The teachings which are the traditional wisdom of all peoples in
man although he, too, desires nothing more than somehow to be able to
all parts of the world, have become virtually incomprehensible to modern
rise above the whole state of the present life’. He hopes to do so by
growing rich, by moving around at ever-increasing speed, by travelling to
the moon and into space.
There is a desire in man, common to him and other animals
namely the desire for the enjoyment of pleasure: and this men pursue
especially by leading voluptuous life, and through lack of moderation
become intemperate. Now in that vision (the divine vision) there is the
most perfect pleasure, all the more perfect than sensuous pleasure as the
intellect is above the senses; as the good in which we shall delight
surpasses all sensible good, is more penetrating, and more continuously
delightful; and as that pleasure is freer form all alloys of sorrow or trouble
or anxiety…
In this life there is nothing so like this ultimate and perfect
happiness as the life of those who contemplate the truth, as far as possible
here below. Hence the philosophers who were unable to obtain full
knowledge of that final beatitude, placed man’s ultimate happiness in that
contemplation which is possible during this life.
The ability to see the Great Truth of the hierarchic structure of
the world, which makes it possible to distinguish between higher and
lower levels of being, is one of the indispensable conditions of
understanding. Without it, it is not possible to find out where everything
has its proper and legitimate place. Everything, everywhere, can be
understood only when its level of being is fully taken into account. Many
things are true at a low level of being and become absurd at a higher level,
and of course vice versa.
From plant to animal, there is an addition of powers, which
enables the typical, fully developed animal to do things that are totally outside the range of possibilities of the typical, fully developed plant,
These powers, again, are mysterious and, strictly speaking, nameless,
Moving form the animal level to the human level, who would
seriously deny that there are, again, additional powers? What precisely
they are has become a matter of controversy in modern times; but the fact
that man is able to do – and is doing – innumerable things that lie totally
outside the range of possibilities of even the most highly developed
animals cannot be disputed and has never been denied. Man has powers of
life like the plant, powers of consciousness like the animals, and evidently
something more: the mysterious power. This power has undoubtedly a
great deal to do with the fact that man is not only able to think but also
able to be aware of his thinking. Consciousness and intelligence, as it
were, recoil upon themselves. There is not merely a conscious being, but
a being capable of being conscious of its consciousness: not merely a
thinker, but a thinker capable of watching and studying his own thinking.
All the ‘humanities’, as distinct from the natural sciences, deal in
consciousness. But a distinction between
one way or another with
consciousness and self-awareness is seldom drawn. As a result, modern
thinking has become increasingly uncertain of whether or not there is any
‘real’ difference between animal and man. A great deal of study is being
undertaken of the behaviour of animals for the purpose of understanding
the nature of man.
A human being can indeed strain and stretch towards the higher
and induce a process of growth through adoration, awe, wonder,
admiration and imitation, and by attaining a higher level expand its
understanding. Some people with whom the power of self-awareness is
poorly developed cannot grasp it as a separate power and tend to take it as
nothing but a slight extension of consciousness. Hence we are given a
large number of definitions of man which make him out to be nothing but
exceptionally intelligent animal with an unduly large brain, or a tool-
making animal, or a political animal, or an unfinished animal, or simply
an ape.
‘What a piece of work is a man? How noble in reason! How
infinite in faculty! Because of the power of self-awareness his faculties are
indeed infinite: they are not narrowly determined, confined, of
programmed’, as one says today. Warner Jagger expressed a profound
truth in the statement that, once a human potentiality is realised, it exists. The greatest human achievements define man-not the common run, not
any average behaviour or performance, and certainly not anything that can
be derived form the observation of animals. all men cannot be
outstanding, says Dr. Catherine Roberts. yet all men, through knowledge
of superior humanity, could know what is means to be a human being and
that they have a contribution to make. It is magnificent to become as
human as one is able. And it requires no help from science. In addition,
the very act of realizing one’s potentialities might constitute an advance
over what was gone before.
This open-endedness’ is the wonderful result of the specifically
human powers of self-awareness which, as distinct from the powers of life
and consciousness, have nothing automatic or mechanical about them. The
powers of self-awareness are, essentially, a limitless potentiality rather
than an actuality. They have to be developed and realised’ by each human
individual if he is to become truly human, that is to say, a person.
