Darwin's Error

It is obvious to any student that Darwin's theory lacks a discussion of language and consciousness. It depicts development as a straight line between creatures. I argue that this line is broken by human language and consciousness. Something comes into the world that has never been there: subjectivity, the ability to envisage something that does not exist, such as a house before it is built.
With language everything changes fundamentally. Humankind gets a map of the world that is not what it is. The word tree is not the tree. The model of the world is not the world. Subjectivity thus gives us plenty of room to go wrong, to get lost in the world. In order not to get lost we have to understand consciousness and language in the words of Jean-Paul Sartre: "Consciousness is not what it is".
In other words: any description of consciousness will upend itself. It's the same with many other questions. I therefore argue that questions like "what is life", "what is consciousness", "what is a human being", "what is language", "what is the universe" also have answers that upend themselves. If consciousness is not what it is that must be the case. This does not mean that we are stranded on an island of ignorance. There are, surprisingly enough, means to find a model that is identical with what it models. This true model is the identity between theory and practice, the word and the body.

This text is a condensed, updated and republished version of my book Darwin's Incomplete Idea, published by Vernon Press, USA.