Sunday, July 2, 2023

Trauma of the Emergence of Reason, by Olavo de Carvalho

From a biographical point of view, an individual consciousness actualizes its capacity for knowledge through a trauma of the emergence of reason, which consists of the discrepancy between the individual’s growing accumulation of experiences over time and their more limited capacity to cohere and give expression to that mass of facts which, initially amorphous, can be ordered – as the individual expresses themselves – to the point where a form becomes discernible within it.

The Trauma of the Emergence of Reason is a text by Olavo de Carvalho for classes of the “Astrocharacterology” course, taught from 1990 to 1992 in São Paulo.

The Trauma of the Emergence of Reason

INTUITION AND REASON: simultaneous and successive nature of knowledge Intuition is said to be triple because it has three aspects united in a single act, causing the subject-object-knowledge chain to occur simultaneously and immediately. Thus, we understand that if there were no sun or any other source of light, this chain would never have occurred, preventing the instant realization of any object by the subject, and therefore, the recognition and knowledge of both. Therefore, no effective knowledge would have ever been produced. Therefore, we owe knowledge, whatever it may be, to light. However, it would not be impossible for a distinction between sound and silence to arise in a dark world. This knowledge could have occurred – but it would take a little longer.

After all, the difference between sound and silence could not be perceived simultaneously because there is light and darkness at the same time – but there is no sound and silence at the same time. I can close my eyes while there is light outside and know that it is dark inside me at the same time it is clear outside, that is, I can be aware of the darkness at the same instant as I am aware of the brightness. Therefore, the triple intuition not only gives us the consciousness of light but also the consciousness of darkness in the same act and at the same instant, inseparably, whereas the process that occurs between silence and noise is not like that. After all, sound is something that unfolds over time. Sound has to last – otherwise, it is not sound. We can say, therefore, that visual perception gives us the idea of simultaneity, while auditory perception gives us the idea of succession.

A “triple auditory intuition,” in quotation marks, could arise, but it would no longer be proper intuition: it would be reasoning. And this is because the sound was heard first, and then the silence; that is, the present was combined with the absent until reaching the conclusion that there is a relationship between them. It is reason that allows us to connect the present with the absent – something that intuition cannot do. And this is the specific difference between them. With reason, man can schematically construct the presence of the absent, represented by an image or a concept, and relate it to a present thing, or even to another thing that is also absent.

Characteristics of Reason

The procedure of reason is initially destructive, critical. It destroys the good to see what remains in the end, as if it were an alchemist’s crucible that crushes the object in search of its essence. The onset of this critical process is the most traumatic thing in a person’s life. And this is because it cleanses, purifies their affective and imaginative world, although the subject (in whom the process occurs and at the moment it occurs) has the impression that their imaginative world is being destroyed. This purification will make the imaginative world have fewer things – but more valuable things – which will increase the subject’s capacity for discernment.

Reason allows for generalizing and summarizing knowledge so that it is not necessary to carry a huge burden of memory. It follows, therefore, the practical function of unloading memory. It also allows us to see things from a distance: when we think in concepts, we do not have to remember one by one the images of the corresponding objects, and therefore, we diminish the emotion, the impact of the images, which are only evoked from afar and lightly, thanks to the speed with which we move from one concept to another.

Reason is, above all, an elaboration of intuitions. Intuition develops on its own to a certain point: from there, reason comes into operation and, when it enters, it dialectically opposes intuition. Reason denies intuition, performing a kind of pruning, but it can never prune everything because it relies on the very intuition that undergoes the pruning. In this process, intuition is refined, blossoming, just like a plant when pruned at the right moment. But this movement from intuition to reason is extremely painful because reason weighs; it contradicts intuition and crushes feelings.

For all these reasons, we can say that reason is the ability to give coherent form to the totality of experience. However, this development would have to occur in two directions: 1) encompassing larger areas and domains of information: it would be quantitative and horizontal growth. However, this growth alone is not enough;

  1. internally, the structures of reason must also become more complex, that is, it must be able to open new doors that establish new modes of relationships between the data: it would be a growth of integration.

Therefore, this dual process of expanding knowledge and integrating it – increasingly perfect and organized – would occur in the direction of increasing abstraction. This means that reason, ideally, seeks to encompass the entire experience and summarize it into three or four basic principles (convictions, certainties), being able to relate all real experience that happens to it. If there were no obstacles, reason would continue to encompass everything that, through intuition, penetrated memory; it would encompass, classify, and integrate the data in an increasingly coherent manner until the entire edifice of experience could easily be summarized in one or a few basic principles. Thus, every time an individual’s experience expands, they can more easily classify that experience within broader abstract concepts; and if there is simultaneous growth in extension and integration, there is also increasing simplification.

Reason, therefore, seeks to minimize the work of thought. That is why thinking is not reason. In fact, the less rational an individual is, the more they will have to think, and this is because if the world of reason is effectively organized, most of the experience will already be known, making it possible to easily categorize it into the genres, species, and principles already known, thereby avoiding the need for a new examination. Therefore, reason, as it gives coherence to the data of lived experience and memory, as it simplifies the work of thought, contributes to the individual not having to experience the same thing a thousand times to know the outcome because, as soon as they experience it, they immediately make the appropriate induction, thus saving time and energy. In this way, reason is directly linked to the individual’s instinct of self-preservation. Comparing with animals, reason is – for humans – what a principle of instinctive self-regulation is for animals: reason is self-regulation for humans.

