The Tiger Beneath: Our Enigmatic, Evolving Nature

I suppose I should begin by demystifying – but only a little! – this blog’s title: “Upon the Back of a Tiger.”

Over the last two years, my ruminations on ethics and philosophy of mind – the two branches of philosophy that have most hooked my imagination and intellect – have steered me into the dark, yet enlightening jungle of the unconscious: the wild, evolved, fiercely competing drives that run the show behind the sunlight of conscious desire. And having returned to the works of Friedrich Nietzsche after a long (all-too-long!) hiatus, I found this very idea cloaked in glorious, terrifying, dark-purple prose:

“What, indeed, does man know of himself! Can he even once perceive himself completely, laid out as if in an illuminated glass case? Does not nature keep much the most from him, even about his body, to spellbind and confine him in a proud, deceptive consciousness, far from the coils of the intestines, the quick current of the blood stream, and the involved tremors of the fibers? She threw away the key; and woe to the calamitous curiosity which might peer just once through a crack in the chamber of consciousness and look down, and sense that man rests upon the merciless, the greedy, the insatiable, the murderous, in the indifference of his ignorance—hanging in dreams, as it were, upon the back of a tiger” ~“On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense” (my emphasis)

What a fascinating, frightful image! What a penetrating insight! – a precursor to, and likely influence on, Freud’s theory of the unconscious. I feel the same shivers when I read William Blake’s iconic poem:

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?… ~ “The Tyger”

Blake’s relentless round of unanswered questions, following this one in the poem, capture well the perplexity we face when confronting the dual nature of nature, echoed in the dual nature of humanity. What twisted desire, what divine split-personality would mold such a “monster” and then turn to make a lamb? Of course, the brambles of the problem wither a bit when viewed in the light of evolution – for indeed, the evidence suggests that no hand or eye framed the symmetry of this monster or any other. A “blind,” aimless, mindless Tetris game was the fearsome tyger’s “creator” (genomes that fit the Tetris environment actually go extinct instead of surviving and reproducing! – but you get the picture). Is such evolution by natural selection “immortal”? That is doubtful, I think: from the apocalyptic pronouncements of physicists and cosmologists, it appears that swelling, exploding suns and an ever-expanding spacetime will leave Life far behind in the dust, as dust (“and to dust you shall return” – Genesis got that much right!). We might comfort ourselves by speculating that Life will be reborn from its ashes in some new aeon or universe – but who knows? What does seem endless is the cosmic or multi-cosmic shuffling of matter, of which biological evolution is a brief episode.

Yet to call the tiger a “monster,” as I did above, is of course too simplistic. Nietzsche emphasized the dark, bloodthirsty parts of the unconscious, probably because many people in his milieu denied that such parts were so ingrained in the human psyche. But the greatest objection I have to Nietzsche’s philosophy lies in this: his blindness to, or pervasive silence about, the benevolent, prosocial, egalitarian drives that are just as fundamental to human nature as our “darker side.” What of the beauty of the sunset stripes, the warm fur and lick of compassion, the soothing purr of solidarity, the graceful dancing on padded paws? I wonder if this glitch in Nietzsche’s thought was due in large part (if I may psychoanalyze) to his circumstantial (and, to an extent, self-imposed) isolation and the rejection he felt from his academic contemporaries, romantic interests, and the rest of his society, not to mention the cruel hand that Nature dealt to his health. If only he had the chance to part from dark Dionysus and anal Apollo for a while, and devote more time to erotic Eros and friendly Philotes! If only he had met the primatologist Frans de Waal, whose studies of chimps and bonobos reveal how deeply evolved, how thoroughly “natural” our empathy, compassion, and pity really are (see, for instance, de Waal’s Our Inner Ape, which discusses at length humanity’s dual nature). If only Nietzsche had met the talking, empathetic ape Caesar in the recent Dawn of the Planet of the Apes! The philosopher who saw a “will to power” at the core of animality seemed to fall prey to what de Waal calls “veneer theory”: the mistaken view that compassion and civility are but a thin, artificial veneer or gloss that humans have brushed onto their biology, hiding a fundamentally selfish, aggressive, power-hungry nature.

No, the tiger beneath us is a multifaceted, enigmatic beast. It is indeed a dreamtiger, to use a fantastic term from my beloved Argentine author, Borges: an ever-morphing stream, an incessant squall, a Heraclitean fire “burning bright.” And the conscious self, riding for dear life on its back, thinks she endures despite the mercurial fire beneath her. But nay! – she, too, transforms: inevitably scathed and purified, disfigured and transfigured by the beast she rides, the changing rainbow hues of its striped fur bleeding into her own outfit, her own skin, her own “soul.”

Only to the extent that we pick out temporary patterns, and are ignorant of imperceptible changes, do we identify an enduring “nature” or “essence” or “identity” in ourselves or the tigers we ride.

My tiger has embarked on a hot pursuit of truth and phantasy, both of which liberate and delight my cerebral, neuronal, hormonal soul. Will you ride alongside me, even ahead of me, and see where this lustful wandering takes us?

Leave your own thoughtprints after my posts, and let’s stir up some lively discussions!

~Peregrine