November 18, 2022
What are the limits of human nature? And is the better course of action a wise acceptance of those limits or a heroic attempt to overcome them? “Trying to be more than human, we have become less,” warns a character in William Blake’s long poem The Four Zoas. Or, on the other hand, should we aspire against all limits and all odds, like Tennyson’s Ulysses, who, although old, intends “to sail beyond the sunset.” Though he is “made weak by time” he is “strong in will / To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” To ask about human limits is a way of asking about human identity and human destiny.
The question of human limits is double: we may be asking either about human capacity or human achievement. The two are not necessarily identical, because traditionally, human achievement has been set within certain boundaries established by a higher order, of the gods, of fate, or whatever, with dire penalties for daring to transgress those limits. The conception of Greek tragedy is of the violation of a limit: hubris, usually translated “pride,” is a vaulting ambition that steps over the line, and when it does so, it is punished by some form of nemesis. The gods are fond of making examples of certain people who challenge their rules, and even challenge the gods themselves. The most famous example of the latter is Prometheus, the Titan who defied Zeus to give fire to the human race, but there are many others, like Arachne, mentioned in a previous newsletter, who challenged Athena to a weaving contest and was turned into a spider when she inevitably lost. Others are guilty of violating moral norms in such a way that both the gods and human beings consider monstrous, like Tantalus, who cut up his son Pelops, boiled him, and served him as a sacrificial feast to the gods in order to test their omniscience, and Ixion, who betrayed the sacred rule of xenia or hospitality by inviting his father-in-law to a feast and killing him. Both Tantalus and Ixion are said in the Odyssey to be tortured in the lowest part of the Greek underworld, called Tartarus.
The Greek concept of moderation, of nothing in excess, is an outcome of this notion of limits, and became the virtue of temperance in both Spenser and Milton. Even virtue itself has to observe the law of temperance: one can be excessive in the pursuit of virtue. Hippolytus, in Euripides’ play about him, was so excessively zealous about chastity that he refused to honor Aphrodite, the goddess of sexual love, who contrived a plot against him involving, with appropriate irony, false accusations that he had relations with his own step-mother. C.G. Jung made temperance into a law of psychic functioning that he called enantiodromia, a term out of Heraclitus that means something like “running to the opposite.” The psyche is a structure of conflicting opposites, and, if someone gets too one-sided, it will compensate for the imbalance by a backlash in the opposite direction, so that one opposite may suddenly turn into the other in an effort to restore equilibrium. Religious fanatics may begin as ne’er-do-wells who suddenly one day “get Jesus.”
The gods’ touchiness about any human behavior that seems to go beyond a prescribed limit betrays an underlying anxiety about the hubris that motivates it: there is a paranoid but shrewd suspicion that the human race will aspire to godhead unless disciplined to remain within prescribed limits. It is of course the fear of the slaveowner that those he has enslaved will get “uppity” unless brutally put down and kept in a constant state of passive terror. At bottom lies the fear that humanity might discover that it actually does have godlike power latent within itself. Hence the attempts to keep the human race hobbled by fear of punishment, but also by various superstitious rules and false moral prescriptions that are, because internalized, more effective than any external chains. The great power of Eros is repressed by all sorts of sexual inhibitions and neuroses disguised as virtues, and the power symbolized by Promethean fire is repressed by various forms of rationalized authoritarian idolatry. Yahweh in the Old Testament seems to be as nervous as any Olympian about humanity’s uppity attitude when he says, “Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and live for ever” (Gen. 3:22). When God is so rattled that he perpetrates a sentence fragment, you know something is at stake: to eat of the tree of life and become immortal would mean deification. And this is exactly the promise with which the serpent tempted Eve: “ye shall be as gods” (Gen. 3:5). This is the same Yahweh whose later taunts to Job all emphasize Job’s limited power: “Canst thou hook Leviathan?” and the like.
