A Historical Outlook on Mankind: Angels or Beasts?

During the Middle Ages, it was assumed that the earth was the center of the universe. As such, the earth was a copy or mirror image of the heavenly realm and humans were seen as angels; they were created in God's image.

In those times, people felt that they were special, given the fact that God had made them Lords over His creation, and they were seen as inherently good. The notion of sin had not fully caught on yet and came with some of the radical Christian saints such as St. Jerome and in certain degrees with St. Augustine.

Humanism tried to shed some of the religious lingo, yet put humanity at the center of its philosophy. Humans were glorified: Leonardo da Vinci and other painters looked to give a more faithful representation of the “perfect” human body; Shakespeare began to delve into the intricate psychologies and the individual differences between one person and another.

Individualism was on the rise and human relationships grew in importance. At its core, humans possessed reason, something that set them apart from all other living beings on the Planet and which made them almost equal to God Himself.

This view continued even with Descartes, who claimed that animals were mere machines and did not have a soul because they lacked both language and consciousness. One of the precursors of romanticism Jean-Jacques Rousseau believed in the goodness of mankind. To the question of why some people are evil, he claimed that it was all because of society that corrupts us and turns innocent angels into manipulating impostors. If children were brought up in a less restrictive manner and did not witness and imitate the hypocrisy and vice of society, they would develop according to their natural state, and be inherently good.

Not all philosophers and thinkers agreed with this assumption though. Thomas Hobbes thought that humans needed rules and laws that would ensure harmony and respect among each other. These laws should be checked and enforced by a ruler or dictator. If mankind was left without proper government, they would turn into beasts and loot and kill each other because they are driven by egocentric impulses, looking for personal benefit and gain.

Somewhat later, Freud had also a rather pessimistic outlook on mankind. He claimed that our personality contains three parts - id, ego and superego - and that the major part, where dark and aggressive impulses reside can be found in the id, the unconscious. These are the strong driving forces that the ego and superego try to oppose to the best of their abilities. If not handled carefully, it could turn into neurosis. However, in the deeper recesses of our self, we are inherently evil and do not obey morality nor do we shy away from acts of brutality and aggression.

Throughout history, we have witnessed horrible acts committed by mankind. Science explains that a combination of genetic make-up and an aggressive environment or traumatic childhood are most likely factors that can turn people into cruel monsters or assassins. We label those cold-blooded assassins as mentally ill because any normal human being would feel horror or remorse about such acts.

Nonetheless, given specific circumstances, times of distress or war, any human being can shed their ethical standards and can turn from an angel into a beast within a matter of seconds. I believe we are born with both aspects, that we are capable of committing any atrocious acts, so it takes immense effort and skill to keep the beast within us deep asleep.

The Funeral Rites of the Romans

Romans had various gods and traditions that they followed closely. From our modern point of view we might take many of their beliefs as superstitious or irrational, but we must keep in mind that they lived in another time and era and tried to make sense of life using omens as their guide.

When it comes to funerals, they had specific procedures that they followed closely. When someone was on the verge of death, the family and relatives would watch over the dying person. When the final hour struck, the closest relative would try to catch the last breath with a kiss and close the dead person's eyes.

Then the dead man's name was called out loudly, a practiced called conclamatio. That must be a frightening experience really. All is quiet, the dying man has passed away; his soul is slowly leaving the body, still numb and in a daze and in great confusion, and all of a sudden somebody shouts his name a couple of times!

After that a small silver coin, obolus, was placed under the tongue or on the eyes of the deceased, which was intended as payment for the skinny and cranky ferryman Charon in Hades. Charon was responsible to take the soul of the dead person across one of the five rivers, the Styx being the most famous one, into the underworld and the coin, along with proper burial or cremation, was to ensure he would be able to pay his fare down that dark river. Yet Charon was a moody and unreliable fellow and often he could not even be trusted; when you are looking the other way or enjoying the after-world scenery, he could push you into the river for no apparent reason.

After death, the corpse would be washed and anointed with oil and perfumes, which was usually done either by slaves or by undertakers. Then the body would be dressed in the person's best clothes and displayed in the atrium for all to come and mourn.

Funerals had started as a nocturnal tradition, but later richer Romans preferred the day, so that they could give sumptuous funerals to impress others and display both the riches and the popularity of the person in question. The poorer people who could not afford elaborate and costly rites usually held their funerals at night, in secret, where nobody could see them and their lack of display went by unnoticed.

The funeral was usually held on the ninth day after death and was headed by musicians. In memory of the deceased often theater actors and buffoons were hired to represent the character and personality of the deceased by imitating his words and actions in his memory. So much for speaking well of the departed. Sometimes women, called praeficae, were hired to wail and cry in grief; these were so-called professional wailers who had their own calling cards for funeral services.

