Sunitus - De instelling van de geest

Man, as a creature with an experiential scope exceeding his physical presence – a mind - has, because of this expansive attribute, an inherent need of a notion of himself, to ground his metaphysical experience in his physical being. This idea must, as I will explain, include an idea of a greater structure, of which he understands himself to be part. In the following text I will attempt to give a moral definition of man culminating in a conception of what he may become, if he properly understands himself.

To herd-animals, and that is how man functions in terms of his most basic living conditions, the social structure is all-important. What distinguishes man from, for example, sheep, is that he not only needs the functionality of the structure, but also the idea of it. He needs to understand that of which he is part, he needs to grasp it in his own terms, which are far more complex than the terms held by a sheep, if a sheep can be said to hold terms. It cannot, I would say. Terms, terminology, conceptual language is exclusive to man.

Modern man had outgrown his old structures, the conceptual constructs of which he, for centuries on end, conceived himself as a part. For this reason, the German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, postulated the “death of God”. He meant that the morality by which man had lived for a long age was no longer tenable, the foundations of this morality no longer credible.

Now, alone, standing by himself, with no such structure, man has both felt himself immensely rich and free, as well as fallen prey to indifference and apathy, in philosophical terms, nihilism, which is the paralysis of his will. For that was the advantage of belief in God – man lived for a reason – he knew there was a purpose beyond himself. This gave him peace of mind, and the courage to work for times that he himself might not live to see.

In lack of such horizons, the modern man has attached his mind to secular ideologies, such as, for example, capitalist democracy or communism. Even if scientifically, such a political system and the doctrine behind them may be seen as more refined or further evolved than any religion has been up to this point, psychologically they continue to fill the same void, which inevitably opens up beneath man when he is moved to regard himself as alone, as existing all for himself.

Perhaps it is true that there are some who can live truly alone. Addressing this type, one cannot really avoid quoting Nietzsche, Einzelganger pur-sang:

“To live alone one must be a beast or a god, says Aristotle. Leaving out the third case: one must be both – a philosopher.”

Whether the inclusion of this third case is justified or not I leave to speculation for now - I will address the fact that the common individualist is far from psychologically self-reliant. He needs his psychological context; he needs to feel appreciated and to belong.

As a rule, man simply cannot think of himself as not part of a greater whole – even the die-hard individualist conjures up around him all kinds of artworks and life-theories provided for him by other humans, dead or alive, to shape a universe of which he, as an individual self, is a loyal and grateful partaker; The self invokes in its mind its proper World; this World is what may be called “The Greater Self”; and it is this construct from which mans morality is derived.

This psychological idea of morality is in these times structurally negated and obscured by the slogans of modernity: “Think for yourself”, “Be free!” “Choose you life!”, etcetera. As if these commands were not ridiculous contradictions in terms - to command someone to be free; to order someone to think for himself… if someone is thinking for himself, he will surely not be listening to voices that might be telling him how he should think.

Someone who thinks for himself will do so because he cannot do anything else, because it is in his nature. And such a person, be it a scientist, a philosopher, an artist or another type, will find himself occupied with this question of how his thinking connects to the thought-forms existing in the world-at-large. The thoughts of one who thinks for himself will hence not be “free” in the popular modern sense - they will be bound to that which exists. The artist is tied to passion and the constructs of passionate thinkers, the scientist to logic and the constructs of logical thinkers, and the philosopher is tied to morality and the moralities of moral thinkers. The supreme freedom of philosophical thought is to understand morality in its basic necessity - it provides one with the power to shape morality, in accordance with ones will.

The will, however, is not an anarchic explosion of violence, and it is not helped by the complete lack of morality – the will is nothing other than the human psychology as a whole, including all its contradictions and frustrations, but also its carefully composed schemes to attain a greater level of comfort and happiness, its inspirations, wishes, desires, compulsions, aspirations and even its fears. The morality befitting such a will is, by this rationale, a blueprint of the will itself, a perfect model of the psyche.

