Olivia Guerriero Final

Human behavior is in constant contradiction. Between an animal instinct for food, reproduction, and safety, and a rational need for security, fulfillment, and understanding, we are in continual conflict over the safest course of action. This struggle has shaped human history, inspiring the separation from nature and the creation of laws and religion. Numerous philosophers have discussed this aspect of the human experience, while many others have picked the approach to existence that they feel is the safest or the most human. What is eventually discovered, however, is that the human mind is in a perpetual battle between desire and reason, shaping our relationships with language, nature, love, ethics, and purpose.

The uniquely human development of two vastly different hemispheres of the brain represents this relationship between human and animal existence, influencing human action across history. As David Shlain discusses in The Alphabet Versus the Goddess, the human brain is bisected into two hemispheres. The right hemisphere deals with emotion, instinctual thought and habit, imagery, and existence, making it perfect for understanding color, feeling, and relationships. The left hemisphere deals with cognition, complex abstract understanding, and action, making it perfect for language, analysis, and detail. The right brain is distinctively more animal, the left more “human;” our evolution has been a raging back-and-forth between the two ways of understanding the world. While we need both hemispheres to make us human, we constantly fight our way between the two in order to find some kind of safe balance that will propel us forward. In Karen Armstrong’s A Short History of Myth, she discusses the early inclination towards myth and story that humans experienced. In order to understand a world in which humans are small and weak but have the capacity to fear death, sadness, and the future, we create stories to explain the things that confuse and scare us. Armstrong presents evidence to show that the first myths may have been stories of an afterlife, influencing burial rituals among Neanderthals. This practice makes personal death and the death of loved ones less scary and uncertain, and it appeals the the right brain. Oral storytelling and tradition work within the right brain, making connections between person and person, as well as between person and space. Eventually, however, these things became obsolete in most places as written language developed. This is discussed by David Abram in The Spell of the Sensuous; written language provided a different kind of comfort for people, a comfort that came from the newfound ability to define and therefore control the world. This appeals to the left brain, which analyzes symbols like letters and numbers and gives them a commonly-agreed upon meaning. The human world shifted from a right-brained world of stories to a left-brained world of letters, allowing for greater philosophical and mathematical thought but losing some of the mystical understanding of the world that is associated with right-brained thinking. This shows the fight between right and left brain, animal and human instinct, that defines human growth across history. Both sides are seeking comfort and stability, but they are seeking these things in very different ways.

Because of the differences between the reason and instinct within individuals and societies, the human relationship with nature has changed vastly over time. When right-brained oral stories and nature-based living were the norm for humans, involving hunting and gathering and familial connection within tribes and groups, humans were very close to nature. As seen both in National Geographic’s documentary Australian Aborigines and Spell of the Sensuous, the Aboriginal people, with no written language, agriculture, or complex societal structure, live from the land. They get their names and their personalities from the place where they were born, which is associated with a creation story and is therefore sacred to the individual. They feel a responsibility for the upkeep of the land, burning the brush to deter forest fires and taking only what they need for game. The relationship with the land is uniquely reciprocal, because they connect their lives, their stories and beliefs, and their origins with the land. In contrast, the Biblical relationship with nature that starts in Genesis and still influences the human perception of nature today, puts a deep divide between the human life and the natural world. The world is given to Adam by God, as are all of the animals on the earth. While Adam is made (in one story) from dust of the earth and will return to dust when he dies, this is not a positive association for man to have with the earth. The Bible enforces the idea that nature and animals both belong to man and are vindictive towards man, influencing a separation from and an attempted control of nature that led to the development of large cities based around agriculture. Civilization, which could not grow without the use of the written word, spread throughout the western world until there was a great divide between people who reject nature and people who embrace nature. This is shown in William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, where European society collides with indigenous lifestyle. Caliban, the indigenous character in the play, has an instinct to share the nature of his island with any visitor, showing the Europeans the best food and water and the ways in which to become safe on the island. The Europeans, however, reject nature and seek perpetually to return to the cities of Italy. This break between indigenous life and, for lack of a better word, civilized life connects back to the break between land-based stories appealing to the right brain and a structured control of the land appealing to the left brain. Again, both ways of life seek comfort and safety amidst an unexplainable world; the first is seeking this through story and connection to nature, and the second is seeking this through intellect and domination of nature.

