Books of universal etiological theories of humankind and its cultures, institutions, behaviors, attitudes, and civilizations enjoy wide readership. A curious mix of empirical data and speculation, these books range from the scholarly to the ridiculous and straddle the borders of anthropology, philosophy, history, archaeology, sociology, psychology, and evolutionary biology. This genre includes Desmond Morris’s The Naked Ape (1967), Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man (1973), Larry Gonick’s The Cartoon History of the Universe (1990), Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2014), and now, Gaia Vince’s Transcendence: How Humans Evolved Through Fire, Language, Beauty, and Time.

Insofar as the author is a science journalist, we might expect a popularization or a “dumbing down” of her data and arguments, but happily, this is not the case. She presents a cogent and intriguing – but possibly eclectic – case for the essential adaptability of humankind to whatever it encounters. The four aspects of her subtitle – fire, language, beauty, time – metaphorically represent four powers which humans have developed and refined over tens of thousands of years, i.e., our creative, communicative, spiritual, and regulative powers, respectively. Through them, humans have become quite extraordinary, not just highly intelligent animals, but entities – or, as Vince argues, a single entity – well beyond animals. Her text is peppered with phrases such as, “we are the intelligent designers of all you see” (p. 9), which affirm what I like to call “dynamic humanism.”

The “transcendence” to which the title refers is the still unrealized but imminent evolution of humankind from a plurality of individuals into a unified being. “Humanity is becoming a superorganism … Homo omnis, or Homni for short” (p. 268). Individuality is what is being transcended, yet self-reliance and self-determination remain. The process mirrors Hegelian dialectic insofar as humankind is aufgehoben through historical development, i.e., cancelled as individuals, preserved as a species, and raised to a higher level as Homni. Indeed Vince’s argument seems unwittingly Hegelian. Not only does Homni resemble a Hegelian Aufhebung, but there also seems to be what Hegel calls a “cunning of reason” (List der Vernunft) at work in what she describes as the “evolutionary triad” of biological or genetic, environmental or adaptive, and cultural development. As they proceed through this triad, humans manipulate their environment partially because they are naturally programmed to do so, partially in response to ongoing problems and spontaneous challenges, and partially in order to achieve what they foresee or imagine as better versions of themselves and their society.

“But what about those of us who cling to individuality and don’t want to go along with the herd …?” (p. 163). We would of course expect individuals to resist being subsumed into a collective species. However, according to Vince, such resistance does not pan out. Her answer to this question reveals a dialectic of conformity in which individualists who try to rebel against the mainstream end up being attracted to other nonconformists, thus creating “self-conforming cliques” in which a “synchronicity spontaneously emerges as a property of large numbers of people” (p. 164). Thus even strong individualists conform in spite of themselves, perhaps accidentally, but more likely in conscious solidarity with other freaks, misfits, and contrarians, as was observed in 1966 and 1967 when thousands of long-haired counterculturists converged on San Francisco. Vince uses Jonathan Touboul’s term, “the hipster effect,” to name this phenomenon.

Ludwig Feuerbach’s theory of a single “species being” (Gattungswesen) in his chapter on the difference between Christianity and heathenism in Das Wesen des Christentums (1841) may have anticipated Vince. In the second edition (1843), Feuerbach much expanded this concept, declaring that the human essence is an infinite unity which reveals itself in existential multiplicity, that other humans constitute our “objective conscience” (gegenständliches Gewissen), that the human species as a whole is “the final arbiter of truth” (das letzte Maass der Wahrheit), and that other humans mediate between the individual and the species to the extent that “humankind is humankind’s God” (Homo homini Deus est). The Gattungswesen thus bestows upon humankind not only sociopolitical solidarity, but also general psychological and even ontological unity.

This is not to suggest that Vince is a latter-day Feuerbachian – although she may be. Feuerbach’s theory of human ontology, like Marx’s, which closely followed it, was explicitly teleological. Vince’s, on the other hand, seems more or less agnostic on the question of universal human teleology. She is not prescriptive about the future, as both Feuerbach and Marx were, but rather speculative or perhaps even serene about it. She seems quite ready and willing to adapt to whatever the present trajectories into the future may offer.

The Gaia hypothesis is the idea that – as Daniel Shannon put it in The Owl of Minerva 27, 1 (Fall 1995): 19 – “the earth is a super-organism that exhibits specific properties of life … [and] maintains homoeostasis.” The locus classicus of the Gaia hypothesis is James Lovelock’s Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (Oxford, 1979), but Lovelock had first developed it in 1965 and it was a topic throughout the 1970s. In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (BBC radio series, 1978-1979; book, 1979; and BBC TV series, 1981), Douglas Adams offered a trenchant satire of the notion that the earth is a single unified being, depicting the earth as a deliberately designed “computer of such infinite and subtle complexity that organic life itself … [forms] part of its operational matrix.” How ironically coincidental that an author named Gaia should propose a theory about humankind analogous to what Lovelock proposed about the earth!

Vince writes, without further elaboration: “As Homni blunders along, our illusion of free will is just that” (p. 271). This toss-off rejection of free will would perhaps benefit from a consideration of Heidi Ravven’s massive and intricate argument against free will, The Self Beyond Itself (New Press, 2013). Like Vince, Ravven discounts human individuality – which she calls “selfiness” – and sees the basic human unit as a socially cohesive group which shares values and generally understands itself as a group rather than as an aggregate of individuals.

© 2020 Eric v.d. Luft

Eric v.d. Luft earned his B.A. magna cum laude in philosophy and religion at Bowdoin College in 1974, his Ph.D. in philosophy at Bryn Mawr College in 1985, and his M.L.S. at Syracuse University in 1993. From 1987 to 2006 he was Curator of Historical Collections at SUNY Upstate Medical University. He has taught at Villanova University, Syracuse University, Upstate, and the College of Saint Rose. He is the author, editor, or translator of over 650 publications in philosophy, religion, librarianship, history, history of medicine, and nineteenth-century studies; owns Gegensatz Press; and is listed in Who’s Who in America.