Have you ever wondered what animal resides inside you? That after so many years of soul searching and spiritual vagabondage, you might have ended up as wolves, lambs, worms or horseshoe crabs?
In 1927, Herman Hesse wrote a book, called the Steppenwolf, in which he spoke of the struggle and the split between our humanity and our wolf like aggression. Apparently, Hesse re-discovered the wheel and what the ancient Greeks kept on preaching about our dualist nature. A concept that was taken over by Plato and Aristotle, but dates all the way back to Zarathustra, the Persian prophet from 18th century BC.
Octavian Paler, a Romanian contemporary writer, a lonely wolf himself, thought that the other wolves would tear us apart, if they knew that our howl is, in fact, weeping. Painful.
Funny, how many of us identify with lonely wolves, while wolves live in fact in packs. Are we naturally born to live alone yet meant to mingle with the crowds?
Outside the animal regna, in social terms, a lone wolf is someone who commits violent acts in support of an ideology, but does so alone, outside of any command structure. From this point of view, a lone wolf is a terrorist. It is admirable to have an ideology, but even within the terrorist organizations you need to obey the rules. Even terrorists need order, discipline and structure. Does it sound familiar to you? Yes, to me too. Not much of a difference, is there?
Hesse said in the Steppenwolf and later on developed in Narcissus and Goldmund, that as humans, we have two natures - a spiritual and elevated one, and a low, and animalistic one.
From this point of view, we were naturally born schizophrenics and our ancestral unhappiness might result from a permanent and irresolvable struggle between the two.
Thus, to obtain peace of mind, we need to come to terms and make peace with the animal inside us. Simpler said, than done. If the animal inside us would be a docile poodle, that should not be hard. Make peace with the animal inside you. Have you tried to come to terms or resonate with a wolf? What about a lemming, a tarantula, a Black Widow or a scorpion?
On an unrelated yet converging to the point topic, Cartesian dualism underlined rather a physical versus mental dual nature. Some 500 years later, Freud picked up on the idea and came up with the unconscious concept, which at Herman Hesse- a contemporary of Freud- was the wolf part. At Freud, the unconscious was the place where we repress the slaps we would like to give, the curses would wish to shout, the punches we would so generously share and the sexual orgies we dream about. Freud himself was not an original. And no, I am not picking up on Freud because I am anti-Semitic or puritan. I just think he was not original. He was courageous, true, but not original.
Man’s greatest chimera is not the achievement of happiness but the idea that he owns original thoughts. What is original? The virtue of introducing new ideas? The power of being unconventional? Since when being unconventional come to mean original and not anarchic? Is then anarchy original? There is nothing out there that is original, not even nature. Not even our genetic evolution is original. It is said that chimps share about 98% of their DNA with humans. Isn’t obvious that chimps have actually gone through more genetic change than us? Any human venture to discover or invent something new is pure rubbish. There is nothing original in life except the moment one creates and shares with another one. That is our uniqueness. How we relate to people, how we vulgarly and sentimentally display our emotions, weaknesses and flaws. It is not our strength that makes us unique, it is our weakness. So can we blame Freud for not being original?
Much later on, in 1966, Bannister described like no one else the human nature, which in my humble opinion, is the most accurate definition that someone adventured to give: Man is basically a battlefield ... a dark cellar in which a well-bred spinster lady and a sex-crazed monkey are for ever engaged in mortal combat, the struggle being refereed by a rather nervous bank clerk.
True, we are all humans, as defined by biology: biped position, major usage of the frontal lobe, hairless and clawless, altruistic and irrational. Some say, we are dual by nature. Others say dualism cannot coexist with causal interaction, and they are certainly and irremediably divorced. In fact, they were never married. How are the memories concerning consciousness created if consciousness can exist autonomously of reality? One easy way out of this futile dilemma is to apply the Franciscan Friar 's razor (Ockham). It seems to always work when dealing with more choices. Reduce the number of choices to as few as possible. Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitate. Do not assume the existence of more entities more than it is necessary.
Leaving the boring theory aside, and sticking with our fable, at a closer look, you will notice that some of us are indeed dogs-which throw themselves on the master’s coffin, loyal, dependent, clingy, immature, naïve, aggressive, not very smart; others are cats- nonchalant, self-sufficient, independent, insensitive; others are bulls- good for hard work, thick necks, low IQ, usually being given extra tasks by the smaller but smarter cats; others are foxes-witty, slick, sly, scruple less, they lie, cheat or steal while looking straight into your eyes; others are doves-innocent, clean, pure, untouched by world’s evilness, that most of the times choose to seclude themselves far from the mad crowd in a desperate attempt to preserve their spiritual cleanliness; my favorites, the brainless but highly decorative peacocks-which they display their colorful plumage and flip their wings to get attention but this is pretty much all they know; the birds of pray- which hunt you down to China town and eat your corpse; the monkeys- usually found in the offices, working for peanuts; the sheep- regularly seen in large groups during election days, fake revolutions, coup d’états, civil wars, religious skirmishes; the sharks- lawyers, policy makers, aficionados.
And this is OK. As long as we know to which category we and the others belong to and we don’t mix races, in order not to risk to be eaten alive, is fine. Pretty much like in the animal regnum, sheep don’t mix with wolves, doves don’t mix with foxes, and monkeys don’t show their back to the bigger and more sexually frustrated gorillas.
Sure my story is very farfetched and I made no point. I have shed no light upon dualism, Freud or Hesse, or even personality typologies. What I humbly did, was to raise more questions. Yes, I considered that are not enough. So, what animal resides inside you?
No comments:
Post a Comment