VII: The Culture Of Man 2. Essential Humanity

A few chapters ago we discussed the meaning of “Man” from a biological perspective. We determined that because of our many unique abilities, traits, and tendencies, homo sapiens should not really be homo at all, as it is the same as absolutely no other creature. We showed how these several uniquely human abilities seem to indicate Man should be a genus unto itself, rather than “the highest” primate representative. Indeed, we argued that Man should not be a primate at all. The classification of humanity cannot end at the level of species (or genus) because part of any definition of Man must include an element of distinctive individuality – personality, if you will – that must be accounted for in any discussion of what Man is.

Trying to define Man from a biological or physiological perspective, the goal of our prior discussion, is a little different than trying to determine what Man is from a purely psychological perspective, the goal of the present discussion. Everything known to us is received through the screening provided by this combination of personality and reflection. Reflection, as a capacity or state could theoretically be the same in everyone, but the personality is something necessarily distinct and individual. It should be obvious that many, if not most of what “a man” is, meaning THIS particular man, or THAT particular woman (or YOU…), is determined by the very same things which determine the fates of animals and even plants. Environment, quality of upbringing, historical circumstances, influence and training, as well as parenting and DNA, play the major roles in determining what any particular human can be. We are in this way products of “culture,” at once produced and informed by it.

Beyond that, however, there are the not-so obvious nor so determined aspects of this or that individual. Unlike even the most intelligent animals Man has a penchant to seek improvement, to break barriers, to do things differently, and quickly, or out of season. Or, conversely, and unfortunately, Man has the ability and capacity to do damage, destroy things for no reason, even torture and kill without discretion, and just do things to his own at least apparently impossible for other types of creature. Each human being, each individual, each “locus of centricity” and so each special [sic.] person has this potential to deviate from Nature [n.b.: It's almost a shame I can't just use the word soul to describe the individual, as this word explains well the purposive and literally extra-terrestrial aspects of an otherwise common Earthly biological organism. The problem is today soul connotes religion, and while probably this is understandable, one must realize that "religion" itself, as a concept as well as practice, is itself a product of the imaginings and workings of this very soul].

Every day humans break barriers mental and physical, set new records for same, and just want to do better by virtue of individual souls compelled to drive forward. Whether this constant human advancing be due to an innate insatiability or unease, or a quest for production and improvement, or as some new theorists say with intricate mathematical formulae, whether it is due to God’s imagined and created world becoming fully realized, in any case we stumble here onto another aspect of the Human Gen(i)us unique to it. Further, this indeed human genius, this creativity and expression, is of quite the individual, and so not so easily quantifiable nature. While it is part of what makes Man Man, it is never the same in this man or that woman. Everyone has the capacity, it seems, but the expression of this capacity is, and always should be treated as, individual. To answer an objection before it comes up, mimicry is itself one form of this expression, so a person could choose to be and live the life of someone else, this would not negate the capacity nor the freedom of expression.

The psychological Origin of Man, then, is in this sense a very different search than that for the biological Origin of Man. While the source of the latter might be found through genetic development, or simple genealogy, or even Adam and Eve, the source of the former is an even more complicated question. “Know Thyself” becomes immediately the task. Explaining what one encounters in one’s own mind is a triply difficult enterprise, and perhaps what led Plato to opine that language can never express real Truth. We are limited by both the symbols of expression (language) and the effectiveness of the communication. As just one human, I myself can relay to you my own personal psychology only through the limits of my personal expression, and it can only be understood within the limits of your comprehension. So, when I search for the Origin of Man, psychologically, a priori the search must be an introspective one, and all I can hope for is that the listener recognize aspects of my personal psychology, as I see it and as I am limited to writing about it, and somehow identify with it. In short, the search must at this point begin as a personal enterprise, an exercise in reflection that must even consider the reflection (or reflector) itself.

A.

