Spencer Heath Archive

Item 3

Penned writing for an essay that is incomplete (see last lines crossed out in original) but stands well alone. Title supplied. No date

/The Transcendence of Humanity as a Life Form/

Our sensory apparatus is entirely physical. It does not tell us anything about the physical world directly. It tells only of its physical effects upon our own physical constitution. It is the nexus between our subjective sense of being ourselves, that of us which animates our physical bodies, is manifested through them by which they function and without which they are inert and dissolve. Through this sensory system, which is itself physical, we know nothing of the physical world but its physical effects. It is in this interaction between the physical world and our physical selves that all our direct and primary knowledge of it arises, all our direct consciousness of it springs. Our senses make us conscious of it but they do not enable us to understand it. They give us only surface indications of it — appearances — and these appearances may be and often are deceiving and misleading. We, our consciousness can react to them — and act accordingly — without understanding them. Such reactions are called emotional because they motivate us to act, and to act objectively in and upon our objective physical world.

Every experience, every interaction between us and the objective physical world with which we inter-act, causes — induces — us to feel. The feeling springs from the physical interaction, from the experience; not the experience from the feeling. However, there is a secondary response generated by the feeling, energized by the emotion. If the feeling is one of mere relief, it is a satisfaction; it does not generate any reaction as action. If the feeling is one of insecurity, of pain as signal of danger to life, then this emotion is one of fear or rage and it generates action — as reaction — by way of escape or attack, flight or fight, — according to the manner in which the organism is most accustomed or best qualified to survive.

However, in the human organism, there is, in addition, the capacity for a higher and entirely different feeling or emotional reaction from many experiences of sense contact with his outer world. In many of these he is not impressed with any sense of pain or danger and has not even any feeling or sense of relief, yet his reaction is highly energetic over a wide range, from a mild curiosity through a quiet determination all the way to a burning desire to know and understand; or they may awaken inborn creative power and invoke the artist to build into color, form or sound the image of his dream. His reactions are not limited to mere animal reflexes, to behavior patterns imposed by his biological necessities for bodily survival merely as a creature sprung from and under dominion of his outer world. He senses within himself some reflection of the spirit, the logos, that animates the universal cosmos whence he springs. Hence his imaginative and conceptual capacities and his rational powers that enable him to discern order and appreciate elements of beauty in the world to which his physical senses primarily respond. His reactions are not merely automatic and unconsidered but delayed and developed. Out of his total sensory  response, his esthetic sense discrimin­ates and selects for appreciation, and his rational faculties for interpretation and understanding of those aspects of the universal whence these capacities in him are derived. This is the essential distinction between that which is merely animal in man and that in which he is specifically distinguished as the human species of animal. Man does not emerge out of or cast off his animal nature in order to become human. He develops higher faculties, higher modes of survival and of advancement, through cooperation in place of conflict as his conditions improve, leaving the method of fang and claw to those forms of life and organization, individual or collective, among which the higher faculties are not employed and no helpful mutuality has evolved, and service /sic/ in those crude situations in which many must perish and but few rudely survive.

For the zoologist as such it is animal structure and behavior alone, from amoeba to man, that he seeks to understand and describe. But for the humanist it is only with what uniquely distinguishes mankind that he is properly concerned. Failure to separate these two aspects can lead to grave mistakes, such as failure to attend to anything of the bird beyond what he has in common with the toad, for his only understanding of the bird — as bird — lies beyond where the analogy breaks down. The higher powers of the bird are too obvious and too far developed to be doubted or ignored, but man is in transition; in some areas of action such as government and war, his animal nature still takes the precedence; he seeks to seize and enslave or destroy and they, out of their animal nature and thinking with Aristotle that man is a political “animal,” seek not to understand the higher alternative at hand but stealthily to escape or violently oppose, when they do not supinely submit. So far as their truly human faculties prevail men become creators. By intuitions that they do not attempt to understand, they practice empirically both esthetic and utilitarian arts, the one to appease hunger of the spirit, the other for bodily necessities and needs. Both are essentially empirical, and in time become traditional, with only occasional or fortui­tous steps in advance without any numerical quantitative rationality — natural laws mathematically defined and applied. But, superposed on its merely intuitive and empirical capaci­ties, the human psyche is endowed with a rational faculty that contemplates abstract units and numbers and their relationships as ratios. In their exercise of this facility upon the data of sensory experience, men discover a parallel rationality in the outer and objective world from which they derive. This objective reality, whatever it may be, mani­fests itself as discontinuous, as consisting of more or less uniform units and organizations of these units into higher unities and these again into still higher units throughout an indefinite range, and that there are uniform ratios among the various lesser units of which the higher organization is composed. The esthetic thrill that comes with the recog­nition of our own rationality reflected in the processes of the objective world is the prime motivation towards a rational and quantitative and thereby scientific understand­ing of our outer and objective world that has conditioned us and in which alone we can physically survive and abide. This esthetic thrill is more than a mere complacent satis­faction. It stirs to understanding and through understand­ing to creative action; for the action is not a reaction of fear that prompts only to escape or attack. The thrill of understanding and thereby participating in the rational order of things gives birth to an art that is not empirical and intuitive, guided by feeling alone. There is superadded a wholly rational technology that proceeds from the dispassion­ate eye of the mind and brings the processes and powers of external nature into the service of the human will towards whatever ends of good or ill it may purpose and propose. And, unlike the empirical arts, this technology is cumulative. It is communicable from mind to mind and thereby transmissible from generation to generation, capable of giving to mankind an ever-increasing dominion over their world — to mold it ever nearer to their hearts’ desires. But this rational technology is only recent and in its infancy as is also the creative man who must practice it for good or for ill, accord­ing as his animal nature persists or as it is transcended in him through regeneration into his unique and distinctly human capacities and powers.