If a mature animal has self-regulation sufficient to ensure its survival in the environment in which it was raised, reason, in an adult human, should be sufficient for them to handle all the new problems and new situations that could arise within a certain regularity in their environment. However, this does not happen. Therefore, this individual relies on communal reason, that is, on the organization of the community. It is evident that the individual needs more help the less structured they are. And it is clear that there are human beings capable of facing emergency situations – but most are not even capable of dealing with routine situations and rely on others for support.

We can say, then, that there is a disparity in human beings: some go far beyond routine needs, even facing astonishing situations, while others do not. In other words, some have much more, and others have much less. This does not happen in any animal species. In another species, the capacity for self-regulation of all members is more or less homogeneous; there is none that is much more skilled than the others, and if there is, the differences are minimal when compared to the differences between human beings. The human species does not have an average or normal level of capacity; a human being can be much below or much above, and they will be considered normal in both cases. And, furthermore, thanks to the support of the community, the majority of the incapable ones will not be destroyed – they will be protected. These differences in self-regulation capacity are, ultimately, differences in the rational capacity from one individual to another.

The Process of Reason Formation

In humans, as soon as they are born, there is a principle of animal self-regulation. After all, not all the learning an individual does is related to reason. So, the question is: when does the individual transition from pure animal self-regulation to reason itself? This “point of transition” is marked at the moment when the individual asks themselves a question, that is, when conscious doubt comes into play. And conscious doubt presupposes knowledge of language – which means that reason only effectively begins to develop after the individual has sufficient language to be able to ask themselves a question. When they ask themselves a question, it means they are aware that they possess certain knowledge and that they lack a specific knowledge at that moment.

The unleashing of the rational process is a kind of qualitative leap in relation to pure and simple learning. Learning begins as soon as the individual is born and continues, encountering obstacles not at the level of doubt but at the level of error. Much can be learned through trial and error, and as long as the trial-and-error method suffices, this learning has nothing to do with reason. However, there comes a moment when the individual feels the need for certain knowledge, for some answers that they cannot obtain through trial and error. When this happens, consciously they are admitting that something is lacking, and that this something is very important. They are aware of themselves as possessors of insufficient and flawed knowledge due to real and urgent needs they feel.

Thus, a serious and urgent question arises in their mind. But that does not mean they know how to perfectly articulate that question, otherwise, they could ask it out loud. Moreover, the question that triggers the rational process can arise in various disguised and varied forms. That is why if the individual could perfectly formulate their question, they would find the answer. However, we can only formulate questions based on the concepts and words we have, while doubt and questioning come from real, intuited experience, so we end up not having names for everything we intuit.

All of this is enough to notice that almost all questions are formulated with other names. Therefore, things that you know through personal experience, through intuition, for which you do not have names or signs, you end up possessing in a very imperfect way, unable to manipulate that knowledge. This means that the individual’s linguistic inadequacy is already a first obstacle for them to master themselves. The individual’s reason can only operate with a minimal part of their experience: that which they have names for, that they have signs to designate, and that which their language encompasses. And what about the other part? Where does it fit? It lies beyond the reach of their reason, that is, it is not rationally manageable by them, so the individual’s deepest, most dramatic, and radical questions may be placed precisely in this sediment that is not utilizable by reason. And it can happen that the experiences that evoke questioning are precisely those for which they lack names, and that, by remaining formulated differently – disguised – they end up receiving another answer. From there, the world of experience and the world of reason are divided. After this division, reason no longer functions properly because it only works to resolve a very insignificant part, and that part may not be the most relevant for that individual. The true question, which is at the core and could not be expressed, is, so to speak, thrown into the subconscious to be answered through spontaneous animal self-regulation, which is clearly not equipped to deal with these problems. After all, spontaneous animal self-regulation cannot answer human questions.

Reason, thus, becomes deceived because it has only received a part of the data, while the most significant part lies deep within and will be worked on by memory, not reason. But memory, despite also classifying data, fundamentally functions through analogy, that is, it is a purely analogical classification, bringing the similar closer to the similar – and not through a rational process but rather through a process of symbolism. From that moment on, the individual functions with two minds:

A) a rational mind that tries to organize the entirety of experience;

B) a symbolic-analogical mind that operates in memory through another form of classification.

Thus, these two halves coexist, normally superimposed but communicating poorly with each other. The individual starts functioning with two brains: one that functions through logical categories and another that functions through analogical categories. And they believe in what both say. The ideal would be to think simultaneously with the logical part and the analogical part, in agreement. Therefore, the more limited the individual’s expressive capacity, the more they will be forced to rely solely on that analog computer that operates downstairs. That is why what remains sedimented and closed within memory ends up being worked on by a kind of crazy analogy that converts the given into very different things, appearing in the end in such a disguised language that an analyst is needed to decipher such a message. All of this means that experiences that ideally should be encompassed by reason are returned to memory and operate subconsciously, and everything done subconsciously is very poorly done – which does not happen when there is a genuine interest in solving the problem. In fact, when the work of reason and consciousness is efficient and complete, the subconscious consents to give the final touch. The unconscious is a repository of a million confused images. Since it operates through analogy, that’s where we can take advantage because when we give a structure that is analogous to some data inside it, that same structure will be able to retrieve that data, which will present itself to us. The data, so to speak, is attracted by the structure you provided. In other words, a structured and clearly formulated question attracts the appropriate answer. If a person could ask the right questions to their memory, they would be a genius. Each human being’s experience is enormously varied, and given precisely structured questions, memory would do the rest of the work and readily contribute to conscious goals.

