"It is only in our immediate intercourse with human beings that we have insight into the character of man. We must actually confront man, we must meet him squarely face to face, in order to understand him. Hence it is not a new objective content, but a new activity and function of thought which is the distinctive feature of the philosophy of Socrates.

"Philosophy, which had hitherto been conceived as an intellectual monologue, is transformed into a dialogue. Only by way of dialogical or dialectic thought can we approach the knowledge of human nature. Previously truth might have been conceived to be a sort of ready-made thing which could be grasped by an effort of the individual thinker, and readily transferred and communicated to others. But Socrates could no longer subscribe to this view . . . Truth is by nature the offspring of dialectic thought. It cannot be gained, therefore, except through a constant cooperation of the subjects in mutual interrogation and reply. It is not therefore like an empirical object; it must be understood as the outgrowth of a social act."
Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man

      Understanding human nature--including understanding individual humans--can only occur in dialectical interchange between persons--"only in our immediate intercourse with human beings." We cannot stand apart from people and study them as we do physical objects if we wish to gain true insight into their essence. Understanding of human nature requires a new kind of social activity and new supra-mental processes of Reason.

"If the soul . . . is to know itself, it must engage with another soul, and especially in that region in which what makes a soul good, wisdom, occurs, and at anything else which is similar to it . . . Can we say that there is anything about the soul which is more divine than that where knowing and understanding take place? . . . Then that region in it resembles the divine, and someone who looked at that and grasped everything divine--wisdom and understanding--would have the best grasp of himself as well." Plato, Alcibiades, 133 b-c

      Truth about human nature is not something already determined which we discover as a solitary investigator examining an external object or a predetermined body of knowledge. Such truth comes into realization ⁵ in the social activity of dialectical interchange, one or more embodiments of consciousness encountering other focal points of awareness.

"The integral Knowledge is something that is already there in integral Reality: it is not a new or still non-existing thing that has to be created, acquired, learned, invented or built up by the mind; it must rather be discovered or uncovered, it is a Truth that is self-revealed to a spiritual endeavour: for it is there veiled in our deeper and greater self; it is the very stuff of our own spiritual consciousness, and it is by awaking to it even in our surface self that we have to possess it." Aurobindo, The Life Divine

The Essence of Human Nature Is Conscious Activity

      When we go beneath the surface, we recognize that humans are in their essence focal points of conscious activity: sensing, speaking, reflecting, making, hearing, achieving, realizing, becoming aware, and so on. Ordinary comprehension as the discovery of predetermined knowledge cannot grasp the human essence.

Socrates: I mean an intelligent word graven in the soul of the learner, which can defend itself, and knows when to speak and when to be silent. Phaedrus: You mean the living word of knowledge which has a soul, and of which the written word is properly no more than an image? Plato, Phaedrus

      Intellectual descriptions expressed in linguistic form always follow limpingly behind the fleeting, progressing, ongoing movement of human conscious activity. Verbal expressions of thought can only fix glimpses and shadows of the essemtial human reality. The descriptions they set down for later examination are already shells from which life has all but flown. That is why a portrayal of a human in words is always lacking in the vital principle; why narration fixes merely a phenomenon that has ceased to move and progress. A human being is becoming, living, always proceeding, and can therefore be depicted only in a medium that is similarly fluid and alive: the social activity of dialectical interchange.

Only the process, the social activity of dialectic can embody and reveal human nature because it involves a dynamic intuitive mode of apprehension and communication, the power of attaining to direct knowledge without extraneous rational thought and inference.       Dialectical interchange involves the more direct "language" of active intuitive apperception. Intellectual reporting can never fully embody or signify human conscious activity.

      The "language" we must use in seeking understanding of human reality is made up, not of words, but of those moving, ever-changing things known as actions--doings. Mere intellectual recountings of living human existence are only useful when we later wish to analyze what has previously occurred.

      In true dialectic or in spiritual meditation and contemplation, we act through inspiration, the instantaneous and unmediated expression of that which, when undiminished by habits of ponderous thought, comes to us directly from higher sources. Our inspirations are then undiluted by passage through the fixed and stationary medium of cogitation. Participants in dialectic engage not in pondering and deliberating, but in expressing immediate inspiration from the Source. It is only after the activity of dialectical interchange that we can legitimately formulate thoughts and select words and expressions by which to formulate reflective wisdom.

"The primary meaning of consciousness is the presence of the self to itself through operations that attain an object. The originating meaning of consciousness is the self-presence that grounds every other form of presence in human consciousness. The secondary meaning of consciousness is the mediation of self-presence through conscious acts. The tertiary meaning of consciousness pertains to the object or content of the conscious activity." Emile J. Piscitelli, "Insight As a Theory of Knowledge: Basic Method And Metaphysics"

      Immediate inspiration is the language we speak when we try to understand human nature: a fluid, flowing language, ever-changing, ever moving in intercourse with the human essence it expresses. That is why in dialectic--and other forms of mystical meditation and contemplation--we look, not to formulated statements for evidence of understanding, but to the living, moving force within us, which brings instantaneous illumination.

      Reflective thought--expressed in carefully chosen words--is an arrestation, a fixing of an elapsed reality, while the living thing--conscious activity--wings its way out of sight. Immediate inspiration is an expression of human experience, which we may not intellectually comprehend at the moment. In dialectic, meditation, and contemplation we free ourselves temporarily from the intellectual mechanism and engage in the language of immediate action--intuiting, allowing a free flow of ideas, speaking extemporaneously, inter-acting spontaneously, not-thinking. This kind of unrehearsed, unedited "doing" is the elemental mode of interaction and communication between persons and other dynamic realities. It is similar to the experience of not merely saying "I love you," but loving through action.

