This was an involved writeup which tried to explore some deeper topics. I am not sure I grasped all the ideas in their full breadth and depth, but I feel I seem to have an understanding of what has been tried to convey - that humans in their attempt to gain control over forces that had led to their suffering are faced with the same laws that these forces had obeyed; hence, only obtaining an illusion of power. Connecting the illusion of control of humans to the morphing of understanding of reason was especially delicate and interesting
However, there are a few things that I have found hard to digest.
1. Just because humans have to obey the same laws as the forces they sought to control, why would that mean that they have an illusion of power, or are powerless? If the same laws dictate the forces, which could be considered entities beyond the human plane of existence, then have humans not advanced in the rungs of power and control? The point being just because we have to act according to certain laws does not imply powerlessness - being ignorant of such laws does. And if the laws are as universal, would there be any existence that acts not in accordance to the laws? Does God ever break His own laws (may not the same ones as humans have managed to discover)?
2. Knowledge and Reason have been purported as tools through which humans achieve power. However, careful consideration would make it obvious that those faculties fall short to describe the human progress in power. For example, ingenuity and creativity that are starkly different faculties from reason have driven a lot of storytelling and fiction which has in turn provided inspiration to be followed through by reason to actualize the fictions. Moreover, knowledge may have its end at reason, however, knowledge is only part of what drives actions, as does reason. For example, much of history have been driven by actions that would be seldom considered reasonable, or virtuous, but much more to be considered emotional (e.g., tribal wars).
3. About the great men in history, and predictability of human nature - there are many a things that are predictable when reduced to the basic necessities of living and their derivatives, but the nature of humans have definitely changed over the centuries. Moreover, relying on great historical figures may itself be futile, for history only recorded those with power - there may have been many other virtuous and heroic generals or soldiers in Napoleon's army who were not taken notice of because their achievements were not great in comparison to the common standard, but who in their own regard might have made great strides and acts of heroism. The norm is always broken by outliers, but not all outliers achieve the stardom (Ref. Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell). So, a healthy skepticism need be maintained when considering history as evidence. What I would wager drives much of the predictability of human behavior is the conjecture that all throughout history only a few ever seek wisdom, and of those only few are able to act on it.
Thank you for your comment! I will do my best to address each point in order:
1. Humans are powerless in the sense that we cannot create our own laws, but must align ourselves to laws that already exist. Our existence improves when we understand these laws and obey them, but that is exactly the irony: what we perceive as the power to change our circumstances is only the power to submit. God neither breaks nor keeps laws, because He is not under the law. That is the meaning of true power, and that is exactly what I mean when I say that humans are powerless: by our very existence, we must submit to law.
2. You are right in saying that knowledge and reason are not the only tools by which people prosper. As I pointed out earlier in the article, human prosperity has a lot to do with chance—or, more accurately, circumstantial factors whose laws we do not understand and cannot align to. This helps to explain why questionable actions—e.g., those motivated by emotions rather than by reason—have still, in some cases, managed to work out. Regarding ingenuity and creativity as distinct from reason, I would have to disagree. I believe all of these faculties stem from the same kind of “divine light” I discuss toward the end of the article. The difference is only in the application. The more I have studied science and the arts, the more I have come to view them as unique applications of the same thing.
3. My point about Napoleon was actually to highlight the very idea brought up in the last point: that many historical figures rose to power without being particularly brilliant or virtuous, and this points to how much of our perceived success has to do with chance. And to your point about outliers, this idea is all the more valid: that contrary to how history is recorded, we are all on equal footing when it comes to power, and the action of any one person—wise or foolish, virtuous or selfish—can have tremendous consequences, whether we realize it at the time or not. So, to the assertion that there were virtuous and wise people who changed the course of history but went unnamed, I heartily agree. What I attempted to convey in this article was that, whether to the laws of chance or the laws of virtue and reason, humans are always in submission. Finally, regarding human nature, I must again disagree with you and state that, while we have increased in knowledge, human nature has not changed at all.
Thank you for clarifying the ideas and progressing the discussion. Your responses have engendered more questions that I believe get more into the nuances of the ideas being explored here. Hence, much of this could border speculation instead of hard reason.