Fatherhood as a Symbol of Reason

From the moment the content of reason is returned to memory, reason itself (as a function) acquires a “mythological” personification in the individual’s mind. From there, reason itself becomes a character in the subconscious scenario. It is when the individual cannot develop their reason normally that they begin to operate, at a subconscious level, with symbols of reason, that is, symbols that have immense power over them. And what is this symbol? Who is this character? Very simple: there is someone out there in the world who does not seem to have the same struggles I have; they seem to master the circumstances I do not, and they dominate those circumstances to the point of dominating even myself and giving me orders: therefore, they are reason – which is self-regulation and self-preservation. They are power.

That is where all the symbols of the father emerge.

The father is a factor that enters a child’s life relatively late, as during the first year of life, the child hardly even knows that this exists. The father comes back into the picture when the child begins to learn language, and then he becomes the symbol of reason and power. He is even feared. But note: the father is not their reason, not their self-regulation, not their power – he only symbolizes it within them. This happens in such a way that the individual becomes unable to address the problems of their self-regulation without reference to the father. Therefore, the pattern of rationality in the world comes from one of these alternatives:

  1. symbolically, through the father;
  2. personal effort to find this pattern.

This pattern could never come from the mother because she is, after all, the subject itself. The connection with the mother is very intimate: it is of a physical nature. The mother is not an external element, not a foreign element; she is not outside the subject: after all, the subject is a part of the mother’s own body; it is, and will always be. However, what characterizes the father is that he does not have this organic connection with the child: he comes from the outside. He is an other, while the mother is not. The first thing you learn about him is that he has a role within the family. Because of this, it is normal for the individual to project their self-regulation onto the father. On the other hand, they project their dependency onto the mother. After all, everything in which you do not self-regulate is supplied by your mother: your body expresses a need, and it is met from the outside, without any effort of self-regulation. Therefore, you are accustomed to dealing with your mother in all the areas where you do not attempt self-regulation. The father, on the other hand, provides you with a ready-made rational system; he gives you orders and maintains those orders with a certain regularity – that is the maximum he does.

If there is no paternal figure, the individual will have – by aberration, if they are a genius – to grasp something as the Cosmic Order, the Law, God, or something similar – which is much more difficult. Reason is the same for all human beings. Reason is impersonal, and it is precisely this impersonality and universality that the individual should imitate, not their own father, the father figure. Imitating a concrete and particular figure will never connect you with the universality of reason.

That is why the educational function of the father consists of being the bridge between the individual and the universality of reason. The father, in fact, is there – for the child – as a representative of reason. When it is said that “the will of the father is the law,” it means that it sounds to the child like a universal maxim, valid in all cases. The child politicizes the father’s orders, and this is because they do not hear him as an individual, but rather as the voice of reason itself. If the father is rational and logical, and is rational and logical in what he transmits to the child, the bridge between their childhood situation and universal reason will be established. The father is a bridge, as if he were a guru: the guru only initiates, takes the child through various stages until the conquest of universal reason. Not everyone is a genius who can grasp an abstract cosmic order. In reality, we need some symbol to pass through it. Therefore, every person needs a father, needs a symbol. But what is the function of the symbol? To become transparent. The function of the symbol is to nullify itself – as a symbol – to let the thing it symbolizes come forth behind it. And if someone is here as your guru, what should they transmit? Universal law. The less rational the father is in his relationships, the less he transparently transmits the idea of an external social law, the idea of a cosmic order, and the more he imposes his own figure, the more confused you will be between your father and reason. You will be obeying that concrete daddy you had and not reason. You will continue appealing to the symbol of reason instead of developing reason. You will continue imitating – either positively or negatively – the paternal image instead of developing reason.

Notice that if the father represents reason, order, law, and if at the same time your relationship with him is negative, meaning fear predominates over trust, later on, you will only trust what you fear; what appears to you as evil, destructive, endowed with an enigmatic, fierce power that turns against you will seem like the embodiment of reason itself. The devil, then, is one of the father figures. He is the father who does not provide a transparent image of order, of universal law. On the contrary, he is an image of absurdity, terror, the incomprehensible. However, you only trust in this, and it is only this that seems rational to you.

To detach oneself from this father image, replacing it with the true image, is one of the most difficult tasks. The notion of good and evil is placed there, in this father image. The individual will only rid themselves of the false image of reason to the extent that they themselves obey reason, that is, take the authority of this false father and place it in the hands of their reason. There are ancient myths that speak of individuals who gathered and ate their own father. These, perhaps, should not be interpreted so literally, nor perhaps in a Freudian sense, that is, where eating something is incorporating it into oneself. Therefore, from the moment that the bearer of reason – and power – becomes yourself and not your father, it means that you “ate” your father. Thus, everyone, in a certain way, should eat their own father.