In the beginning psychology was born for this reason, to study the human psyche. “Psyche” meant soul, basically, so originally psychology was the study of the soul. If this sounds old or antiquated to you, understand that this was in contrast to “mind,” for which the old Greeks used the word “nous.” The mind is but one aspect of the psyche, the latter something at once individual, yet in touch with eternity. When Apuleius, in the 2nd Century AD, in Metamorphosis wrote about the love affair between Cupid and Psyche, he expresses in the myth this relationship between mind and soul. Before Freud ever thought about separating the human mind into the id, ego, and superego, Apuleius by use of tradition and metaphor could be said to have accomplished the same.

I want to discuss and elaborate a bit on this tale of Cupid and Psyche. First let’s understand what these words mean according to the myth. “Psyche” or more properly psuche in Greek, means “breath of life” or as we have said, “soul.” Cupid, the Anglicized version of Latin cupido is a direct translation of the Greek eros, or desirous love. Some may remember that the Greeks had three words for love, the other two being agape (spiritual love) and philos (friendly love, or friendship/kinship). In the story the magnificent Psyche, by many strange pitfalls and circumventions, falls in love with the most beautiful creature she has ever seen, Cupid. Metaphorically speaking the soul beholds the concept of desirous love and must have it. To get it, though, she must endure trials and tribulations. Eventually, she does win Cupid, and so the soul has taken possession of the object of its greatest affection, love.

It should be noted that it is Venus, the goddess of love and beauty (Greek Aphrodite) that makes Psyche run through so many hoops in order to acquire or achieve union with desirous love. So, Love allows the soul desire, but only if the soul works and struggles to acquire it. The desire must be real and strong for it to have the blessing of, or be permitted by, all-pervasive Love. The marriage of Cupid and Psyche, and so the eternal union of Desire and Soul, is thereby given expression in this myth.

What we learn from this myth, pertinent to our discussion here, is that since ancient times Man has tried to explain his mental processes by sub-dividing it into different aspects. From the myth we learn that soul is separate from love which is again separate from desire. When we think, there is a reflector and the object of reflection, and what this myth seems to imply is that the two – desire and soul – are inseparable. In many ways the soul and a desirous soul are synonymous. It is the object of desire, the objectified thought, that can and does vary by individual and circumstance.

B.

A study of the mind is technically a biological study. Nearly every living creature, to the extent that it has a brain, or central nervous system that controls its behavior, can be said to have a mind. Plants bending toward the light, and similar autonomic reactions in the plant kingdom, may also be said to be indicative of mind. A study of the soul, however, that is, the source of human personality, the spring of originality and creativity, the tone of the voice and expression, the energy motor, intelligence, will, and more, can be informed by biology, but not answered by it.

Aristotle, as we mentioned, described several “types” of soul. Specifically (and drastically paraphrasing), he talked about a vegetative soul, an animal soul, and a human soul, and how each “higher” type of soul also contained within it the elements of the lower. In example, take an elm tree, a lion, and a human. The elm tree grows by ingesting elements and turning them into energy by which it creates more cellulose and so it grows. The lion does this as well, but it also can move from place to place freely, can use mind to a higher degree, and if caught young could even be taught to perform and do tricks, and so taught to do work. It has enough mind to do basic tasks. Man eats and grows like the plant, reacting to its environment, Man uses mind very well and surely, as Skinner and Pavlov (and Nintendo and the Army) have shown us, can be trained to do things, can learn.

According to Aristotle, though, there is one aspect, a particular aspect of mind, which differentiates the soul of Man from that of any other creature. It is the nous poetikos, or the poetic mind that allows man to communicate with language, comprehend music, create and invent, and overall, to just imagine. It enables Man to have his fantasies, by which he has forged the technological and artistic empire you see today. Its counterpart, for Aristotle, was the nous pathetikos. While the former might be properly translated “poetic mind,” the latter can be translated as “pathetic mind.” This common type of mind is held even by the animals, something indicated by the meanings of pathos from which it is derived, signifying emotion-based, rather than purposive, creative, or rational thinking. While poetic mind makes us human and able to create, pathetic mind allows day-to-day living and is the gatherer of experience, the master of the senses. What we each are individually is a result of the combination of these two elements of mind. Psyche or soul is these elements in combination, and it should be noted that for Aristotle this poetic aspect of mind is divine, and unique to mankind.