1. I agree that humans can not create their own laws, and what is perceived as power to change their circumstances by some humans, may only be the power to submit. But, I would argue it is a form of power nevertheless which allows humans to elevate themselves to a higher plane of existence, i.e., to the plane of existence of forces that had once controlled a lot of the aspects of human life. This supposed path to apotheosis of human, if you will, is as much a reward for human's attempts at enlightening themselves of the truth of the material world, as any force dwelling in the physical could be the beneficiary of. I find in this the beauty of the human condition - powerless, and yet not - for we (and only we, allegedly,) have the divine gift of ponderance.
About your point on God not keeping or breaking the laws, I have, at the risk of anthropomorphizing, a simple example. Consider a monarch - who has all authority and power to break or keep the laws - has a task to accomplish which is complicated because of the very laws he/she put in place. Now, when will he/she need to cross the laws to achieve that? If the laws were wrong, or if the monarch was not resourceful enough to achieve their end within the confines of law. None of these shortcomings applies to God, so it is reasonable to assume that He never breaks His laws either. This brings us to the question about the completeness of understanding of the laws that we think we have understood. And in fact, if we had an agreement that we had done comprehending all the laws, physical or spiritual, all research into these should come to a stop.
2. About circumstantial factors, the laws of which we have not yet understood, I realized there might have been an omission in my line of reasoning, for acting on one's emotions in determining situations may not be considered a virtuous mode of acting. I am not certain if the outcomes of such actions could be explained in part by the laws concerning virtue and would love to hear your thoughts on it.
I have no problem with the admission that all the faculties of reason, intuition, and creativity stem from the same divine light. But I believe if I am reading correctly, the change in the understanding of reason that had happened over the past several years does not strictly transfer to these other faculties - there is still an element of mystery, if you will, to these faculties. Moreover, admitting these faculties as separate allows reasoning that perhaps reason is not the end of knowledge, because knowledge can also be accessed by subconscious process and acted upon by faculties other than reason.
3. I am glad that the points here regarding the chance occurrence of greatness, and considering the erroneous nature of recorded history as sole truth have been clarified and we have had an agreement. I would like to further elaborate my point on the change in human nature. I would like to make a more practical argument here, since the predictability of human behavior play a huge role not only in marketing campaigns, but also in technological innovations, and business decisions. Though most of these fields rely to an extent on the predictability of human nature, it is still considered largely unknown what large-scale impacts of certain technologies or gadgets would be (and hence ethics debates surrounding groundbreaking technology is not uncommon). For example, the affect of smartphones and social media was largely unpredictable in hindsight. From this lens it becomes obvious that there are at least large areas which provide rich empirical evidence that the nature of humans are not really predictable. So, the question really becomes, what kind of nature are you talking about?
1. You hit the nail on the head when you said, “a form of power.” The ability to recognize and adhere to the laws that govern the universe is what makes humans unique from the rest of creation, and it does give us a relative power over the material world. But, as I stated in the article: “…Man, through reason, retains not power itself, but a form of power. And even this form of power is only retained by submission to true power: to Law, to Perfection, to God.”
You mentioned “the question about the completeness of understanding of the laws that we think we have understood.” Even now, we only understand the laws of the universe in a very limited sense. Think of how much of our scientific knowledge is based on assumptions and how, to understand any new thing, we must begin with the simplest observations in the most ideal cases. Even in the most complex models of physical phenomena, we ignore a tremendous amount of the nuance of actual behavior. The result is that we have a general understanding of how underlying laws manifest and impact us, but a limited intuitive grasp of the spirit of the law. The way that we make sense of the world around us is analogous to a painter capturing a brilliant sunset: we may capture some semblance of its beauty in color and in form, but no matter how skilled we are, we can never truly recreate the sunset. By this same analogy, we can consider our framing of universal laws as paint and canvas, with which we clumsily represent the real thing: not law itself, in fact, but omniscient being.
