“A little better would he live, poor wight, had you not given him that gleam of heavenly light. He calls it Reason only to pollute its use by being brutaler than any brute.” Mephistopheles to the Lord — from Faust, by Goethe
Sure, you say. I know that technically, humans are animals. But we’re really more than animals, aren’t we? Well, let’s take a closer look at just how we differ from animals and how we’re similar:
“All man does with his “mind” or “psyche” (or with his brain and nervous wiring and his body) that animals are not able to do, or can do only slightly better, is but a single act: He imagines. Imagination, as people involved in the study of man fail to perceive, is the underlying source of the other processes of mind to which we give so many absurdly nit-picking and hair-splitting names.“
It’s been over fifty years since Philip Wylie wrote those words, and one could question whether we’ve advanced at all during that span, concerning natural reality, our knowledge of it, or even our acceptance of it. Today, we can’t even agree on the facts of ############# and the realities of their cause and effect relationships. All that aside, it may help matters to step back and take a look at the biological facts beneath the millions of subjective human realities that contend with (and deny and subvert, twist and misinterpret) the natural reality we’ve been confronted with since life began on this planet:
Wylie, in his last book, The Magic Animal (1968), gives us a glimpse of what might happen in this natural world when an animal confronts man for the first time:
“…Consider then, a mammal, good-sized, faced for the first time by another, unknown creature of cryptic (and so, perhaps, dangerous) sort. A panther, or tiger, say, with no inherited, learned, or prior personal knowledge of what now appears before it: a man.
The situation sets up the familiar alternative-choice problem: fight or flee…The panther or tiger has sense perceptions only slightly different from our own though some are sharper. Still, it’s picture (imagined) of the real world more or less corresponds to man’s. Light and shadow, perspective, relative size, distances, colors, number of objects around it, are sensed in a way we comprehend. So are smells, if any, and most things smell. Such sounds, too, within auditory range: rustle of leaves, crunching halt of man. distant bawl of ungulate, chitter of near birds. The animal is “aware” of all those, or could become aware on notice of need.
It is similarly aware, or able to be, of itself — as body and so as furred and hairy, as warm or cold, as breathing, as toothed, clawed, as very powerful in its environs and pretty safe from predation. As, perhaps, having a mate and cubs, somewhere near, as hungry or not, or thirsty; and aware of such data in relation to many other creatures, when they are present, as well as its kind, as panther, tiger in sufficient degree to recognize other panthers, tigers, and the rules for their own species responses. But now its awareness rises one level. It perceives its first man and about this creature it has no such “knowledge.” Here is an animal, obviously, but one with crimson head-hair, red fur down to the place where blue, slick skin begins; and below that, black feet. Standing like a bear on two legs. With a complex aroma so unfamiliar as to be incomprehensible — unless, perhaps, in part, a sweaty scent of fear.
But what to do? What not? Flee and lose face for no cause? Fight, and risk being killed? The panther will flee almost always. Not, though, the tiger perhaps. And our panther may have cubs behind and a lamed mate and a sense that their defense is more important, perhaps, than other risk. Not of death but of defeat — since the panther cannot foresee death. Stress rises, and awareness of stress, another lift of level in awareness.
Without any conscious effort, automatically and in a split second of time, the panther runs its baffling image of man through its cerebral computer for analysis and analogue. All the heritage of its ancestral beings is stored there in shorthand form and also the enormous library of panther facts. Its own experience is coded there, too. If the other animal were familiar that sorting would suffice when checked against the panther’s present situation, and its current mood, its individual nature, cubs to defend, matters of territory, and the rest. It would then know what to do , or not, from its innate moral order.
That knowledge would not be palpable to it as such. All the computer will finally furnish is a cue in the form of a feeling, that is a sensed result of an evaluation, for what could and would be translated into the appropriate act — a leap toward, or away from, the other being. Or even the ignoring of it, a passing on, alongside, or a skirting of it.
