Weeping Is So Visceral: Is it Absent Intelligence?

Dear Friends and Family,

It’s been a while since I extended a warm welcome and thank you to all of you for being here. Quite a few of you are new. Quite a few more of you have been reading for quite some time.

To all of you, thank you for welcoming Beyond the Comfort Zone into your inbox and sharing a few moments of your week with me and everyone reading.

On a recent walk, something stirred me for reasons I could not say. As oft happens, what stirred in a moment has become the image of a weeks-long contemplation. Today’s reflections are the first in a short series on intelligence, instinct, innocence, and the “fall of man.” I don’t yet know where this is going to land, but it seems to have something to show us.

As always, I welcome your reflections.

With love,

Renée

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When the newborn babe seeks for the first time its mother’s breast, so showing that it has knowledge (unconscious no doubt) of a thing it has never seen, we say, just because the innate knowledge is in this case of a definite object, that it belongs to instinct and not to intelligence.¹

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Jonquils have burst into bugle bloom. Every open corona just yesterday an inner invisible. Today, they face the sun, its rays the milk they seek and must in some way know before the light of day. Only plants can drink the sun.

It is said that only the female horsefly bites. She needs a meal of blood to lay her eggs and so, while biting the rump of a horse, the fly must of eons know that for her eggs to hatch, they must gestate in the equine gut. The horse, licking her agitation, will surrogate another horsefly generation in every pain-licked swallow.²

I saw an infant while on my walk, swaddled in the cradle of a mother’s arms, and no sooner than my eyes rested upon him did he begin to wake from a dreamless sleep. (Do you remember this sleep?) Tanned still from the blood warmth of his mama’s womb, eyelids parting without angst, and lips beginning to purse just so, with his cheek nuzzled, he turned to her bosom without wait, like a blossom facing the morning sun. Rooting reflex, they call this mouthy inclination to slake the need now to eat. And then his mama lent a hand, just an index finger was all, but a touch around which the babe would cup his hand. Palmer reflex, they call this grasp when a newborn without volition holds on. We come here knowing.

For long, we thought that knowing belonged to the act of thinking and thinking to the human only and so, knowing was the domain of sapiens, and it was what set us free. By this knowing, we meant intelligence, and we parsed out intelligence from instinct, insisting in ways subtle and not so that the former was better than the latter.

Of the human, that which we might otherwise call instinct we gave the name reflex, most of which we would outgrow. Such as rooting. Such as grasping. And of those we do not outgrow, they are called vestigial. Such as goosebumps. That which is vestigial is thought to be left over from an earlier mode of life; so goes the thought. That which is vestigial, it is thought, we can do without.

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Thus, then, the part of the soul which we call intellect (and by intellect I mean that whereby the soul thinks and conceives) is nothing at all actually before it thinks. Hence, too, we cannot reasonably conceive it to be mixed with the body.³

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Those are the words of Aristotle.

In those long-ago days, not quite three thousand five hundred years ago, there was no science as we know science today, but it is safe to say that as a natural philosopher, Aristotle was an early empiricist, which is to say, someone who derives knowledge by observing phenomena. And of that, he was the first that we know of to compare forms of life, which is to say, he was a comparative biologist. There were others, perhaps, who were peering into the bodies of animals and humans, too; we don’t quite know—dissecting the latter was forbidden in Greece; people didn’t so readily let on about it. There were others doing the same in other places, too, in Alexandria for one, but it is Aristotle whose thought would carry on.

Aristotle was obsessed—completely possessed we could say—with this one attribute that set the human aside from all the rest. This attribute was, he thought, intelligence. And of intelligence, he gave the attribute of thought. This attribute, he wove around the human soul, which was to say, we come into the world with it. Soul, for Aristotle and those of his time, was divined, not in the churchly way we may think of today. The whole cosmos was ensouled, and the human had a particular kind of soul.

Today, we would say, intelligence is innate to the human. Today, what we would say of intelligence would exclude the soul. That this is so is its own trouble. We’ll get to that another time.

At the end of that passage, Aristotle added something, and this is where things get intriguing as we shall soon see. For Aristotle, the human intellect is distinct from the body.⁴ It comes in with soul and leaves with soul upon dying. If this is so, and Aristotle was sure it is, it, meaning intelligence, cannot be instinct.

So goes the thought since Aristotle that anything of the human that is instinctual must be outgrown, and if not outgrown, swept aside as insignificant. Such as goosebumps. These come, you see, not so much with thought as with inner feeling.

What if I said to you Aristotle was off the mark? And if he was off the mark, then today, we are. If this is so, would it matter? And why?

Where we are going with this is:

What is significant about the perceptual insignificance of the instinctual in the human?

. . .

When on my walk, I saw this newborn begin to stir from that dreamless sleep, I was just as struck that I began to weep—wholly absent my own volition. And when I tried, I could not stop. Why? I wanted to know. Is this, too, instinct? Like involuntary emotional piloerection, i.e., goosebumps, is the shedding of tears absent intelligence? Weeping is so visceral, such a lachrymal outpouring that comes from deep within . . . the body.  

And then I began to wonder:

Could there a hidden link between innocence and instinct? Could it be that the obscurity of one (the latter) portends of the veiling of the other (the former)? And if instinct is not lost but covered over, then perhaps it could be that innocence, too, is there in the shrouded wait?

On this, I leave you with these words to wonder in the days ahead.

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There are things that intelligence alone is able to seek, but which, by itself, it will never find. These things instinct alone could find; but it will never seek them.⁵

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1. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (New York: Henry Holt, 1911), pp. 162–163.

2. Ibid.

3. Aristotle, de Anima, trans. R. D. Hicks (Cambridge University Press, 1907), 429a 22–25.

4. Not in a Cartesian mind/body split, wherein the body is an extension of the mind. For Aristotle, soul is an in-forming cause of the body which continues to be after the body dies. In fact, Descartes wished to do away with the Aristotelian perspective, and it is safe to say, Cartesianism quite successfully desouled not on the human but the world. See Thomas Berry, The Great Work.

5. Bergson, p. 167.