2. Regarding your statement: “Moreover, admitting these faculties as separate allows reasoning that perhaps reason is not the end of knowledge, because knowledge can also be accessed by subconscious process and acted upon by faculties other than reason.” I’m pretty sure we are saying the same thing in slightly different ways. When I talk about a divine light giving rise to reason, intuition and creativity, I do not mean to lump all of them together as identical faculties, but only to say that they have a common source. I think you are getting at something similar here?
3. This may simply be a matter of perspective. When I refer to human nature, I am talking about broad motivations behind actions: greed, envy, love, hate, etc. How these motivations present themselves can vary, especially with changing technology, but the motivations themselves do not change. Thus, whatever the changes in technology, we can still predict that humans will act out of self-interest or, in less frequent cases, out of alignment to a higher law.
Thanks for further expanding on the ideas I was confused about.
1. First things first - I love the analogy you give about how a painter captures a sunset and the picture of natural laws painted by present day science. I agree to this characterization of the scientific models we have made. And this sprouts and intriguing idea - perhaps within the gaps in the laws that we choose not to rigorously fill exists the very source of divinity that is so close, yet distant because of our ignorance or arrogance.
About the power retained by man, I would argue that that form of power is the supreme form that any agency can achieve in the material world - There is no form of power that one can obtain from within this material world that could be superior to the kind that humans have achieved (the agency here being the forces of nature or the deities).
2. I think the point I am trying to make here is that although reason, intuition and creativity stem from the divine light, it is only the faculty of reason that has lost its attribution to divinity in the modern times. It is only when we are exercising the faculty of reason that we replace the divine element with ideal assumptions, while for the other faculties, viz., creativity and intuition, we readily attribute it to something innate, natural - and hence by extension - something divine.
3. While the perspective of considering human nature to be constituted of the broad motivations behind actions can definitely bolster the argument for predictability of human behavior, I would argue it is an oversimplification of the complexity of human behavior, both at an individual level, as well as at a population level. E.g., The emergence of democracy and its spread throughout the world would be an anomaly in this regard, since the unchanging motivations should predicate that the ruling class never relented on distribution of authority. More importantly, such basic motivations can be found aplenty in the animal kingdom as well - hence, it begs the question : How is the nature of humans different from other animals, then?
This was an involved writeup which tried to explore some deeper topics. I am not sure I grasped all the ideas in their full breadth and depth, but I feel I seem to have an understanding of what has been tried to convey - that humans in their attempt to gain control over forces that had led to their suffering are faced with the same laws that these forces had obeyed; hence, only obtaining an illusion of power. Connecting the illusion of control of humans to the morphing of understanding of reason was especially delicate and interesting
However, there are a few things that I have found hard to digest.
1. Just because humans have to obey the same laws as the forces they sought to control, why would that mean that they have an illusion of power, or are powerless? If the same laws dictate the forces, which could be considered entities beyond the human plane of existence, then have humans not advanced in the rungs of power and control? The point being just because we have to act according to certain laws does not imply powerlessness - being ignorant of such laws does. And if the laws are as universal, would there be any existence that acts not in accordance to the laws? Does God ever break His own laws (may not the same ones as humans have managed to discover)?
2. Knowledge and Reason have been purported as tools through which humans achieve power. However, careful consideration would make it obvious that those faculties fall short to describe the human progress in power. For example, ingenuity and creativity that are starkly different faculties from reason have driven a lot of storytelling and fiction which has in turn provided inspiration to be followed through by reason to actualize the fictions. Moreover, knowledge may have its end at reason, however, knowledge is only part of what drives actions, as does reason. For example, much of history have been driven by actions that would be seldom considered reasonable, or virtuous, but much more to be considered emotional (e.g., tribal wars).
3. About the great men in history, and predictability of human nature - there are many a things that are predictable when reduced to the basic necessities of living and their derivatives, but the nature of humans have definitely changed over the centuries. Moreover, relying on great historical figures may itself be futile, for history only recorded those with power - there may have been many other virtuous and heroic generals or soldiers in Napoleon's army who were not taken notice of because their achievements were not great in comparison to the common standard, but who in their own regard might have made great strides and acts of heroism. The norm is always broken by outliers, but not all outliers achieve the stardom (Ref. Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell). So, a healthy skepticism need be maintained when considering history as evidence. What I would wager drives much of the predictability of human behavior is the conjecture that all throughout history only a few ever seek wisdom, and of those only few are able to act on it.