In addition to Prometheus, who is not human but a Titan, there were always rebels against the divine decrees bridling humanity. The builders of the tower of Babel were apparently attempting to scale the walls of heaven and take it by force, comparable to the Titans’ attempt to overthrow the Olympians as recounted in Hesiod’s Theogony. In the 14th canto of the Inferno, Capaneus is being punished as one of the Blasphemers, but he is still defying the king of the gods just as he did in Aeschylus’s Seven against Thebes, with a magnificent speech that surely must have influenced Milton’s portrait of Satan:
“What I was once, alive, I still am, dead!Let Jupiter wear out his smith, from whom he seized in anger that sharp thunderbolt he hurled, to strike me down, my final day…and with all his force let him hurl his bolts at me, no joy of satisfaction would I give him!” (14.51-54, 59-60, Mark Musa translation)
When Virgil angrily replies to Capaneus’s taunts, Dante notes, “I never heard his voice so strong before.” Capaneus has got Virgil’s goat because his speech is impressive. So is the great speech of Ulysses in canto 25, which is the direct source of Tennyson’s version, even though Dante, unlike Tennyson, is condemning Ulysses for giving false advice—the advice to his crew to take an unauthorized voyage through the Pillars of Hercules from the Mediterranean into the uncharted waters of the Atlantic—to boldly go where no one has gone before, beyond the limits prescribed for human venturing. Not all rebels, however, are cast in the heroic mold. Later, among the thieves, Dante and Virgil encounter the petty criminal Vanni Fucci, whose defiance is spiteful and vulgar, befitting his lower social class: in a hilarious, unforgettable moment in canto 25, Vanni Fucci gives the fig to God, the Italian equivalent of giving someone the finger:
When he had finished saying this, the thief shaped his fists into figs and raised them high and cried: “here, God, I’ve shaped them just for you!”
Granted, then, that there are limits, the limits that define what we call the human condition, but there is still the question of what might be possible within those limits: how far may the boundary be pushed by concerted striving? In the Homeric epics, the main concern is with athletic and battle prowess, peacetime and wartime versions of the same skills, really. In the Iliad, a number of the best warriors have a moment of what is called aristeia, an untranslatable word, though usually translated “excellence.” But when I describe it, many of my student athletes know exactly what it means. When it is a matter of certain skills dependent on reflexes that have been trained into the unconscious, some days you’re better than others. Some days you’re just okay—but on rare occasions some kind of energy rises up from within and takes over, and you may perform, not just better than you ever have before, but better than you thought you were capable of. You exceed your limits in a moment in which it seems you can do no wrong, though it is not exactly you that is doing the performing. It may be the best moment of your career, and you may remember it the rest of your life.
What such moments of aristeia suggest is that what we think are our limits, or the limits of the human condition, may be more habitual than actual. This experience of being lifted up on a wave of energy that expands human capacity is also true of musical performers, especially those whose performance is partly improvisational, as with jazz, rock, and bluegrass soloes. When improvising at such speed, there is no time to think about what you want to play or how to play it: if it is a guitar solo, your hands play it, not your head. It just happens, and sometimes it is more inspired than others.
Some forms of music demand that the musician always be performing at the highest possible level of speed and technical virtuosity. There is an elitist ethic whose standard is the very limit of human possibility. Folk music is expressive, and not usually mindful of technique. If you make a mistake, ignore it and keep going and chances are your audience will not even notice, and if they notice they will not much care because that is not the point. But classical musical performance is perfectionistic in a way that I admit has always rather turned me off. The same is true of those forms of jazz, rock (especially metal) and bluegrass whose ideal sometimes seems to be speed and virtuosity for their own sake. This bores me, but I get the feeling that such musicians are often motivated less by egotism than by the exhilaration of pushing the envelope, of coming as close as possible to some absolute limit. I imagine it is the same daredevil mentality seen in test pilots or mountain climbers. Such a level is dangerous, allowing not a single mistake, but there must be a thrill to making an asymptotic approach to the superhuman.
That form of brinksmanship, of flirting dangerously with the limits, appears in those sports, or arts—the distinction is ambiguous—which defy the spirit of gravity, perhaps, as Nietzsche said, the most fundamental symbol of human limits. Many years ago, I saw the Moscow Circus in Memorial Auditorium in Buffalo. The trapeze and high-wire acts had been set up so that the performers, although high in the air, were perhaps no further than 50-75 feet from the audience on its risers. It was electrifying. I saw, close up, the human body perform feats that it should be impossible for the human body to accomplish. And it took me back many more years, to childhood in 1963, when my family vacationed in Lake George and watched the Great Wallendas only a year after the fatal accident when their human pyramid collapsed, killing, injuring, and paralyzing several members of the family. The Wallendas always performed without a net. Mountain climbing is driven by a similar fascination. A single mistake and you are dead. An even more direct defiance of the spirit of gravity is flight itself, and from Icarus to the daredevil aviators of World War I the exhilaration of ultimate freedom is mixed with the thrill of danger, of the forbidden. If God meant human beings to fly, he would have given them wings. Which is why I am afraid of heights, so that I have to screw up my courage to board an aircraft.