      The rapid twinklings of birds flocking through space are illustrations of the directer language which dialectic speaks. The hesitation of a tenth of a second by any single member of the flock would inevitably throw the whole operation into jostling confusion.

      This uninterrupted, primordial language of unmediated intuition is what Socrates taught participants in dialectical interchange. At first, we may feel it to be almost impossible to obtain that flexibility of spirit which receives accurately and undistortedly the immediate impulse from the depths of being--the impulse which translates itself into the sure and spontaneous action that is its expression. We stammer and hesitate and use wrong "words" and "awkward phrases" in attempting any new or little-accustomed language.

      In the experience of immediate inspiration in dialectical interchange, there is manifestly no room for ponderous communication of ideas filtered through a mechanism such as the brain. The action of flocking or intuiting is itself the reality. It is not a question of receiving an impulse and deciding to act on it, nor of receiving an impetus and diverting it into the groove of long-established habits of thought or behavior. Human conscious activity is only understood through the immediate manifestation of an impelling force.

"The self-presence of the subject is the primary form of presence because it is I who am conscious. Acts are said to be conscious when they mediate the object to the subject: I am conscious through conscious acts. The object is that of which I am conscious through conscious acts. Neither objects nor other persons can be present to me without the mediation of conscious operations. Consciousness is experience grounded in self-presence. If consciousness is experience, then consciousness is the experience of experience, the experience of understanding, the experience of reflection, and the experience of deliberation and decision. Insight undertakes an examination of consciousness as experience in order to understand: experience, questioning, understanding, reflection, judging, and deciding. The self-affirmation of the knower arises in a reflection on my conscious acts so that when I judge that I am a knower, I am saying that I am one who experiences, understands, judges, and decides. What I know is my self as knower. When I decide to live and act in accordance with self-knowledge, I have appropriated my rational self-consciousness." Emile J. Piscitelli, "Insight As a Theory of Knowledge: Basic Method And Metaphysics"

      When we begin learning to follow intuition in dialectical interchange, we make many blunders and mistakes. This occurs because of the distortion of habits of thought, puzzlement as to what we're experiencing, or because before the first and pure impulse is brought to conscious attention, it's diluted by deliberation. Thought, for all its mechanical

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nature, is extraordinarily swift, and before the flash of perception reaches expression thought may unconsciously interpose a hundred considerations that modify it.   What we think is the pure impulse has thus become a hybrid before it reaches its expression in action. Only with practice and with trial-and-error can fluency and accuracy in this language of intuition, as in all others, be obtained. But we can succeed in gaining proficiency in this primordial language of inspiration through persistence of effort.       The spontaneity of dialectical interchange is not, however, mere mindless blathering, bantering, or Freudian free-association of senseless mental effluence. We learn to use the unfamiliar powers of intuition and inspiration, becoming conduits for Ideas already existent in a higher realm.

  Dialectic involves allowing this supersensible wisdom to flow through us in an untrammeled and unpremeditated way in realizing and understanding human life. Instead of the uprush of crude, raw discharge, we become unobstructed channels for exalted, resplendent conceptions and sentiments.

The Creation of Individual Human Nature Within the Experience of Dialectic

      We cannot grasp the essence of a genuine human as we do the nature of an ordinary physical object because such an authentic person discovers, invents, creates, and recreates herself continually, especially within the social context of dialectic.

Dialectical interchange is a shared mystical experience. In the spiritual dimension, persons act on each other through a kind of radiation effect, as fire has a radius of heat or as ice emits an aura of cold. Spiritual awareness involves becoming a part of the essence of the entity you are apprehending.       In dialectical interchange spiritual transformation--re-birth--occurs, bringing about an awakening in that part of our being that is open to inspiration and generation.

    Advanced humans learn through dialectical interchange how to become co-conscious with one another in a super-human Intelligence. Whatever is known within this super-consciousness is known at all points.

      We learn to advance beyond our current terrestrial state of being, shunting off (becoming detached from) our ordinary sense-based existence and attaining spiritual awareness. Only through introspective and dialectical contemplation can we understand this process of spiritual regeneration into unitive consciousness, by the inwardly turned eye of the Soul. We release ourselves into the surrounding Universal Life so our experience can explain itself.

"Thou must thyself be the way; the understanding must be born in thee; thou must enter into it, so that the understanding of the work in the practic art . . . may be opened to thee." Jacob Boehme

Notes

¹ In two previous essays we explored the unknown nature of reality in general and in reference to energy, number, and frequency. In this essay we're investigating the unknown character of human nature, a part of that larger reality.

² Note that our very language reveals a delusory conception of reality: a sun that "rises" and a "world out there" that is only pasted together from inner sensory experiences which lack any element of "out-thereness."

³ We must always recognize that a "lone person" is part of a larger culture which defines his "reality."

⁴ We must distinguish genuine humans from sub-humans. The word "sub-human" has been used by various groups as a mindless term of rejection: the Nazis depicting other European peoples as sub-human; some cultures referring to women as sub-humans; Hindu society depicting untouchables as sub-human, and so on. I am using the term only in a descriptive manner, referring to certain people as sub-human who have lost the ability to think critically, who possess no desire to understand the truth, and who have no compassion for their fellow-humans. Since those and other qualities are essential in true humans, their absence from these people renders them sub-human.

⁵ Realize: make real or concrete; give reality to; be fully aware or cognizant of; the Higher Consciousness is actually our identity, so Perennialist activities--including dialectical interchange--realize (make real) this union with the Higher Self; the Higher Consciousness is already active but in a subliminal state