The Ape Who Gazed Beyond
Evidence of future influence is sought in a brief survey of humanity’s past in the speculative philosophical tract The Ape Who Gazed Beyond.
Fernando Reich’s The Ape Who Gazed Beyond is a meditative, birds-eye narrative of humankind’s development from the Stone Age to the present coupled with a stimulating but unorthodox perspective on the nature of time itself.
The book’s terse, contemplative chapters cover the key stages of human evolution, including the earliest human settlements on the African savanna, the development of agriculture and fire, the first uses of language, and the origins of religion and science. Each crucial stage of human history, the book asserts, was marked by a mysterious, powerful “pull” from the future that helped bring about these milestones. The vague possibility that human understandings of time are inverted accompanies this speculation: Rather than treating time as linear, the book raises the possibility that time is a force that travels in both directions, with the future able to influence the past just as the past can influence the future.
The book’s unusual reading of human history, wherein progress was driven by humans’ ability to tap into “resonances” or premonitions of the future, is dependent on the acceptance of grand speculative claims about human intuition, though. Most are undersupported internally. For instance, it argues that some irrational certainties in the present can, in fact, be readings of the future:
Maybe it’s a way of tuning to the future—not the future already written, but the future that wants to be born. The one that already vibrates at a faint frequency, barely perceptible, yet enough to lean our choices.
The prose is quite airy, leading to a muddled delivery. Indeed, though it makes radical claims about time, it does so in a manner that undermines its own seriousness. The presentation of its claims vacillates between firm truth and “food for thought” across its different sections. And its extensive and intriguing bibliography is compromised by the fact that the same works go unreferenced in the body of the text itself, which seldom appeals to outside research or concrete examples, preferring instead to address universal and abstract aspects of human experience.
While each chapter touches on a unique element of human history and time, in the end, too many of the book’s stimulating conclusions, as about the “bi-directionality of time” and the future promises of AI, are insufficiently supported. Further, repetitiveness sets in, including with the often-used and wearying formulation “It isn’t only X. It’s also Y,” some variation of which appears in every chapter, undermining the book’s overall persuasiveness.
The Ape Who Gazed Beyond is a philosophical and spiritual meditation on history, time, and the future of humanity.
Reviewed by
Isaac Randel
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
