Life Beyond Reproduction – Humanity as a New Element of the Cosmos
- Brainz Magazine
- Sep 29
- 6 min read
Dr. Dragana Favre is a psychiatrist, psychotherapist, and a seeker of the human psyche's mysteries. With a medical degree and extensive neuroscience education from prestigious institutions like the Max Planck Institute and Instituto de Neurociencias, she's a seasoned expert.
Most biological entities in the natural world live, driven by the basic instinct of reproduction. Life sustains itself through the continuous renewal of generations, through the endless cycle of birth and death. From a strictly evolutionary perspective, survival is subordinated to replication. Yet, in the human being, we encounter a radical transformation. Humanity not only prolongs existence far beyond reproductive necessity but also redefines the very meaning of living. Life ceases to be merely “life for life,” bare survival in service of reproduction, and becomes “life for Life”, for meaning, for creation, for transcendence.
This transformation opens a paradox. Despite humanity’s violence, destructiveness, and estrangement from nature, does it nevertheless introduce something qualitatively new into the universe? Arthur Schopenhauer (1819/2010) saw in humanity “life becoming conscious of itself.” [1] Henri Bergson (1907/1998), in his notion of élan vital, described a creative impulse of evolution that in human creativity is liberated from the straightjacket of instinct.[2] Carl Gustav Jung (1954/1960) argued that instincts in humans can be sublimated, not denied, but transformed into symbolic, cultural, and spiritual expressions.[3]
Human life, in this sense, mirrors the “life” of the universe itself. As cosmologist Martin Rees (2000) has shown in Just Six Numbers, the cosmos could easily not have existed at all, or collapsed back into nothingness immediately after its emergence.[4] And yet, against all odds, it exists. The same can be said of human existence, not only do we persist despite death and biological limitation, but we extend life far beyond reproductive functionality. Humanity insists on living, even in the absence of reproductive purpose, and often despite suffering.
This paradoxical persistence suggests that the universe itself generates balance through opposites. Where there is meaning, there must also be meaninglessness, where there is consciousness, there must also be unconsciousness. Jung (1959/1969) insisted that psychic opposites are always complementary, and that consciousness requires the unconscious as its background (Aion).[5] Perhaps humanity is the locus where the universe attempts to “consciously balance the unconscious”, introducing reflection, symbolic order, and meaning into what otherwise remains chaotic, opaque, or unarticulated.
The very fact that life and consciousness exist at all suggests a kind of ontological defiance. The cosmos did not have to exist, yet it does. Human beings did not have to become self-reflective, yet they are. As Paul Tillich (1952/2000) argued in The Courage to Be, human existence is defined by the tension between being and non-being, courage is the affirmation of being despite the threat of nothingness.[6] Human life thus represents not only a prolongation of the biological cycle, but a metaphysical act of persistence against entropy and absurdity.
Emotions play a central role in this transformation. Evolutionarily, they emerged to motivate instincts, love, attraction, and bonding ensured reproduction and the protection of offspring. In this sense, emotions were servants of survival. But in humans, emotions exceed their instinctual basis. We encounter melancholia, longing, aesthetic rapture, spiritual ecstasy, and existential anxiety, experiences that do not simply facilitate reproduction but open onto entirely new modes of life.
The relationship between meaning and meaninglessness is not only a philosophical abstraction but also an emotional reality. Meaninglessness manifests emotionally as dread, emptiness, depression, meaning manifests as joy, inspiration, vitality. Viktor Frankl (1946/2006), in Man’s Search for Meaning, showed that even in the concentration camp, human dignity could persist through the quest for meaning, a quest irreducible to biological survival.[7] Likewise, Tillich (1952/2000) suggested that the confrontation with meaninglessness generates the need for meaning as its dialectical counterpart.[6]
Thus, human emotional life becomes a site where the universe “tests” the boundary between order and chaos, sense and nonsense, consciousness and unconsciousness. Emotions no longer merely guide instinct, they motivate the creation of culture, religion, philosophy, and art. They propel humanity beyond the given.