A proper morality must thus be composed to host and sustain the psyche in its full capacity. Man must not be force-fitted into it like into some medieval torture apparatus, and neither, although this is probably preferable to the former, should man live in a total absence of commandments, for he will be left dangling in the wind, with nothing but the thin air to hold on to in determining his actions, and in who and what he is. As such he will be an animal – which is better than hellish suffering, but not what man aims to accomplish.

We are faced now, in the west, with the persistent rejection of any psychological “moulds” – and indeed the notion of them is horrible, because it contains this idea of force-fitting, with which our race has been made abundantly familiar during the dark ages. In these times, mans fundamental drives and passions were treated as diseases, as a consequence of which he became a disease to himself.

As we have been liberated from false morality, from a morality that does not befit man, it will naturally take us a while to put our trust again in morality per-se. We are however, as the world is made a unity by technological advancements, face to face with the necessity of some moral world-view, and this is troubling us, because we do not like to see ourselves as part of a whole; we rather think of ourselves as wholes-in-ourselves. This is a truly wonderful aim in contrast to our past self-image of servants of a disdainful and wrathful God, but it does not form a complete picture of what we are, what we desire to be, what we are capable of being. We sense this; we know this. We will gradually be coming to terms with the literally challenging fact that our identity is inextricably linked with the part we play in the world.

Since the “death” of God, the idea that man is factually, as opposed to ideally, part of a greater whole has been warded off under the guise of intellectual conscience, scientific skepticism and healthy distrust of notions of a non-material world. But there is nothing scientific or philosophical about this warding-off, about the insistence that man may only know about himself what he can deduce from his particular individual experiences. The ground of this attitude is not science, but mere doubt. Doubt is necessary, but not sufficient for science - it is not by itself ground for critical a thought; skeptical questioning demands discrimination, and a discriminating mind will come to the conclusion that it is part of a whole, that it wills itself to be so, and that it cannot conceive of itself otherwise.

The mind simply does not exist by itself. It is a product of the chain of thought that has led up to it. Only very violent folly can convince the mind otherwise, leading to solipsism; the idea that nothing can be known but the self, and that therefore, nothing else is real. It takes only a critical questioning of what this self is composed of to render such belief utterly meaningless.

So we arrive at the conclusion that not even the philosopher is truly by himself. He, too, is a product of the thinkers who came before, and even if his life, like that of Nietzsche, is without much living companionship, the philosopher thinks his thoughts with posthumous friends in mind. Aristotle was right then – to live alone one must be a beast or a God. Since we are neither, we thinkers of a globalizing world are faced with the task of understanding mankind as a collective – from which no single individual may, as a result of tightness of the “mould”, be excluded.

From this we may conclude certain things about the moralities, doctrines religions and ideologies that have hitherto existed – namely, that they were all imperfect. If one had been perfect, all humans would have voluntarily chosen to live under its banner. We may also conclude that many moralities, doctrines religions and ideologies have in fact been relatively close to perfection, because so many people did choose to live under their banner. So from all teachings we may learn, but there is a missing ingredient to all of them. What I propose is that this ingredient is the very thing by the examination of which we must come to the conclusion that we are factually, by our status of Homo sapiens, connected to each other – our mind.

This overarching property of the human species, the weakening of which always points to cultural atrocities and moral decay, has been taken for granted, and omitted from the foundations of all moral doctrines so far. That is why our race remains divided, why our differences rather than similarities determine daily politics –where the mind is weak, the passions rule, and passions thrive on division, even love.

When mind takes center-stage, all other human qualities must fall into place, acquire a natural context for themselves, so that every human may be granted his role to play and in which to excel. Mankind will know itself as the broadening scope of the ever-expanding experience of the universe, approaching a state of perfect knowledge, wisdom and understanding, a state that we might as well call the “Universal Mind”. This mind is perfectly free – bound only by its existence, which is the ground of its freedom.