When the virtuosity is intellectual rather than physical, we call it “genius.” Here, the achievement of something beyond what most people can even understand, let alone accomplish, seems to depend at least partly on something innate rather than acquired, and being a child prodigy is almost a rule. It is commonly observed that mathematicians and theoretical physicists do their important work by the time they are thirty. Geniuses in all fields become the subjects of exactly the same kind of biopic with the same kind of plot, one that portrays the genius as having a double nature. The actual genius is a godlike creature possessed of ability so far beyond the normal limits that ordinary mortals cannot remotely understand its insights: Einstein epitomizes this conception in popular culture, a more recent version being Stephen Hawking. But the godlike entity is attached to an ordinary mortal who is human, all too human, possessed of perhaps even more foibles or disabilities than the ordinary bloke. Thus we have the sockless Einstein for whom every day was a bad-hair day; thus the Mozart of Peter Shaffer’s play Amadeus, a child prodigy “beloved of God” attached to the personality of a giggling, horny, arrested adolescent; thus the volcanic tempers of Michelangelo and Beethoven, the ear-lopping frenzy of Van Gogh, the gargantuan alcoholism of Dylan Thomas, and, on a lower level, the self-destructive lives of how many actors and popular musicians. Some of this is an underachieving public trying to assuage its inferiority complex, but the foibles of genius are in fact real. Jung has an insightful essay on this phenomenon called “Psychology and Literature,” whose special focus is on precisely the kind of artist whose art seems to transcend the normal limits. About such godlike figures, Jung first quotes K.G. Carus as saying:
Strange are the ways by which genius is announced, for what distinguishes so supremely endowed a being is that, for all the freedom of his life and the clarity of his thought, he is everywhere hemmed round and prevailed upon by the Unconscious, the mysterious god within him; so that ideas flow to him—he knows not whence; he is driven to work and create—he knows not to what end; and is mastered by an impulse for constant growth and development—he knows not whither” (101-02).
In his own words, Jung says:
A person must pay dearly for the divine gift of creative fire. It is as though each of us was born with a limited store of energy. In the artist, the strongest force in his make-up, that is, his creativeness, will seize and all but monopolize this energy, leaving so little over that nothing of value can come of it. The creative impulse can drain him of his humanity to such a degree that the personal ego can exist only on a primitive or inferior level and is driven to develop all sorts of defects—ruthlessness, selfishness, (“autoeroticism”), vanity, and other infantile traits. (102)
I would add that there are geniuses who managed to be good, unselfish, non-destructive human beings—Northrop Frye was one of them—but even they pay the price of such a total concentration upon their creative project that that they almost do not exist as ordinary personalities. The same seems to have been true of Shakespeare, whose personal life is such a blank that the makers of biopics are forced to invent it ex nihilo. Those who love such creators have to accept them for what they are, namely, people constantly turned inward upon some inner vision in a way very much comparable to a religious contemplative. William Blake’s wife Catherine is on record as saying that her husband mostly lived in Eternity.
