The perhaps excessive emphasis on consciousness leads to the idea that all our rich and novelistic human complexities are just artifacts of the evolutionary history of an organism capable of bearing an autonomous self-reflective consciousness. Don't we already perceive signs of the exhaustion of this experience of the human, its romantic failure? As if we are a kind of organism bred so that we can yield a vital element in a potentially self-purifying way though further inevitable and cruel evolutionary cullings? That the messy and limited vagaries of human biography are the bitter and disposable husk of a fruit which is the sole purpose of our erstwhile species-being but whose destiny lies elsewhere? Isn't some such bloodless notion at the heart of all idealism and in a lesser key even of all utopianism? There is something that cries out against it, but the sense of this pull is present in all forms of transcendence. At some level, for all our nostalgias, all our love for the foul rag and bone shop of the heart, wasn't this inhuman will to transcend the human integral to the human from the very start? Isn't it what is symbolised in the crucifixion? The cracking of an egg, the first glimmerings of a different light.