Further on the ancient understanding of the self, Aristotle’s teacher Plato’s anamnesis theory of knowledge stated that basically we are born already knowing everything there is to know, but that we have forgotten and need to be reminded. This is, for Plato, what makes any knowledge at all possible, analogized by the first time you did a complex (to you)  mathematical equation and figured it out. This “eureka,” or knowing something is right, argued Plato, relies on such a preset familiarity. When the slave boy Meno is led to solve for himself some mathematical (geometrical) problem involving a triangle, this is meant to show that Meno already knew the answer, but just needed to be reminded

Later in philosophical history this locus was seen as of divine origin, or a place where body and soul meet. Rene Descartes would find the seat of the soul in the pineal gland of the brain, and he is interesting because of his introspection, or solipsism, which involves thought processes similar to those we have been using in this section. We have been examining thought, and consciousness itself, using consciousness itself.

C,

Now, I have never seen myself as a dualist but without a doubt I can see myself in two main ways. There is, I know, an Angelo, a “me,” that has never changed, at least as long as I have known it. I know “Angelo” is not (let’s say) him, but rather a name placed upon him. This me watches and sometimes suggests and endures, sometimes it scolds and sometimes it prods, but most of the time it just abides, succumbing to whatever experiences, like the naming, like the things that happen to its body as it ages. This me, this locus of my centricity, never really itself changes, never ages, and, indeed, there are times I think this me is not really me at all. But that it is there, “behind” my waking consciousness, I have no doubt.

In contrast, there is the physical Angelo, the one you see, the one who does things, the one who you speak to. He gets old, has changed his opinions over time, in short he is a big box of conditioned matter pretty much operantally-conditioned and stricken with physical and mental limitations. If I want to think of a memory, I will the image, think the thought, and the memory appears, and when that memory appears it is of the same nature as my non-physical, overseeing self. If I attempt to think of Angelo, I think of an image of myself, like a photograph. It seems, though, that what is me is more what is doing the thinking than the image of myself I, or my mind, conjures up.

One can think of the phrase “But for the grace of God go I.” In this scenario just described, the one that takes place by the minute in my mind, this “me behind me,” the non-aging self, may be seen as this grace. Itself this grace cannot, in a sense, be touched by the material world. What it does is provide the mental capacity by which experience might be received. It is a giver but never a direct receiver. The dualism-monism philosophical battle has raged for centuries, but since, and largely because of Immanuel Kant, many “hybrid” theories have come upon the scene, claiming that we humans display both monist and dualistic tendencies.

Kant realized that the old rationalist-empiricist philosophical debate about the origin or knowledge was going nowhere fast. Where they argued about whether (the position of the empiricists) or not (the position of the rationalists) knowledge is received through experience, Kant showed both aspects to be necessary, and in some senses, assuming of each other.

For newer theories, like those of Christopher Langan, many of these old debates are “solved” by changing the way we look at what Man is and what he can be. Schizophrenia aside, the minds of men are more complex and diverse than ever could have been imagined, and these new theories may therefore be correct in, if nothing else, their staunch insistence on the role of the observer in any such discussion. Consciousness is itself the condition behind all knowledge, and anything known must have to have been received through it, and formed by it.

It should be recognized that this is essentially the classic existentialist position (if one there be…), that Man is the measure of all things. What Man knows or can know about the world, or God, or even himself, must be filtered through human comprehension and explained in humanly comprehensible terms. It is the best we can do, and again, perhaps why it was seen by Plato as not good enough. For Plato it was enlightenment only, revelation, that brought Truth.

D.

Now the question becomes, given this information, what is this Man, whose Origin we have been seeking? Is it:

a. The sum total of all humanity

b. The origin of a particular group of humanity

c. The origin of one individual

d. The origin of an individual’s psyche

…or something else?