In this sense, humanity strives to live “beyond reproduction,” or at least with reproduction sublimated into other forms of transmission. Freud (1930/2010), in Civilization and Its Discontents, described culture as the sublimation of instinct into symbolic forms.[8] Humans transmit not only genes but also ideas, myths, works of art, and scientific theories. Cultural creations become a second form of heredity, what Richard Dawkins (1976/2006) later called “memes.”[9]
Human life thus becomes a laboratory of transmission in which instincts are not denied but rechanneled into new orders of expression. Creativity, knowledge, and spirituality are not simply supplements to reproduction, they are alternative ways of ensuring continuity, not of bodies, but of meaning. In Jungian terms, they represent the individuation process, through which the psyche integrates instinct and spirit into a living whole.
From this perspective, the human condition embodies a dialectic that seems inscribed in the universe itself. The cosmos exists, though it need not have, humanity seeks meaning, though meaninglessness is always near. Jung (1959/1969) described the Self as an archetype of wholeness that requires the integration of opposites.[5] If consciousness stands for meaning, the unconscious remains the reservoir of meaninglessness, together, they form a unity.
Emotions serve as mediators of this dialectic. Love, desire, and bonding express the instinctual drive toward reproduction. But longing, despair, or awe express something more, a movement toward transcendent meaning or toward confrontation with the void. As Tillich emphasized, it is precisely the awareness of nothingness that awakens the courage to affirm being. Frankl’s testimony shows that human existence is defined not only by the drive to live but by the capacity to endure and transform suffering through meaning.
Thus, humanity might represent a new element of the cosmos, a being in whom the universe itself becomes self-reflective, balancing its unconscious chaos with conscious meaning. Life and consciousness, “against all odds,” are not reducible to function or survival. They are acts of transcendence, ways in which the cosmos speaks to itself through the human.
The question, then, “Why does humanity do this?” admits a double answer. On the one hand, it is the continuation of the divine dimension within the human, homo religiosus, who always seeks the transcendent (Eliade, 1957/1992).[10] On the other hand, it is the history of emotions that have liberated themselves from their instinctual bases and become motivations for what exceeds reproduction. Humanity is therefore not merely another species prolonging life. It is a site where the universe experiments with reflection, meaning, and creativity, where life defines itself not only by survival but by asking why survival matters at all.
Human beings thus introduce something unprecedented into the cosmos, a life that persists against necessity, emotions that surpass instinct, and meaning that arises precisely because meaninglessness is always possible. In this paradox, humanity does not escape its biological roots but transforms them into a new horizon. It is here, perhaps, that the “Life” resides, not only life for life, nor life for reproduction, but life as a conscious balance of meaning and meaninglessness, a new force within the universe itself.
Dragana Favre, Psychiatrist and Jungian Psychotherapist
Dr. Dragana Favre is a psychiatrist, psychotherapist, and a seeker of the human psyche's mysteries. With a medical degree and extensive neuroscience education from prestigious institutions like the Max Planck Institute and Instituto de Neurociencias, she's a seasoned expert. Her unique approach combines Jungian psychotherapy, EMDR, and dream interpretation, guiding patients towards self-discovery and healing. Beyond her profession, Dr. Favre is passionate about science fiction, nature, and cosmology. Her ex-Yugoslavian roots in the small town of Kikinda offer a rich backdrop to her life's journey. She is dedicated to helping people find their true selves, much like an alchemist turning lead into gold.
References:
[1] Schopenhauer, A. (2010). The world as will and representation, Volume 1 (J. Norman, A. Welchman, & C. Janaway, Trans.). Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1819)
[2] Bergson, H. (1998). Creative evolution (A. Mitchell, Trans.). Dover. (Original work published 1907)
[3] Jung, C. G. (1960). The psychology of the transference. In The collected works of C. G. Jung (Vol. 16). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1954)
[4] Rees, M. (2000). Just six numbers: The deep forces that shape the universe. Basic Books.
[5] Jung, C. G. (1969). Aion: Research into the phenomenology of the self. In The Collected Works of C. G. Jung (Vol. 9ii). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1959)
[6] Tillich, P. (2000). The courage to be. Yale University Press. (Original work published 1952)
[7] Frankl, V. E. (2006). Man’s search for meaning. Beacon Press. (Original work published 1946)
[8] Freud, S. (2010). Civilization and Its Discontents (J. Strachey, Trans.). W. W. Norton & Company. (Original work published in 1930)
[9] Dawkins, R. (2006). The selfish gene (30th anniversary ed.). Oxford University Press. (Original work published 1976)
[10] Eliade, M. (1992). The sacred and the profane: The nature of religion. Harcourt. (Original work published 1957)
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