However, reason also means order and discipline. In other words, only the individual capable of organizing and disciplining themselves more harshly than their own father demands will free themselves from him. You have to bid farewell to the flesh-and-blood father and start referring to a divine figure in some way. All mythological figures that represent a positive force are nothing more than the impulse of human beings to find a symbolic figure that neutralizes the evil father, or Satan. Reason itself would have the strength for that, but we do not have it, and this is because we are not motivated by abstract ideas but by images. The image attracts desire, and desire attracts will. For the individual to be rational, they need to have an image of rationality that they can emulate. They need to have the will to think. That is why you cannot turn your critical reason against the evil father because only he sets your reason in motion, in the way he wants. You cannot reason against him because he is the foundation of reason. One of the techniques used by the false guru may be to discredit authentic paternal images, those of the wise. The wise person is an individual who teaches universal reason, who is a transparent figure; if the image of the wise is taken away or erased from a society, a powerful defense against evil is lost.

All that has been presented here is, in summary, a system of genetic and evolutionary psychology, and also the basis of a psycho-pathology, formed from the idea of the trauma of reason at a certain stage of development. There is an ideal path of personality development; a path that rarely occurs due to obstacles of various kinds. These obstacles are either of a particular, biographical-historical nature, marked by traumatic experiences, or of a general and anthropological nature, marked by a deviation that occurs in the formation of the personality of every human being and that can be called, therefore, a deviation from the paternal image.

Reason and the Psyche

Sometimes reason is represented as a burden that one carries: man carries his reason as if carrying a cross. In the Arabic language, the word that designates a cross is the same as the word for spinal cord: “çulb”. In other words, the same cross that keeps him standing is the same one that brings him down. In another sense: only that which gives him power can destroy him or, as in the Muslim saying, “only he who can help you can hinder you”. It is this cross, in fact, that confers dignity upon man because it is through it that he can obtain awareness of the need for the incessant pursuit of truth. And it is this pursuit that will humanize him more and more. Sometimes, however, the truth hurts, and this pain generates a cognitive trauma that arises at the moment reason emerges. There is no trauma worse than this because all other traumas are localized, they affect a part of the psyche, while this one affects the entire psyche. Note that almost all therapeutic processes are based on the fact that the individual brings certain subconscious contents into the light of consciousness, while this process described here takes place entirely within consciousness, without anything subconscious. It is so general and comprehensive that by resolving it, the subconscious resolves itself. And this contradicts Freud’s classic thesis that the unconscious presides over the conscious. After all, everything in the subconscious has passed through consciousness: it is consciousness that determines what enters and what exits the subconscious. Therefore, the fundamental point to be emphasized in psychological healing is the restructuring of the foundations of the individual’s consciousness.

The criterion for organizing consciousness is fundamentally intuitive until a certain stage; then reason comes into play. If the individual does not make a gigantic transition, a successful adaptation to the rational world they are entering, and tries to continue based on intuitive organization, they become maladjusted to adult life and are most likely to fall victim to neurosis or something similar.

The “trauma of the emergence of reason” is therefore an anthropological evil and not just a psychological one. It would be an evil inherent to the human species; an evil that underlies all possible individual psychological problems. After all, these problems only affect the individual, while the anthropological one affects the species as a whole.

The Repression of Reason’s Activity

The repression of critical activity of reason is one of the foundations of neurosis. The individual engages in rational criticism but, at the same time, prevents themselves from seeing that they are doing so. They do not want to know. That is why the repression of reason seems to be much more serious than the repression of sex: a person can live without sex, but without reason, they cannot even survive for five minutes. If you repress, for example, the sexual instinct, the most you can do is sublimate it in dreams – and it is resolved. But how do we sublimate reason? How do we do it when the negative critical contents of reason are passed on to the unconscious?

Because reason has coherence, it can continue to govern one’s behavior because, in a way, you also begin to act according to an internal logic that becomes more unknown as it remains in the realm of the unconscious – and thus, you live in constant danger to your own integrity.

Therefore, you can either embrace the critical activity of reason or completely repress it, “kicking it into the unconscious”. But if I kick it into the unconscious, I maintain the apparent coherence of the conscious field, causing my conduct to be led in directions that I do not desire. This divergence ends up transforming into a behavior that we can call critical.

Reason and Psychological Currents

Excluding the idea that we might all have been born sick, the hypothesis presented here is that in most cases, we are born healthy in the lower areas. The conflicts arise in some way from the outside in, to the extent that there is an uncomfortable situation (see Piaget), that is, throughout the process of assimilating information from the external world. It is from there that we can become ill. Man suffers, becomes neurotic, and eventually even psychotic not because he has instincts or traumas of an affective and sexual nature, but because he cannot perform the function that is proper to him. It is clear that human beings also have problems in the animal sphere, but these are not the characteristic conflicts. There are diseases that are specific to each animal species, while those related to reason would be specific to humans. This is the essential question.