A simple inspection of the four great levels of being has led us to
the recognition of the four elements-matter, life, consciousness and self-
awareness. It is this recognition that matters, not the precise association of
the four elements with the levels of being.
Life is either present or absent – there cannot be a half-presence
— and the same goes for consciousness and self-awareness. Difficulties of
identification are often exacerbated by the fact that the lower level tends to
produce a kind of mimicry or counterfeit of the higher, just as an animated
puppet can at times be mistaken for a living person, or a two-dimensional
picture can look like three-dimensional reality. But neither the difficulties
of identification and demarcation nor the possibilities of the four great
levels of being, exhibiting the four elements’, four irreducible mysteries.
The progressive movement from passivity to activity, which we
observe when reviewing the four levels of being, is indeed striking, but it
is not complete. An interesting and instructive aspect of the progression
from passivity to activity is the change in the origination of movement.
While at the animal level the motivating cause has to be
physically present to be effective, at the level of man there is no such
need. The power of self-awareness adds for him another possibility of the
origination of movement – will, that is the power to move and act even
when there is no physical compulsion, no physical stimulus and no motivating force actually present. The progression for passivity to activity
is similar and closely related to the progression from necessity to freedom.
self-awareness; but we have direct and personal experience only of our
Inner space is created by the powers of life, consciousness and
own inner space’ and the freedom it affords us. close observation
discloses that most of us, most of the time, behave and act
mechanically,
like a machine, the specifically human power of self-awareness is asleep,
solely in response to outside influences. Only when a man makes use of
and the human being, like an animal, acts – more or less intelligently-
his power of self-awareness does he attain to the level of a person, to the
level of freedom. At that moment he is living, not being lived. there are
still numerous forces of necessity, accumulated in the past, which
determine his actions; but a small dent is being made, a tiny change of
direction is being introduced.
To ask whether the human being has freedom is like asking
whether man is a millionaire. He is not, but can become, a millionaire. He
can make it his aim to become rich: similarly, he can make it his aim to
become free. In his “inner space” he can develop a centre of strength so
that the power of his freedom exceeds that of his necessity. It is possible
to imagine a perfect being who is always and invariably exercising his
power of self-awareness, which is the power of freedom, to the fullest
degree, unmoved by any necessity. This would be a Divine Being, an
almighty and sovereign power, a perfect Unity. There is also a marked
and unmistakable progression towards integration.
Man has obviously much more inner unity than any being below
him, although integration, as modern psychology recognises, is not
guaranteed to him at birth and remains one of his major tasks. As
biological system, he is most harmoniously integrated; on the mental
plane, integration is less perfect but is capable of considerable
improvement through schooling. As a person, however, a being with the
power of self-awareness, he is generally so poorly integrated that be
experiences himself as an assembly of many different personalities.
Integration means the creation of an inner unity, a centre of
strength and freedom, so that the being ceases to be a mere object, acted
upon by outside forces, and becomes a subject, acting from its own “inner
space’ into the space outside itself. The degree of integration, of inner coherence and strength, is
closely related to the kind of ‘world’ that exists for beings at different
levels. Inanimate matter has no ‘world’. Its total passivity is equivalent to
the total emptiness of its world. A plant has a ‘world’ of its own–a bit of
soil, water, air light and possibly other influence of ‘world’ limited to its
modest biological needs. The world of any one of the higher animals is
incomparably greater and richer, although still mainly determined by
biological needs, as modern animal psychology studies have amply
demonstrated. But there is also something more like curiosity which
enlarges the animal’s world beyond the narrow biological confines.
The world of man, again, is incomparably greater and richer;
indeed, it is asserted in traditional philosophy that man is capable of
bringing the whole universe into his experience. What he will actually
grasp depends on each persons’ own level of being. The higher’ the
person, the greater and richer is his or her world. A person, for instance,
entirely fixed in the philosophy of materialistic scientism, denying the
reality of the ‘invisible’ and confining his attention solely to what can be
counted, measured and weighed, lives in a very poor world, so poor that
he will experience it as a meaningless wasteland unfit for human
habitation.