Thank you for your comment! I will do my best to address each point in order:
1. Humans are powerless in the sense that we cannot create our own laws, but must align ourselves to laws that already exist. Our existence improves when we understand these laws and obey them, but that is exactly the irony: what we perceive as the power to change our circumstances is only the power to submit. God neither breaks nor keeps laws, because He is not under the law. That is the meaning of true power, and that is exactly what I mean when I say that humans are powerless: by our very existence, we must submit to law.
2. You are right in saying that knowledge and reason are not the only tools by which people prosper. As I pointed out earlier in the article, human prosperity has a lot to do with chance—or, more accurately, circumstantial factors whose laws we do not understand and cannot align to. This helps to explain why questionable actions—e.g., those motivated by emotions rather than by reason—have still, in some cases, managed to work out. Regarding ingenuity and creativity as distinct from reason, I would have to disagree. I believe all of these faculties stem from the same kind of “divine light” I discuss toward the end of the article. The difference is only in the application. The more I have studied science and the arts, the more I have come to view them as unique applications of the same thing.
3. My point about Napoleon was actually to highlight the very idea brought up in the last point: that many historical figures rose to power without being particularly brilliant or virtuous, and this points to how much of our perceived success has to do with chance. And to your point about outliers, this idea is all the more valid: that contrary to how history is recorded, we are all on equal footing when it comes to power, and the action of any one person—wise or foolish, virtuous or selfish—can have tremendous consequences, whether we realize it at the time or not. So, to the assertion that there were virtuous and wise people who changed the course of history but went unnamed, I heartily agree. What I attempted to convey in this article was that, whether to the laws of chance or the laws of virtue and reason, humans are always in submission. Finally, regarding human nature, I must again disagree with you and state that, while we have increased in knowledge, human nature has not changed at all.
Thank you for clarifying the ideas and progressing the discussion. Your responses have engendered more questions that I believe get more into the nuances of the ideas being explored here. Hence, much of this could border speculation instead of hard reason.
1. I agree that humans can not create their own laws, and what is perceived as power to change their circumstances by some humans, may only be the power to submit. But, I would argue it is a form of power nevertheless which allows humans to elevate themselves to a higher plane of existence, i.e., to the plane of existence of forces that had once controlled a lot of the aspects of human life. This supposed path to apotheosis of human, if you will, is as much a reward for human's attempts at enlightening themselves of the truth of the material world, as any force dwelling in the physical could be the beneficiary of. I find in this the beauty of the human condition - powerless, and yet not - for we (and only we, allegedly,) have the divine gift of ponderance.
About your point on God not keeping or breaking the laws, I have, at the risk of anthropomorphizing, a simple example. Consider a monarch - who has all authority and power to break or keep the laws - has a task to accomplish which is complicated because of the very laws he/she put in place. Now, when will he/she need to cross the laws to achieve that? If the laws were wrong, or if the monarch was not resourceful enough to achieve their end within the confines of law. None of these shortcomings applies to God, so it is reasonable to assume that He never breaks His laws either. This brings us to the question about the completeness of understanding of the laws that we think we have understood. And in fact, if we had an agreement that we had done comprehending all the laws, physical or spiritual, all research into these should come to a stop.
2. About circumstantial factors, the laws of which we have not yet understood, I realized there might have been an omission in my line of reasoning, for acting on one's emotions in determining situations may not be considered a virtuous mode of acting. I am not certain if the outcomes of such actions could be explained in part by the laws concerning virtue and would love to hear your thoughts on it.
I have no problem with the admission that all the faculties of reason, intuition, and creativity stem from the same divine light. But I believe if I am reading correctly, the change in the understanding of reason that had happened over the past several years does not strictly transfer to these other faculties - there is still an element of mystery, if you will, to these faculties. Moreover, admitting these faculties as separate allows reasoning that perhaps reason is not the end of knowledge, because knowledge can also be accessed by subconscious process and acted upon by faculties other than reason.
