Humans Don't Love the True Knowing and Truth. We Love Myths and
Dreams
According to Aristotle, we are a specie endowed with the
thirst of learning. «All men by nature desire to know»,
he wrote, in his Metaphysics.
But the love to knowing can be seen in a much less
extolling view. Frequently we are too absorbed with our
ideas, illusions and dreams, or with our sons, consorts
and business, without time or will to spy through the
holes that give access to the other side of life and to
other levels of knowing.
What we love most is not the true knowing, or truth. The
knowing we like is the immediate and conventional one.
It’s the knowing that feeds our capacity of survival and
our relationships with others. A knowing often mingled
with myth and dream.
To worsen our predispositions, when a stronger impulse
comes into our life and incites us to peep through the
holes of life to the other side of things, we often
don’t like of what we see. We distinguish uncomfortable
and threatening realities – weaknesses, limitations,
emptiness, wars, death…- or realities too complex and
incomprehensible. And we run away.
Most of the times we prefer the dreaming and the myth -
the myth that we are strong, that we are children of God
(instead of descendants of apes), that we are at the
centre of the universe, that our country is the best of
all, or that man… has the love of knowing.
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Quotations
Men, Knowing and Myth
For what a man had rather were true he more readily
believes. Therefore he rejects difficult things from
impatience of research; sober things, because they narrow
hope; the deeper things of nature, from superstition; the
light of experience, from arrogance and pride; things not
commonly believed, out of deference to the opinion of the
vulgar. Numberless in short are the ways, and sometimes
imperceptible, in which the affections colour and infect the
understanding.
Francis Bacon, 1561-1626, English philosopher and
politician, Novum Organon
In religion and politics people's beliefs and convictions
are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without
examination, from authorities who have not themselves
examined the questions at issue but have taken them at
second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about
them were not worth a brass farthing.
Mark Twain, 1835-1919, American writer, Autobiography
Men are nearly always willing to believe what’s their wish.
Julius
Cesar, 100-44 b.C., Roman emperor, De Bello Gallico
All men are liable to error; and most men are, in many
points, by passion or interest, under temptation to it.
John Locke, 1632-1704, English philosopher, Essay
concerning the Human Understanding
False opinions are like false money, struck first of all by
guilty men and thereafter circulated by honest people who
perpetuate the crime without knowing what they are doing.
Joseph de Maistre, 1753-1821, French writer, Les Soirées
de Saint-Pétersbourg
Our I is a liar capable of persuade himself of his own
sincerity.
E. Morin, French philosopher and sociologist, Method V
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