How to Think About the Meaning of Existence as an Entrepreneur

This is a prequel to my previous article: The Birth of Entrepreneurship out of the Spirit of Prometheus: Part 1 - Prometheus, the Original Entrepreneur

Once upon a time, a king invited a group of blind men to the palace to touch his elephant. One man touched its leg and said that the elephant is like a pillar. Another touched its trunk and said that the elephant is like a hose. Yet another man disagreed with both of them; he touched its body and said that the elephant is like a wall. They fought each other, believing that there exists only one valid interpretation. As beings in this world, we are all blind men touching the elephant when it comes to understanding reality, but the entrepreneur is one who dares to ride the elephant without knowing exactly what it is. Debating about what is the elephant means being distracted by the superficial representations, while the entrepreneur should live authentically. The entrepreneur doesn't debate; he simply puts his money where his mouth is. He who has practical mastery over reality is better off than he who has only theoretical understanding of the truth. The Bhagavad-Gita says that yoga is skill in action. Entrepreneurship is yoga.

What does it mean to exist? How do you live a purposeful life? These are difficult questions to answer directly. However, it’s important to recognize the commonalities among the philosophies of empiricists, existentialists, Buddhists, and Taoists. They all reject René Descartes's notion “I think, therefore I am.” Existence comes prior to the thinking mind. The existence of an object precedes its essence. When we look beyond appearances, we experience the horror of the emptiness of existence, and thus we find ways to affirm our existence. The quote should be altered to “I think, therefore I tell stories.” The difference between humans and other animals is that humans construct stories out of their direct sensory experiences to give life meaning and to cope with the difficulties of existence. All that we do in life is like this, and entrepreneurship is one such way to seek meaning in an absurd world. Stories of entrepreneurship fit the archetypal hero’s journey as describe by Joseph Campbell, and inspire us to venture into the primordial chaos to bring back value.

In Maps of Meaning, Dr. Jordan Peterson sought to combine the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Jean Piaget, and many other philosophers and psychologists to show how humans developed into what we are today and how to approach the meaning of our existence. My goal in this book is to extended Dr. Peterson’s work in the context of entrepreneurship while also drawing additional influences from Eastern philosophies, network economics, and the ideas of René Girard, Nassim Taleb, Camille Paglia, and other innovative thinkers. Isaac Newton said, "If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." To truly become a great innovative thinker, we must stand on the shoulders of past innovative thinkers. Creativity is in the hidden connections between seemingly unconnected ideas. The entrepreneur must train himself to discover the unknown valuable connections and extract value from it by bringing them to light in a free market context.

Piaget’s theory of cognitive development shows the order in which humans develop their understanding of the world. I must begin here to provide an empirical biological argument to explain how we interpret meaning in our lives and why it’s important to reject Homo Economicus and rationalism. Any philosophy should be backed by scientific evidence and meaningful subjective experiences, or it fails to provide real value. Jean Piaget is the pioneer of developmental psychology and genetic epistemology, which attempts to link the validity of knowledge to the model of its construction. According to Piaget, a child develops through the sensorimotor, pre-operational, concrete operational, and formal operational stages sequentially. A big mistake when interpreting developmental psychology is assuming that the later stages are better and that the earlier stages can be dismissed without much thought. We forget that the later stages are built upon the foundation of the earliest stages. We find stories about building a strong foundation in the parables of all cultures, for example, Matthew 7:24-27, Chinese folktale about the fool building the second floor of a house without the first, and The Three Little Pigs. Our initial way of knowing is sensorimotor, which exists prior to logical reasoning. Inductive reasoning is developed in the concrete operational stage, and deductive reasoning isn’t developed until the formal operational stage.

"Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions." -- David Hume, 18th century empiricist philosopher

In order to truly bring value back from the unknown, we must accept that reason cannot control or explain everything. If it does, then there is zero point to engage in art, religion, or entrepreneurship. The logical conclusions of rationalism are nihilism and pseudo-scientific rationalizations of ideologies. Fyodor Dostoyevsky gave amazing insights into this in his novels, especially Notes from the Underground and Demons. Descartes was very wrong on a scientific, biological level. Hume provided an excellent empiricist refutation of Descartes’s rationalist proof of the existence of God. But please don't scapegoat Descartes, because that's reductionist and he did make other important contributions.

Today, with knowledge of neurobiology, we see further evidence of why “I think, therefore I am” is an unworkable rationalization. The prefrontal cortex is responsible for higher level thinking and it is one of the newest evolved structures in the brain and only present in mammals (although birds and octopi have structures that perform similar functions). Rats have smooth prefrontal cortices and the granular prefrontal cortex first evolved in early primates. Humans have the largest granular prefrontal cortices ever evolved, and this is what biologically separates us from other animals. Our large prefrontal cortices gave us the ability to craft stories, question the meaning of existence, and think logically. Most modern humans pride ourselves on the achievements of the prefrontal cortex, but we must not forget that the brain is much more than that. There are subconscious methods of knowing that are embedded in much older brain structures.

In the next part, I will discuss the value of nonrational knowledge and take a brief look at Gregory Bateson's double bind theory and Robert Kegan's stages of adult cognitive development.

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This is a draft of an exerpt of a longer essay (now it's looking more like a full book) on the philosophy of entrepreneurship. The full essay will eventually appear at https://medium.com/@mimeticarbitrage