Properly, as we’ve said, Man should be a genus unto itself. This genus should be divided further into types, or species. Race or color is an obvious but probably incorrect way to make this division. We could instead try such things as temperaments (hot-cold-varied,Type A, Type B, etc.), blood type, and so on. These species should be further subdivided into subspecies, and finally to no less that each and very individual. At this individual level, as some would say, at the level of the monad, despite all their similarities, men are prone to drastic differences. What works for one might not work for another, and others are whole opposites and worlds apart, in temperament, in outlook, in motor, and opinions. In a correct Chain of Being, the differences each human displays would be enough to claim that of all the general things which might be said of homo sapiens, one of those must be a definite individuality, one which makes the precise definition of what Man is quite complicated.

For what, really, constitutes this individuality? Once again, there are the contenders. There is the waking self, the ego as it has been called, the human animal, which ages and must be trained and in sum is a smart relatively hairless monkey, and then there is the self behind the self, the psyche or soul, which sometimes informs, but mostly just provides the firmament for experience. Which is really me? Which origin are we seeking?

Clearly, I am a hybrid. A monistic complete whole with several dualistic aspects. Try this experiment. Next time you are in a quiet room with a clock ticking, make an effort to hear the clock. Don’t move your head. just direct your consciousness to the clock. Soon you will hear the clock a lot better. How is this, or what is this, that manipulates and directs the input of the senses? What is it doing the concentrating, or better to say, directing the consciousness? Is the director of consciousness the same as consciousness itself? In short, the question to ask here is which is you, the thing that directed the hearing, or the thing that did the hearing?

Without doubt, both are necessary. Without the “super” consciousness behind us, without the “little voice inside our heads,” the self that never changes, Man would be nothing more than an animal, and perhaps less, with no actual center of being. This is not to make an ethical judgment (either way), but just to call attention to how much depends on an unchanging aspect of each human being. Without waking consciousness, on the other hand, we would have no need for a physical existence at all. The super-consciousness could receive no impressions and be unable to sustain any type attention. What is clear is that the mind and soul need each other, just like Psyche needed Cupid. Therefore we must conclude that Man might (also) be defined, indeed, distinguished, by this cohabitation.

A spider can weave a brilliant, nearly perfectly symmetrical web, a cricket strum a perfectly timed tune, without ever taking a class or studying a lick. At least to our perception, the web appears as a brilliant display of constructed and created order, strong, suitable to purpose, and displaying intelligence in design. It is a marvel no less than the cocoon spun purposeful with art and utility by the common moth, to enable itself the metamorphosis into an entirely different being, while at the same time retaining its original identity. These creatures have themselves not only a metaphorical message, but a grace, and perhaps it is a grace we humans, too, once had. Perhaps at one time we knew what to do from birth, we had to take no lessons nor study nor work to live and thrive and create. Perhaps it was a paradise on Earth. Perhaps we were born like the spider and had inherent to our natures special and specific duties, and so were also graced by knowing inborn how to act and what to do. Perhaps having this predicament, we grew bored, we grew free, and we grew independent. Many myths and theories and tales exist about how Man came to be in his current predicament, from fallen angels to extraterrestrial insemination. Perhaps we did curse this bound slavery of determinism, we rebelled against our pre-programmed animalistic fates and destinies, and demanded of our creator the freedom and liberty to think, live, and act as we so see fit.

They say be careful what you wish for, and it appears what has happened is Man has gotten his wish. Man is allowed the one overriding grace of freedom, ultimate freedom, limited only by those same limitations of anything within space and time, and perhaps more. This poetic mind, the super-consciousness, this soul or spirit, is truthfully an image of God. The main religions of the world that mention human creation say God created Man in His image (Genesis 1:2), “…male and female created he them.” While most often this is interpreted to mean “in His likeness,” meaning looking like God, or acting like God, or thinking like God, consider a moment another possibility. When one looks in the mirror, or on the surface of water, there is a reflection, and what one sees in this reflection is an image. Now what is God’s reflection? What is God’s thinking of, what does it concern? When God looks in the mirror, what image does He see? Whatever the answer is, suppose Man was created IN that. God creating Man in his image could literally mean God created Man in his reflection, in his mind. Given such presumptions, and when we continue to discuss the Origin of Man, we must then assume that the Man for whose Origin we search is a mental construct. It is quite literally a conceptual designation, deep down just a particular expression of divine enthusiasm.