All of this goes against what Psychology – at least in the field of psychotherapy – has been doing for the past 100 years, seeking to intervene only in the affective sphere and below. The vast majority of current psychological currents are very mistaken when they ignore the intellectual aspect of neuroses, thinking that traumas stem from problems related to the emotional aspect of man. However, the greatest difficulty lies in confronting the rational. The only great psychologist who gave importance to this was Viktor Frankl, the founder of logotherapy. Frankl was the first to formulate the intellectual aspect of neuroses. But in general, psychology does not address this point. In reality, humans are infinitely more afraid of the clear part of their soul than of the dark part: they flee less from their ghosts than from certain undeniable truths that are reached through reason. Even Viktor Frankl’s psychotherapy, which belongs to the higher spheres, deals only with the moral aspect, values, and the meaning of life – but never with the logical sphere. The only person who thought in these terms was someone named W.R. Bion. He imagined something along these lines but did not say that the problem lies there. After all, if Dr. Freud teaches us to reconstruct the individual’s history, why is it not possible to reconstruct their logical history, that is, how their frames of reference were successively formed? It is in this sense that Bion’s work can be useful, although it is very complicated. Bion is a Freudian who read Kant; he began to interpret neurotic symptoms as Kant interpreted the a priori forms of understanding, that is, as something that is a priori in a person’s mind and that causes them to see the situation in a different way. Bion calls this a grid. But the fact that he calls it a “grid” shows how difficult it is to reconstruct the history because, in truth, it is a succession of grids that change over time.

In order to reconstruct the history, one must have the central key, that is, how the individual began to construct these “frames of reference,” which end up becoming for him an absolute reason that he unquestionably obeys. And there is no point in persuading someone who has constructed their logical scheme incorrectly to think correctly because they will end up reconstructing the idea in its original and mistaken form. To make an individual admit with all their soul that, for example, 2 + 2 = 4, their rational scheme must allow for such information, and for that, sometimes it is necessary to go back to the initial premises. If the individual remembers their first principles and perceives their inadequacy, their logical scheme can dismantle and reassemble at an impressive speed. That is why if you propose such a reassessment to the individual, it may function as a catalyst, allowing them to instantly see the generating axis of false interpretations.

Obviously, we have to evaluate whether these false interpretations stem from the fact that the individual twisted the truth because they were driven by impulses from another realm. This can happen, but it is rare. In most cases, children twist reality because they lack sufficient information and experience, that is, it is not a trauma or a distortion but rather a deprivation. The source of human misery is ignorance.

This theory of the Trauma of the Emergence of Reason can even reconcile the various currents of psychology or create a common ground for them to debate. After all, each new “line” corresponds to a new result: Freud’s proposal of the Oedipus complex is not a common link; Jung’s proposal of archetypes of the collective unconscious is not either; nor is Adler’s proposal of the will to power. But the process described here is based on something that does not depend on any kind of social structure to be true: it is like a lost link that, when taken into account, provides the point of convergence for all these theories. In fact, one of the consequences of Astrocharacterology is the proposition of a point of reconciliation, a common link amid all these disagreements. The common link and the highest principle that encompasses all traumatological theories of the psyche is, I believe, the trauma of the emergence of reason. If we were to discuss psychotherapy or psychopedagogy, I believe in the possibility of human development from the moment one takes responsibility for their own reason, their own contradiction, that is, by transferring suffering from the experiential aspect to the intellectual aspect. Intelligence can endure anything; it is the strongest part of man. Man can endure living in doubt his whole life.

Reason and Entry into Society

Reason is universal, and hence the inadequacy that always exists between our psycho-physical organism – which is one, individual, singular, with its own needs – and the functioning of reason. We are never perfectly suited to reason. Reason deals only with generality; it is never adequate to understand any individual case. And even less so to understand ourselves. Reason is the burden that man carries. In general, the urgency of the personal problem at hand prevents the individual from seeing the bigger picture. If he can set this problem aside and continue with the education process it requires, he will become a member of the community, a citizen; otherwise, his fate will be different.

One can even measure whether an individual is neurotic or not by this point: how much he has become fixated or not on a specific personal issue that should be approached only as a human mystery to be investigated – or at least as a stimulus for such investigation. Freud was on the right track with his theory of neurosis: he said it was the mismatch between our psycho-physical organism and the demands of culture and reason. He was also right when he said that culture and reason had already won the battle in advance. So it was pointless to try to rid ourselves of them: the path of man is indeed to become rational, to enter society, to enter history – there is no other way.

We know that Freud sought to arrive at the fundamental anthropological evil, believing he had found it in the “Oedipus complex,” considered a universal problem. But Malinowski demonstrated that in certain tribes, such a complex did not exist, referring to it as relative to a particular cultural and sociological context, thus undermining the universality of this proposition. Adler, following Nietzsche, said that the “will to power” is universal; however, one can see cultures where the will to power is not cultivated. Therefore, the “Oedipus complex” and the so-called “inferiority complex” are not anthropological; they are sociological: they depend on the context of this or that society. But the same cannot be said of thinking and speaking, that is, the advent of language and reason: these are universal phenomena from which the human species cannot escape. In every human society, each individual, one day, will confront reason, and this confrontation will be brought about through culture and not nature. Therefore, if there is an inherent or possible trauma related to the emergence of reason, this trauma is universal. The faculty of reason, if the evolutionists are somewhat correct, is not yet fully mastered by man. If there was any humanization from an animal base, it is natural that we carry these higher faculties as a burden, as they become too heavy for us.