Female relatives and friends would usually mourn and lament in loud wailing voices, beat their breast and tear their hair. Men were mourning too, but were careful not to show their feelings and control emotional outbursts, since a public display of emotion was considered effeminate. Romans were quite "macho" in this respect.

The deceased would be carried along in a coffin or a stretcher, and the last rites would be performed outside of the city, where the body would be either buried or cremated along with objects that belonged to him, that he held dear and that he could possibly need in the afterlife. Not only his teddy bear, but also objects like combs and gel so he could still look good and spiffy in the afterlife.

While cremations became more common in later Roman times, especially during the Republic, the poor continued with burials. Burials became a more common and widespread practice after the growing influence of Christianity. Yet Christianity had a different perspective of how funerals should be held and barred buffoons and professional wailers from this ceremony; in other words, dying became a dead serious matter.

Kant’s Dogmatic Slumbers: CPR for Metaphysics

When reason and scientific thought were dominant, when Hume's skeptical ideas were widely accepted and religion and idealism were steadily losing ground, that's when Kant appears on the scene and gives a long-awaited, enlivening shot into the arm of metaphysics. Kant himself claimed that it was thanks to Hume that he was awoken from his “dogmatic slumbers.”

Up to that point, Kant was a follower of Leibniz, but with Hume human knowledge and experience came under threat, and life offered no certainties or truths. As a result, Kant made it his philosophical mission to reconcile scientific thought with the not trendy unscientific Platonic notions of the times and to rescue human knowledge from the growing abyss of doubt.

How did he go about it? For the scientists, Newton had been their long-awaited Savior. “God said let Newton be,” Alexander Pope gloriously exclaimed. Everyone was caught up in a physical mechanical explanation, the mathematical ways of the world. Everything can be reduced to cause and effect, which was the magical universal formula.

Kant was into absolute statements and shunned the relativist point of view of the humanists as well as the skeptical outlook. Truth should not be simply useful, it should be true and valid in all cases and without exceptions. So what did he do after he actually “woke up,” after Instant Karma hit him over the head, as John Lennon would say?

He spent all his time and energy to come up with a coherent theory, which would both fit into the scientific worldview, yet at the same keep idealism apart and intact. It was, so-to-speak, an updated version of what Plato intended to prove more than two millennia before Kant. The latter clothed Plato's theory in modern jargon and made it more resonant and consistent with our modern day beliefs.

In fact, Kant's idea in a nutshell is simple and straightforward. There are two kinds of events in the world. The one we mostly refer too is called phenomena. This can be equated with Plato's illusory world of shadows and appearances. All such physical events have an underlying cause. Natural laws, such as gravity, apply to these events at all times. So far, it seems to embrace a materialistic point of view, which would make Newton smile.

Yet then he adds that there is another set of events called noumena. These events are un-caused and separate from natural laws. They are how things really are ("das Ding an sich"), the Superior Reality that Plato describes when all is seen in the light of the illuminating sun.

An example of a noumenon would be free will. We are all free to decide and hence always responsible for our actions. According to Kant, it is not only what is observable, our behavior, that defines us, but more so, our mental representations and intentions; they actually reveal much more about us. There is also what he calls the Transcendental Ego, that part of us that would most resemble a soul. This is however different from an empirical ego, the storehouse of our sensations and mental contents; the Transcendental Ego has no content; it is pure thought and hence 100% noumenon.

In other words, yes, there is another plane of existence not one far away from us but actually within us. Science cannot delve into those mysteries because it lacks tools for it. Science can only observe and make laws about phenomena and that's as far as it can get. So the question whether God exists or not is not a valid scientific question. One cannot prove nor falsify the existence of God or a spiritual entity simply because these questions all belong to the world of noumena.

Some might not be convinced yet about the contributions to philosophy and even psychology that Kant's views bring. According to Kant, the mind is active in creating and organizing our worldview, a point of view that strongly influenced Jean Piaget. Our mind is not simply passively taking in information, yet it is quite involved in shaping our thoughts and our opinions. In fact, it is actually the objects that conform themselves to our understanding. These thoughts and impressions are later categorized in what Piaget later called "schemata.”

We can see that Kant rescued us from a dilemma that would have engulfed idealism once and for all. It is not saved yet, but there are many who try hard to make others see that there is more to human beings than all that is visible and scientifically and rationally explained. There is another part that simply defies logic, that knows no boundaries, that cannot be explained and tracked down by science and that is, after all, pure noumenon.