There have always been reports of human achievements that do not just approach the limits of the possible but drive right beyond it. The question has always been whether or not the reports can be corroborated with believable evidence. Two of the oldest and most famous forms of human transcendence are the subject of massive, and massively documented, studies by Mircea Eliade: Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (1964) and Yoga: Immortality and Freedom (1958). Shamanism may be the oldest form of religion: possible evidence goes back to the Paleolithic caves. As Eliade’s subtitle says, it is a discipline aiming at a transcendence not just of human limits but of ordinary reality, symbolized by the symbol of flight to other worlds. In his trance, the shaman flies up and down the length of the vertical axis mundi to all the possible worlds above and below our middle earth. Eliade says that “shamanic ecstasy can be regarded as a recovery of the human condition before the ‘fall’; in other words, it reproduces a primordial ‘situation’ accessible to the rest of mankind only through death” (493). Chapter III of Eliade’s book is titled “Obtaining Shamanic Powers”: in addition to flight to other modes of being, shamans acquire superhuman powers, such as knowing the language of the animals. Modern-day superheroes are the direct descendants of the shamans, which accounts for their huge popularity. The same is true in yoga: Eliade’s books parallel each other. As they ascend the degrees of illumination, adepts acquire without seeking them various powers, the siddhi. Buddhism cautioned seekers not to be tempted by the powers—they are in the end a distraction from the real end, which is “freedom,” meaning freedom from the human condition altogether, nirvana. Christianity has its equivalent of these superhuman powers: the miracles performed by the disciples and the saints. An empirical attitude demanding repeated documentation and experimental proof is never going to validate these phenomena, most likely. The same is true of another equivalent, the paranormal powers investigated by the Rhine experiments: the eventual discrediting of the latter is exemplary. All these phenomena are unpredictable—as Jung said, they are synchronistic rather than causal—and by their very nature transcend the limits of reality posited by scientific materialism, so they can never be measured. There is nothing material to measure. That does not mean they are unreal, merely that they cannot be proved.
The Romantic era saw a dethroning of the gods and the toppling of the old Chain of Being. It was accompanied by a suspicion that denial of human powers and the maintenance of divine limits to human achievement were ideological projections rather than reality, excuses by which the political and religious elite maintained their power. What then are the actual human limits? We do not know. All we can do is keep trying to break through what we previously accepted as a limit. Striving becomes indefinite, and human desire becomes infinite. As usual, Blake put it in the most boldly dramatic way: “More! More! is the cry of a mistaken soul. Less than All cannot satisfy man.” The Romantic theory of the imagination is based on the faith that we do not really know “the farther reaches of human nature,” in Abraham Maslow’s phrase. The very phrase “expanding eyes” implies a possibility of expanded vision, and thereby of expanded capacity. The orthodox Darwinism of the later 19th century led towards a vision of tragic pessimism, but unorthodox theories of evolution promised a series of continued and progressive metamorphoses. The promise is that humanity could, through evolution, exceed its previous limits. The ultimate goal was what Nietzsche called the Übermensch, the Overman, usually translated into English as the Superman. Nietzsche’s Overman is the one who overcomes himself. George Bernard Shaw picked up the idea in Man and Superman and other plays, and from there it passed into popular culture, becoming the superhero phenomenon in comic books and a whole series of science fiction novels about “mutants” as the next stage of human evolution, including Olaf Stapledon’s Odd John (1935), A. E. van Vogt’s Slan (1946), and Theodore Sturgeon’s More than Human (1953).
But waiting on the next mutation is a very uncertain process. The increasing prestige of science tempted various writers to imagine the human race re-engineering itself, altering its very nature through eugenics (as in Shaw), later through genetic manipulation. And of course the glittering promises blinded many to the inherent temptation of the will to power—the same temptation that was always there: “Ye shall be as gods.” The temptation of the will to power swells the human ego into the form of megalomania that Jung calls inflation. Mary Shelley warned of it from the outset in the full title of her first novel: Frankenstein: or, The New Prometheus, Frankenstein being not, of course, the “monster” but his inflated, narcissistic mad-scientist creator, who dreams of replacing the temptations of occult power with the temptations of scientific power. And of course we know what the Nazis made of Nietzsche’s ideas of the “superman” and the Master Race. Science fiction—some science fiction—is still dreaming the dream of human transcendence by humanity’s own efforts. It is accompanied by a parallel phenomenon, the movement known as post-humanism or transhumanism. Although some people make a distinction between these terms, the common idea is that the pace of technological development is steadily increasing, and, if that pace is projected into the future, a point will be reached beyond which we will become post-human, some species beyond the human condition as we know it. The science fiction writer Vernor Vinge called that point the Singularity because, in fact, we cannot describe what the post-human condition will be like for the same reason we cannot describe the inside of a black hole—or, as medieval theologians asserted, the nature of God. It is beyond our capacity even to understand.