It is curious that Dr. Freud, who was a convinced evolutionist, did not think about this – but he was on the right track when he said that civilization was the origin of neuroses. Civilization forms the body of laws, customs, in other words, the entire realm of reason. This weighs upon man. In reality, man can have access to a sphere that is much higher than him; a sphere of knowledge that he glimpses in an incomplete and fragmented way. This theme of “incompleteness” is, in fact, one of the most fundamental themes in universal literature and obsesses the human imagination. Look at the number of stories about incomplete treasure maps, fragmented objects that need to be found, or cases of individuals who are unaware of part of their own origin. In fact, Oedipus errs not because of any diseased attitude, but due to incomplete knowledge. Aristotle, when defining tragedy, says that the story is fundamentally composed of:

  1. Pathos = scenes that are exaggerated emotions;
  2. Peripeteia = when events take an unexpected turn;
  3. Anagnorisis = when something is discovered that elucidates the meaning of the events.

Therefore, we see the importance of missing information: it is astonishing that modern psychology has not paid the slightest attention to this. Thus, we can say that the process of acquiring reason is the process of socializing the individual. And this is because reason is an essentially human faculty. To socialize and make someone rational is, more or less, the same thing.

The Contradiction of the Rational Animal

The source of human misery is ignorance. It is not the only evil, but in practice, it is the root of all evils because if this ignorance did not exist, all other problems that arise as conflicts in the affective sphere could be resolved. However, in order for the individual to resolve them, they must use the rational scheme they possess. But if their rational scheme is flawed (because it develops precariously around a central question that inherently contains a contradiction), any experiential solution they give to anything will be mistaken because the question itself has not been resolved at least intellectually.

It seems obvious to me that there is no conflict more severe than this; all other conflicts are, so to speak, conflicts of force, that is, of things that are in motion. However, this is not a conflict of force; it is a static conflict. It does not develop; it simply repeats itself. It is as if it were saying that the other conflicts are merely conjectural, that is, events that happen and that time takes care of dissolving. But this conflict is not in the realm of facts; it is in the very structure of rational thought with which one attempts to confront the facts. It is precisely the difference between a man in the dark and a blind man: when it becomes daylight, the former will see while the latter will continue to see nothing because the defect is not the darkness of the environment – it is the internal darkness of the person, this is their blind spot.

There is, therefore, a certain congenital defect in the human species; a defect that lies in the elaboration of a rational scheme whose purpose is understanding or reason itself, which in turn gives everything its true meaning. This defect – in the individual’s positioning in the face of any life situation or even in a biographical analysis – will cause a misconception to always repeat itself or appear disguised in various forms until, finally, one decides to resolve it first – which only happens when there is a sincere desire for self-knowledge. But most people are willing to accept explanations of the Freudian or Reichian type, which will always attribute the responsibility for what happened to others or to oneself. But in this case here, the responsibility lies neither with others nor with oneself: it is a fate. The fate of human constitution itself. And that’s what no one wants to see.

Everything that has an author is contingent: it happened, but it could not have happened. What is contingent somehow relieves us. That which always has someone to blame is always some contingency, an accident. But what about that which has no one to blame? When the blame is not on daddy, the past, capitalism, or even yourself? To whom or what do we attribute our suffering? When we accept this suffering as constitutive of the human being, we will understand that we have to carry this burden with dignity like everyone else. But what if we don’t accept it? And if what is necessary is treated as contingent to the point of attempting to force a solution? It will be a double tragedy: after all, it is not meant to be resolved at the experiential level where it originally arose.

Note that each geometric figure is what it is and, as such, is bound by a set of laws that define it, that is, by a set of properties from which its definition necessarily follows. Thus, no matter how the angles of a triangle are summed, the result will always be 180 degrees. And this is not by chance: it is simply because it is so – it is the nature of that being. In the same way, this conflict of man with his own reason is in his own nature: he cannot avoid having it. And this is because man – if he is indeed a rational animal – is defined by a kind of contradiction; a contradiction that he cannot resolve except as the final outcome of a lifetime – after all, this contradiction cannot be resolved at the beginning, because if it were resolved at the beginning, the human being would cease to exist.

This means that the resolution of this contradiction constitutes the very life of the individual: if there were no contradiction, there would be no life. If you want to disconnect, that is, separate the “two wires,” then you do not want to live: you are rejecting life. The price of life is this suffering. The price of life for the rational animal is to bear the contradiction of animality and rationality, without being able to relinquish either of them. It is evident that one cannot relinquish animality because that would be the same as dying; after all, responding to biological needs is a requirement to maintain life itself. On the other hand, it is evident that in everything man has done in terms of rationality, there is a touch of animality, and this is because man is not pure rationality; man is never purely rational because if that were the case, there would simply be nothing to think about. This is what Aristotle said: man is an inseparable fusion, an inseparable mixture of rationality and animality. And separating them is either an impossibility in itself or it is death. This conflict, which defines the human being, gives him the status of being human.

