ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the status of ‘ideals,’ arguing that the anthropocentric bias which stipulates that all value metrics, in fact the very concept of value itself, are nothing more than human constructions, is a wilful exaggeration of human exceptionalism. Granting the hypothetical existence of supra-human precepts, the case is presented here that the tension between native principles and our worldly experience of them could be the critical driver of moral evolution, and therefore of the new metanarrative. In this context, the status of the new metanarrative is discussed with reference to Rousseau’s ‘general will,’ and also with reference to the concept of emergence. Here the door is opened to a more detailed discussion, in subsequent chapters, of agency as perpetrated by an individual entangled with the universe, and what it portends.