The most salient physical limitation of humanity is that of the organic: the very phrase “flesh and blood” implies our frailty, our lack of power, our mortality. Therefore much posthuman musing revolves around fantasies of uploading human consciousness into a virtual reality—or, more radically, fantasies in which artificial intelligence supersedes humanity as Homo sapiens superseded the Neanderthals. The future in fact will not belong to humanity, which is only a steppingstone, but to AI. The power complex lurking in the post-human movement seems all too evident to everyone except its proselytizers.
The great novel that warned against the inflation of such superhuman fantasies is Theodore Sturgeon’s More than Human. Sturgeon does imagine a next stage of human evolution—yet it is one that will not reject the organic basis of human experience but rather expands it. His “superman” is a Homo gestalt, five human beings linked in an empathic connection—linked, in other words, by love, not power. And love is rooted in the body, the emotions, and the senses, all of which are to be, as Blake and Milton both saw, not transcended but expanded into the dimension we sometimes call spiritual. As the book says on its final page, “here was the Guardian of Whom all humans knew—not an exterior force, nor an awesome Watcher in the sky, but a laughing thing with a human heart and a reverence for its human origins, smelling of sweat and new-turned earth rather than suffused with the pale odor of sanctity.”
The five members of Sturgeon’s gestalt are a motley crew of social outcasts: an “idiot,” meaning an intellectually disabled person, two African-American twins who cannot speak, a Down syndrome baby, a girl from an abusive family, a boy from an abusive orphanage. They are “different” and they are despised by the respectable people around them, who are nevertheless shown to be the truly “disabled” ones, disabled by the limitation of their utter selfishness and the cruelty it engenders. Alongside the technological fantasies of the post-humanist crowd, another phenomenon has been growing, and provoking enormous social resistance the more it grows: the re-defining of human nature to include many forms of “difference” previously rejected as sub-normal and pathological. We are beginning to accept gender differences—not just homosexuality but identities like “trans” that question physical and sexual boundary lines altogether. We are beginning to accept racial differences—not just an equality of Black and White but a future in which races are so intermixed that the old categories will not even make sense any longer. We are beginning to accept mental differences, accepting autism, Aspergers, bipolar and chronically depressive people, ADHD people, as human and not “mentally ill.” This is another way of transcending the old human limits, but it is one driven by the opposite of the will to power. What will happen to any stable sense of human identity if it is no longer grounded in anything normative and constant? Some people worry about this, and it is true that it leads to a good deal of social and psychological chaos, and sometimes to real mental illnesss, that is to say, to self-destructiveness and paranoid fear and hatred of others. How can we live in such an anarchistic environment?—the right has driven itself mad with fear and hatred of such a future, and wants to stamp out anything heterogeneous.
Is it an airy-fairy liberal dream, this utopia of metamorphic differences, not grounded in practical reality? The fearful ones would have us believe so, but in fact it is not cutting-edge post-modernism that belies them but tradition itself. Difference did not bother Dorothy in Oz. What kind of mentality can cope with a brave new world of difference? One that can empathize with and treat with respect and compassion a tin man, that sentient AI; a scarecrow who is mentally disabled and longs for a brain; a lion suffering from social anxiety. And Prof. Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters, otherwise known as the X-Men, is a harbor and a refuge for persecuted mutants. Hogwarts is another refuge, taking in an orphan boy suffering in an abusive foster family, run by a headmaster we eventually learn is gay. The true limitation of human nature is the hard shell of its selfishness, the nihilistic destructiveness of its will to power. To break through the one and renounce the other: that is the true transcendence of human limitation. The irony is that it does not take shamans or yogic adepts or superheroes or wizards. Anyone can do it, even a child. In fact, as the examples show, especially a child. And unless you can become one, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven.
References
Eliade, Mircea. Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. Translated by Willard R. Trask. Princeton, Bollingen Series LXXVI, 1964.
Eliade, Mircea. Yoga: Immortality and Freedom. Translated by Willard R. Trask. Princeton, Bollingen Series LVI, 1958.
Jung. C.G. “Psychology and Literature.” Translated by R.F.C. Hull. In The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature. In The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, volume 15. 84-108.
Sturgeon, Theodore. More than Human. Vintage, 1999. Originally published 1953.