This battle between reason and instinct connects to love and art, in which people struggle between an impulsive desire for companionship and procreation and a cognitive desire for beauty and goodness. In The Birth of Tragedy, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that a human being is innately divided between their Apollonian self and their Dionysian self; the former Greek deity was a sun god ruled by reason, delicacy, and dreamlike ideology, while the latter was the god of wine and was known for sex, desire, and wildness. Once again, we see a distinction between nature and civilization, abstraction and reality, wild freedom and strict control. The Dionysian self in each person desires physical passion and immediate gratification, seeking a hedonistic fulfillment of love and lust. This serves the evolutionary purpose of furthering the genes, while providing bodily satisfaction in the moment. Dionysian love can be seen in ancient love poetry of Egypt, in which the narrators often base their love and desire on physical experience. Their pain is raw and untempered by a rational interpretation of human behavior. The poetry contains sexual imagery, as well as imagery and metaphors of food and drink, showing the physical need for another person. This approach to love is often seen to be wild and uncontrollable, however, and must be moderated with the Apollonian self, which seeks a control of the impulses and a prioritization of the mind over the body. This is the self that Plato sought for himself. In “The Love of Beauty,” from Symposium, Plato defines Love in terms of divinity and purpose, saying that love is a connection between man and god. He sees sex and physical relationships as an intellectual desire for procreation and immortality, and equates this kind of love with the love that a person can have for an art form or for philosophy. Man’s desire for beauty is due to the understanding that beauty equals goodness, and goodness equals happiness; therefore, the quest for beauty is a quest for happiness. In this, Plato rationalizes love by putting it in the mind instead of the body, controlling it and making it safer for himself and for others. Dionysus’ love is dangerous due to its separation from the intellect, and Plato’s Apollonian analysis makes love certain and avoidable. While we know that no one can approach love solely from an Apollonian or a Dionysian intent, the fight to keep love controlled or free is another example of the human desire to feel security in an insecure experience.

Morality is a uniquely human concept, and it too is affected by different desires for safety as influenced by different aspects of human nature. We are quite often torn between an animal instinct to keep ourselves safe and a logical imperative to follow a moral code. An interesting representation of this is seen in the Ten Commandments. The rules themselves are a mixture of universal ethical rules such as “Thou shalt not kill” and social law such as rules about property that keep a community orderly and controlled. The act of creating ethical law within religion is a very left-brained and logical; it allows for a simple rule that, when followed by all, keeps society in line and allows for maximum comfort for all. It makes a lot of sense, and it more or less works. However, within the Ten Commandments is something more right-brained and mystical: in order for the Commandments to function, the members of the community must all believe in God. This belief is anything but stable, as there is little concrete proof as to the existence of deities. Belief in God requires an intuitive trust and faith that goes against the logic presented by the Commandments themselves. A lot of religion is, therefore, a balance between blind faith and calculated logic. This is true of human action as well, which rocks back and forth between a reasonable imperative and an instinct. This is seen in two different ways in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and Woody Allen’s film Crimes and Misdemeanors. In Crime and Punishment, the main character fights between a logical justification for murder that he has created, and the wordless understanding that he has that he should not kill. In Crimes and Misdemeanors, however, one of the main characters fights between a logical thought that he should not kill and the instinctual feeling that he must kill to maintain his stability and happiness. In both instances, a man has a battle between his logic and his intuition; the battles are simply complete opposites from each other. This shows the ways in which morality appeals to both the reason and the feeling, and how both reason and feeling can ignore morality in favor of something stronger.

There may be no aspect of human life where the divide between instinct and logic is more visible than in the quest for meaning and knowledge. On the instinctual side, meaning is rather irrelevant; safety, comfort, and companionship is really all that is needed, and the present moment is all that is considered. On the logical side, we think about the past and the future, both within our own lives and throughout human history. We feel that we must have a purpose and answers to all of our questions in order to live full and happy lives. In William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the title character spends the play in anguish because he can find no purpose to his life. He contemplates suicide on numerous occasions, but the lack of knowledge that he has about what awaits us after death keeps him from killing himself. This is an instance where a lack of knowledge tortures an individual. In Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha, the main character spends the entire novel searching for knowledge and enlightenment. His search proves fruitless for most of his life, especially because the search for knowledge and the experience of never receiving answers only makes him more unhappy, like Hamlet. However, Siddhartha eventually finds bliss and enlightenment when he gives up the search for a purpose and stops striving for future goodness. When he loses his need for a logic answer to life’s questions, he is able to live from feeling and to live in the moment. Alternatively, in Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” the man who sees the light and goes into it, or who attains knowledge, can no longer relate to those who do not have his knowledge. His understanding of the world, greater than that of everyone around him, causes him suffering because he cannot use his knowledge or find anyone to relate to him. This is an instance where the possession of knowledge causes suffering. As humans, we have a constant need to search for knowledge and to focus on the next moment, the next event, in the hope that that is where happiness will lie. This need, driven by a rational, planning mind, often causes pain. We feel the draw of moment-to-moment life, driven by instinct and feeling, but we reject it in favor of plans and questions because these feel safer to us.

The connection that I see between all of the works that we covered is the underlying theme of conflict, between biological instinct and rational imperative. Everything that we do is in search for safety and stability. There have been many philosophies advocating only for the use of reason or only for the use of natural feeling in order to attain happiness. I believe that we need to blend the two aspects of our humanity; we are, of course, animals with animal instincts. But our cognitive approach to things is what defines us and sets us apart from even the most intelligent of animals. It does not make us better, for our constant questions and issues cause a lot of unhappiness, but it is a defining feature among us and it must be fostered alongside a more affective way of understanding and being.