3. I am glad that the points here regarding the chance occurrence of greatness, and considering the erroneous nature of recorded history as sole truth have been clarified and we have had an agreement. I would like to further elaborate my point on the change in human nature. I would like to make a more practical argument here, since the predictability of human behavior play a huge role not only in marketing campaigns, but also in technological innovations, and business decisions. Though most of these fields rely to an extent on the predictability of human nature, it is still considered largely unknown what large-scale impacts of certain technologies or gadgets would be (and hence ethics debates surrounding groundbreaking technology is not uncommon). For example, the affect of smartphones and social media was largely unpredictable in hindsight. From this lens it becomes obvious that there are at least large areas which provide rich empirical evidence that the nature of humans are not really predictable. So, the question really becomes, what kind of nature are you talking about?
1. You hit the nail on the head when you said, “a form of power.” The ability to recognize and adhere to the laws that govern the universe is what makes humans unique from the rest of creation, and it does give us a relative power over the material world. But, as I stated in the article: “…Man, through reason, retains not power itself, but a form of power. And even this form of power is only retained by submission to true power: to Law, to Perfection, to God.”
You mentioned “the question about the completeness of understanding of the laws that we think we have understood.” Even now, we only understand the laws of the universe in a very limited sense. Think of how much of our scientific knowledge is based on assumptions and how, to understand any new thing, we must begin with the simplest observations in the most ideal cases. Even in the most complex models of physical phenomena, we ignore a tremendous amount of the nuance of actual behavior. The result is that we have a general understanding of how underlying laws manifest and impact us, but a limited intuitive grasp of the spirit of the law. The way that we make sense of the world around us is analogous to a painter capturing a brilliant sunset: we may capture some semblance of its beauty in color and in form, but no matter how skilled we are, we can never truly recreate the sunset. By this same analogy, we can consider our framing of universal laws as paint and canvas, with which we clumsily represent the real thing: not law itself, in fact, but omniscient being.
2. Regarding your statement: “Moreover, admitting these faculties as separate allows reasoning that perhaps reason is not the end of knowledge, because knowledge can also be accessed by subconscious process and acted upon by faculties other than reason.” I’m pretty sure we are saying the same thing in slightly different ways. When I talk about a divine light giving rise to reason, intuition and creativity, I do not mean to lump all of them together as identical faculties, but only to say that they have a common source. I think you are getting at something similar here?
3. This may simply be a matter of perspective. When I refer to human nature, I am talking about broad motivations behind actions: greed, envy, love, hate, etc. How these motivations present themselves can vary, especially with changing technology, but the motivations themselves do not change. Thus, whatever the changes in technology, we can still predict that humans will act out of self-interest or, in less frequent cases, out of alignment to a higher law.
Thanks for further expanding on the ideas I was confused about.
1. First things first - I love the analogy you give about how a painter captures a sunset and the picture of natural laws painted by present day science. I agree to this characterization of the scientific models we have made. And this sprouts and intriguing idea - perhaps within the gaps in the laws that we choose not to rigorously fill exists the very source of divinity that is so close, yet distant because of our ignorance or arrogance.
About the power retained by man, I would argue that that form of power is the supreme form that any agency can achieve in the material world - There is no form of power that one can obtain from within this material world that could be superior to the kind that humans have achieved (the agency here being the forces of nature or the deities).
2. I think the point I am trying to make here is that although reason, intuition and creativity stem from the divine light, it is only the faculty of reason that has lost its attribution to divinity in the modern times. It is only when we are exercising the faculty of reason that we replace the divine element with ideal assumptions, while for the other faculties, viz., creativity and intuition, we readily attribute it to something innate, natural - and hence by extension - something divine.
3. While the perspective of considering human nature to be constituted of the broad motivations behind actions can definitely bolster the argument for predictability of human behavior, I would argue it is an oversimplification of the complexity of human behavior, both at an individual level, as well as at a population level. E.g., The emergence of democracy and its spread throughout the world would be an anomaly in this regard, since the unchanging motivations should predicate that the ruling class never relented on distribution of authority. More importantly, such basic motivations can be found aplenty in the animal kingdom as well - hence, it begs the question : How is the nature of humans different from other animals, then?