, are likely to involve the same sort of reconstructive, interpretive processes (in imago dei). We understand that concepts like destiny or God’s plan may be ex post facto bits of anthropomorphizing. But it may be that we have no choice, that the reconstruction of intent is the means by which we grasp meaning at all, including those meanings which we do not understand as of our own doing, of our own authorship. The neural processes by which we constitute "what I meant," are the same ones behind the constitution of any meaning at all. Our very sense of the meaning and moral significance of events may depend upon the temporal constraints, and the mortal finitude, that makes such neurophysiologically emergent cognitive processes adaptive.

How to address questions of meaning, of destiny, of our place in creation? We wish not to be forgotten, that our lives will have meant something, yet it may be in remembering ourselves that our finite lives can have their only living meaning. It may be precisely the finitude of our time that makes possible the existence of consciousness at all, and the need for moral prioritizing. What commitments we have may be important precisely because of our temporal limitations. Faith may help construct more meaningful lives. Notions of destiny or of God’s plan need not involve ontological claims about some pre-existent plan, but an ex post facto guide to constructing a meaning, playing a role in directing us toward a particular and life-affirming form of meaning-making. We may well unpack a deeper understanding of a personal God in seeing how purposes may be necessarily emergent, reading greater openness and freedom in human consciousness, and greater care in continuous creation. And finally, a better understanding of the role of human finitude in temporal ordering, in consciousness, and in meaning making alerts us to the possibility of an eternal life (and an escatology) which is a future, temporally ordered subjective anticipation only in the context of being (with Bultmann) a present, embodied, existential reality.