But this panther has to decide without any complete way of evaluating the data and then experiencing the correct feeling for action. Or non-action. This state involves a still higher level of awareness, a sense of stress that obliges the creature to be aware of itself as under pressure and as forced to imagine what to do — using time and past experience to the degree they may help for that end. Whatever the panther or tiger then does is the result of a feeling it gets by imagining itself in a new way, so as to imagine something about the unknown reality it faces for evaluation, all alone, to get an individual feeling. It will conjure up a feeling that will lead to its act, appropriate or no.
People have that identical capacity but in an unlimited degree or one nearly unlimited. The human computer can be programmed in as many ways as can be imagined including insane ways. But what the human being does to “think” is merely to react to a feeling that is the aware end product of reference to a stored value system, sensory, learned and personally encoded. If it were not so, what people say to each other in a five minute phone conversation would take a year or two. Our statements, questions, answers, opinions, exchanges of verbal symbols of every sort — all these — arise nearly instantaneously but after computer-like evaluation. They represent translations to feelings, not thoughts. To mere sensations that are the “print-out” of automated process. These are retranslated as verbal symbols in our phone talk.
In face-to-face talk they are also translated into the vocal inflections (that the phone carries, too), but the spectrum of kinesic “talk” is now visible. Often without the exhibitor’s awareness. Hands, brow, eye rims, a hundred or perhaps many thousands of bodily movements, give clues of the speaker’s evaluations, which are often opposite to or different from his verbal statements. So we are preposterous when we assert we are rational and fair, just and equable, lucid and reasoning. We but imagine that.
We imagine it and act out the imaginary “reality” exactly as does the animal, panther or beetle, to their limits. Nothing or near-nothing in our aware activities is reasoned. All is imaginary. And nothing is true, in consequence. All is merely an evaluation of images we ascribe to ourselves and then project on others, the world of matter, realms of “belief”, theory, and even admitted images. We do not have access to any dependable, fundamental data.
We do not know what the universe is or why it exists. We cannot know “who” we are and merely cling to imaginary notions about that. Our perceptions, sensory or fictitious, are not the accurate, dependable concepts we assume. We cannot hear most of the vibrations that seem to us the whole of sound. Our ability to sense the electromagnetic wave spectrum is minute. We sense more only with the aid of apparatus. Our sense of smell is probably one thousandth of that of some insects, a billionth of the smell range.
What most of us, most of the time, and all of us some of the time, conceive of as “self” and as “another,” or as “communication,” and as “intelligence,” “reality,” suitable “judgments” and so on is but a fragmentary image of limited evaluation rendered as a feeling. Thought, reason, logic, the entire rest of the human aware acts, and those unaware, too, are artifacts, themselves end products of images.
Even “original thought,” a supposedly purely intellectual act, is the result of a feeling. Before the genius makes the step forward that abets human progress, evaluation will have led to a feeling that leads to his new image, poem, sonata, or scientific theory. And to the scientist who now demurs, who insists, perhaps, that there is “more” to art, creative thought, and the discovery of “new concepts or categories” than that, it might be asked, at least, with a certain potential of elucidation: Why did he choose to become a mathematician, biologist, chemist?
For unless a career, or an errand downtown, is the response to a feeling, the career or errand do not take place. The innate right-wrong programming of the individual is involved to every end, and it gives all the directions there are for living things. In that basic and unarguable way it can be stated that all “thought” and all other allegedly discrete or detached “intellectual” processes are but rationalizations of feelings. Rationalizations made unconsciously of evaluations the moral machine printed out. The results can be good or bad, gain or loss, mental achievement or madness. The source is one; the process, single; the whole affair, to the point of action, imagined.”
So ends my first post on Wylie’s, The Magic Animal. I’ve quoted it at length rather than paraphrase it, because I think it’s important to read in its original form, and that what he has to say about our predicament is singularly educated and accurate. All of Wylie’s writings were based on Jung’s psychology, and anyone who reads them will find that he follows it very closely. And lest you may have forgotten about my own writing, it, too, follows Jung’s concepts very closely. Read about my book here.