The Man: the Living Philosopher

The Trauma of the Emergence of Reason is a drama in which the individual is confronted with the need to bear his condition as a rational animal, ceasing to try to find a solution solely in the sphere of the animal, experiential, or emotional. The common man – it must be said – is pragmatic and requires very little use of reason. But if a person’s life is exhausted at a pragmatic level, the questions that demand rational intelligence will be set aside. They will not enhance their theoretical intelligence and will end up revealing themselves as problems at the experiential level. Man has much more intelligence than what is used to solve his pragmatic affairs. And these “surpluses” that continue to function oppress him with unanswerable questions. Thus, what would be man’s main weapon becomes his main enemy.

In reality, the individual is trying to solve, through an experimental method, a purely theoretical problem; that is, he is trying to solve in life a problem that is not in life. Fichte – a great philosopher – said the following phrase: “To philosophize is not to live. To live is not to philosophize.” Therefore, if you are trying to solve a philosophical problem in life, you are confusing theory with practice. In fact, what happens is that theory has its demand: it calls for man. Man cannot live solely in the practical world. He has a theoretical aspect that is inherent to the human condition – and that is denied. And it is denied because he has the wretched desire to be happy. He thinks that by diving straight into practical life, he will find happiness; when in reality, he should do the opposite: he should step back, meditate – he would have to not live. We read in the Gospel: “The more you want life, the more you lose it; and whoever gives it up, gains it.” Does this not mean that to philosophize is to not live? Yes. That is why with philosophy, one finally enters life with the inherent perspective of man; a perspective that places him in an integral condition and removes him from his previous fragmented condition. Everyone must be a philosopher, to cultivate their own intelligence. But one must philosophize solely and exclusively about what matters, never avoiding this theme carefully just because it is bothersome. If one never poses a single real problem, they are left with all the philosophical equipment without knowing where to use it. They become, so to speak, pure rational beings, and philosophize just as others typically do in academia; they become, thus, a philosopher from the third floor and below the second floor, a donkey.

There is no way out: wherever you turn, man is a rational animal. He is the living philosopher himself. Reason is what introduces the individual, so to speak, into the genus to which he belongs. Hence, the problems raised by reason itself can only be solved within its particular scope. This is, then, the definition of the human being: to go beyond their biological limit. The value of a man is measured by what he devotes his life to. Devoting is giving; after all, life does not belong to him. If you dedicate yourself and let your life be spent on something, your life – and you – will not consume themselves, like wax that produces no light. And why should we do this: to produce light? Because this is characteristic of the human being: to go beyond the biological. Beyond what is necessary for one’s subsistence. After all, it is man who has extra forces. It is inconceivable that an animal with such a complex and exquisite nervous system should have as its destiny only to eat and procreate. That would be a tremendous waste.

Reason is the faculty possessed equally by all human beings, that is, what is valid for my reason is valid for yours. However, this is not the case in the sphere of animal life: my life is not yours because if you die, I continue to live; if your tooth hurts, mine does not. In other words, what I feel, you do not necessarily feel. Feeling only exists at the moment I feel it and at the moment someone else concretely feels it. But… what about rational truth? It is true whether one thinks about it or not: after all, during the time when no one yet knew the Pythagorean theorem – in the time of the Neanderthal man – did the sum of the squares of the legs not already equal the square of the hypotenuse? And after the last man disappears from the earth, will it not continue to hold true? Does this not mean that there is an abyss between the sphere of experiential life and the sphere of reason, and that man is the one who crosses that abyss? Man is the connection between these abysses; he is the only connection between animality and rationality, or between the singular and the universal.

Consciousness and Truth

In reality, the man who is consciously divided is the one who suffers, not the one with a divided consciousness, that is, consciousness that struggles against itself. Moreover, this man, who takes the conflict out of consciousness and consciously does not suffer, and whose behavior is incoherent, is an inefficient man. And it must be said that this is the vast majority of humanity. In other words, very few people can consciously endure the suffering caused by doubt. To have consciousness is to strive to have certainty as a whole and to encompass within it all divisions and contradictions that may exist. To have consciousness of one’s own division is to know, therefore, that one is divided; but if the individual is not aware of their own division, let’s say, a guilty consciousness, then one of two things is true: either they are holy or they have swept the division under the rug. Thus, suffering in intelligence is characteristic of an intelligent and conscious man, that is, of a man who desires coherence and goodness and, nevertheless, understands the divisions and contradictions of life, the paradoxes of oneself; after all, he knows that he is not a treatise of logic or an edition of the gospel. Therefore, thinking about these things, intellectually suffering with them, trying to solve them, is equivalent to carrying one’s own cross and facing reality. In truth, the health of intelligence is the suffering of one’s own intelligence: healthy intelligence suffers. But this is only possible for the man who fundamentally desires truth.

Therefore, one must know all personal contradictions, one by one, and make this consciousness obtained from them a part of one’s worldview. In reality, if a person is sincere, they will not consider this division and this schism as temporary – this division is part of human nature. Man will have this contradiction until his last day because he is a rational animal. He is pure contradiction. He is a point of adverse natures bound together. Being aware of this is, therefore, embracing the human condition.

