The Human Condition: Can Understanding Ourselves Set Us Free?
What does it actually mean to understand the human condition? I recently came across this fascinating interview with Australian biologist Jeremy Griffith, whose work attempts to address one of the oldest questions humanity has asked: why are we capable of such extraordinary love, compassion and creativity, yet at the same time capable of selfishness, anger, cruelty and destruction?
Griffith proposes that this contradiction can be understood through the relationship between our inherited instincts and the development of the conscious mind. His argument is that as human consciousness developed the ability to think independently, experiment and search for understanding, it came into conflict with older instinctive orientations towards cooperative behaviour. Unable to explain or justify this departure from instinct, early humans experienced what Griffith describes as a profound psychological conflict. He argues that much of our anger, egocentricity and alienation subsequently developed as defensive responses to this struggle. Rather than seeing humanity as fundamentally corrupt or evil, Griffith asks us to consider whether our darker behaviour might be understood as part of a long and difficult journey towards consciousness and self-understanding.
One of the ideas I found particularly interesting is the suggestion that understanding ourselves may ultimately be more transformative than simply condemning ourselves. Griffith presents knowledge and self-understanding as potential forms of liberation: if we can understand why human beings became psychologically conflicted, perhaps we can begin to loosen the grip that conflict has upon us. His later discussion of what he calls the “Deaf Effect” takes this further, suggesting that we can become psychologically resistant to ideas that force us to confront uncomfortable aspects of ourselves. He connects this with Plato's Allegory of the Cave: sometimes encountering a radically different understanding of ourselves can initially be difficult precisely because it challenges assumptions through which we have understood ourselves and the world.
Griffith makes exceptionally ambitious claims for his theory, including that it provides a biological explanation of the human condition and could contribute to humanity's psychological rehabilitation. Those claims deserve to be approached critically rather than simply accepted as established scientific fact. But regardless of whether one ultimately agrees with his conclusions, I think the questions raised by the interview are worth serious reflection. What makes us who we are? Why do we behave against values we claim to believe in? How much of human suffering comes from our inability to understand ourselves? And could greater self-knowledge actually change the way we live?
For me, that is where this becomes particularly interesting philosophically. From Socrates' insistence that we examine our lives to modern attempts to understand human consciousness, philosophy repeatedly returns to the idea that knowing ourselves matters. Griffith approaches that ancient problem from his own biological and psychological perspective. I don't think something this ambitious should simply be believed or dismissed. It should be questioned, examined and thought about — because the question underneath it remains one of the greatest we can ask:
Why are human beings the way we are?
