The webs of significance of the cultural context in which we live are only rational to the degree that reason is necessary for us to manipulate nature. Whether a horticultural culture believes one must bury a fish in the garden every spring because of an irrational religious cosmology, or because they have reason to believe this is the best way to fertilize the soil, makes no difference. They manipulate nature to their own benefit just the same.

Marx’s claim was that the fundamental basis upon which these webs of significance were built was our physical subsistence: our reaction to our environment, which allows us to survive and provide for our material subsistence, is the only basis for our culture to work up from and build these webs of significance. I would claim that (though this does not necessarily contradict Marx) material subsistence is not the only motivation for the formation of belief systems.

We are not motivated to eat food because without it we will die. We are motivated to eat food because without it we will suffer. Even if the threat of death is the only reason to eat, and we do not suffer for being hungry and starving, we will eat because the thought, "Death is coming," will make us suffer. However, if our webs of significance tell us, as they tell the anorexic, "To eat is to be fat. To be fat is worse than to die. To not eat is to die," then the anorexic will find more meaning in starving to death than in eating. She is not eating, in order to avoid suffering, while most of us are motivated to eat to avoid suffering. Material subsistence is not an absolute motivation for us; avoiding suffering is.

But insofar as the pains we are trying to avoid in creating our belief systems are the pains of death, it is quite a philosophical hair-splitting exercise to say, "Marx was wrong because it wasn’t our need to subsist that motivated us, but the pain involved with the idea of not subsisting." I hope to show that human beings, though they subsist, will still suffer, and create belief systems to ease that suffering, that are not issued from trying to avoid merely material collapse.

Human beings have never been able to live in a world they do not comprehend. They constantly feel that at least their world of everyday experience must be coherent and comprehensible to them. Thus culture renders the world comprehensible with the webs of significance. But human beings go beyond what is needed for survival when they form their beliefs. What are the stars? Before humans could know this they had already formed strongly held beliefs about them. In fact, they formed entire cosmologies, when they could not understand why the disk of the earth did not fall, but seemed merely to hover in the air. All these things were not comprehensible to them, and so they rendered them comprehensible through their admittedly irrational belief systems. Perhaps the means of their material subsistence provided the basic framework, and determined the beginning principles, upon which these belief systems were formed. But one need not comprehend one’s entire world to subsist.

There is a kind of suffering that comes from the world being incomprehensible and absurd. The Existentialists, who purposefully try not to be fooled by our webs of significance, see a meaningless, anguishing, incomprehensible world, which these webs of significance hide from most people. Thus, we must go beyond mere survival to explain the belief systems of humankind: we must go to the just as basic need to alleviate suffering before the incomprehensible. When men and women do not comprehend their world, they will expand their belief systems into the unknowable and incomprehensible, to render it familiar, meaningful, and comprehensible.

The early Greek philosophers, especially the Presocratics, specialized in this sort of "rendering the senseless sensible". What is the world made of? What are the stars and sun? Is the earth round or flat, and if it is either, why does it hover in the air, and not fall? They used logic to answer all these questions. All their belief systems were perfectly logical and orderly, in which every part fit together logically with every other part—and yet they were absurd belief systems. Thales said the world, and everything in it, was made of water. Anaximenes said everything was made of air in various degrees and stages of condensation and rarefaction. Pythagoras said there was a massive cosmic fire that both the earth and sun revolved around. If there were internal inconsistencies in these thinkers’ philosophies, they are hard to spot. Their absurdity lies in the fact that they are ultimately based on creative speculation. The world had filled their role previously by religion: the sun was a god, lightning came from Zeus.

This is precisely how psychosis functions: it is internally logically consistent, but ultimately the questions it seeks to answer are unknowable and therefore speculated upon. No one could prove Anaximenes wrong. Then again, no one could prove him right. I am not saying he was psychotic. The unknowable things he tried to answer weren’t ego-centered questions such as, "Why hasn’t that professor gotten back to me yet on the fiction I asked him to read?" but things like, "What is the world made of?" and so he wasn’t led to delusions that other people could obviously see were false. I will discuss later on in detail my theories about psychosis, and how it figures into everything that has been said so far.

Marx would argue that the actual content of the beliefs that we form to render the incomprehensible familiar is a direct result of the material means of subsistence of the society. Some anthropologists believe the same thing: the belief systems of a culture function as a response to environment and a means of subsisting in that environment. I will digress too far for a detailed critique of this idea, and whether it is true or not has no bearing on the thesis at hand. But my point is that societies form beliefs that are not necessarily needed in order to survive in a given environment (such as beliefs that tell them what the stars are), as a means to avoid the uniquely human suffering that comes from living in a world that does not make sense. Whether the content of those beliefs issues directly from their means of material subsistence is not relevant: their motivations for understanding such things is not itself material subsistence.