Man can only improve in consciousness, and his consciousness improves as he is able to bear the contradiction. If it is possible to improve one’s conduct as well, it is better for others. Undoubtedly, this is progress – but it happens that this is not the decisive point. The decisive point does not lie in good or bad conduct; it lies in the consciousness that is obtained. If an individual has stopped doing evil and is doing good at the expense of their consciousness, they are merely a pious fool. They are completely mistaken about themselves. They have a false consciousness and are fundamentally liars. In Catholic doctrine, evil exists and you do not escape it for a single moment: it is fundamentally pessimistic. It says that evil is at the root of human existence, in original sin, and it cannot be erased. However, this does not mean that this contradiction between good and evil cannot be overcome: it can, but not in a way that one is achieved at the expense of the other. The contradiction, thus, could always be absorbed into another perspective, namely, a rational one, and not an experiential one. This aspect of reason is responsible for framing all conduct in a direction where good and evil are not nullified on the experiential plane, but rather integrated into planes where contradiction becomes a motive for generating reflections and understanding, and not just a source of pain and discomfort. As one moves from the epicurean code of pleasure and pain to the code of truth, the concern for good and evil that one had diminishes significantly; after all, it is no longer so important to know whether the human being is good or evil: it is already known that he is inherently evil. That is why there is merit in admitting the truth: the love of truth is a fundamental virtue. If, in addition to loving truth, one can have slightly better conduct, it is only better for others to live with us.

Consciousness exists and strengthens to the extent that the search for truth exists. If the search for truth does not exist and there is only a search for life, what does it matter what others think about good and evil? They become merely ideological discourse to justify one’s own conduct. Therefore, all the good and evil that one does both become disguises, lies – thus, if one has renounced truth, one has renounced goodness. Truth is coextensive with goodness – it is goodness itself. Furthermore, indifference to truth is considered, in Christianity, the sin against the Holy Spirit: all sins can be forgiven, but the sin against the spirit is not forgiven in this world or the next. Therefore, commit all sins – but do not commit this one. Renouncing truth can never be done. Another thing: religion, without religious tension, only serves to corrupt the individual because faith is used as a relief. The tension lies precisely between faith and doubt; where there is no doubt, faith becomes an analgesic for consciousness, and since people seek faith in order to avoid doubt, it ends up becoming an analgesic in the vast majority of cases. All this is evidence that man is a rational animal, a being made to investigate truth. He is capable of it, and if he does not meet such a demand, he becomes deficient. Nowadays, rationality – including scientific rationality – has become more of an instrument of animality, serving only pragmatic purposes, rather than the understanding that restores the meaning of life. Thus, doing anything ceases to be an end in itself as it becomes merely an instrumental activity that is exhausted in meeting animal needs.

Reason itself is, therefore, a purpose of man. And the human species is particularly unhappy because it does not live according to its purpose. Man is the animal who can – and therefore must – know the truth. Every human being has inquiries that can only be resolved through certain knowledge – but not everyone will dedicate their time to the pursuit of this knowledge because, in reality, they are seeking a practical solution to alleviate their discomfort. Thus, we divide people into two groups:

  1. those who seek truth;

  2. those who seek relief.

The latter will not find it because, at a purely pragmatic level, the problem has no solution.

All of this, in short, should summarize what is understood as original sin: what is the tree of good and evil, that is, the forbidden tree? It is precisely enjoying what is pleasant and unpleasant. But what about the tree of knowledge? It is the search for truth. The former is the tree of merely animal needs, while the latter is that of human needs – from it, man can eat the fruits; from the former, he cannot.

Therefore, to have consciousness is already to have a guilty consciousness; after all, it is to be conscious of one’s own powerlessness and, as such, to have a guilty consciousness. This is the destiny of man. After all, man knows things that extend backwards and within his existence, infinitely beyond the range of his physical action – and that is precisely why he is human. If the range of his action could extend as far as his knowledge, he would be a potentate, a god; but if he wanted to level his consciousness only to the sphere of his power, he would become an animal. For the animal, there is no contradiction between knowledge and power: everything he knows expresses a real power that he possesses. And where he has no power, he knows nothing. So if a person does not accept knowledge, understanding, even if they become powerless, they do not accept the human condition itself; and since they cannot be a god, they choose to be a little animal.

To accept knowledge without power is the foundation of all human ethics. The foundation of knowledge of truth is this: enduring guilt and knowing that one’s guilt is not greater than that of others – everyone is guilty. Therefore, one will have to accept that their intelligence is infinitely more potent than their capacity for action. They will have to accept knowledge without power. Moreover, the foundation of psychological knowledge is to be conscious of one’s own limit of action. And this is one of the greatest tests that human beings undergo and, in general, cannot endure.

Every human being must “carry their own cross,” which is this limitation in temporal space, this carnal condition of an intelligence that is, so to speak, immortal. That is even the definition of man: the rational animal; while rationality is universal reason, encompassing everything; while animal is rooted in a body that is fragile, that feels pain, and that deteriorates over time. That is the truth. Moreover, the rejection of the carnal condition is the definition of the diabolical, that is, the rejection upward, where one wants to have universal power to rid themselves of the consciousness of physical frailty. Otherwise, one may descend downward, becoming a little animal and destroying their own consciousness.

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