12-22-09: Ideas

I don’t know at what age I became interested in Ideas and the history of ideas. By Idea I mean a complex of philosophy, science, history, sociology, religion and philology. I still remember that at the age of six or seven I started reading about this complex ensemble in Urdu. Only when I reached, I think the age of fourteen or so, when I was in a position to read about these topics in English. I still remember reading about Omar Khaiyam in Urdu where the writer says that Omar Khaiyam was deeply influenced by Socrates and his concept that what he did know was that he did not know anything. That is to say that the very truth of knowledge remains hidden from us and what we try to ascertain is mainly the concepts around that fundamental truth. This concept, I think, is nothing to do with the idea that either we cannot reach the depth of truth or that we remain blissfully ignorant of truth. The humans are so constituted that they always try to know what is around them, external to them, and also inside them. The sense of exploration and the attempts, techniques and methods to devise exploring ways is fundamental to all the inventions and discoveries which the human species has made since last 20-30000 years of their existence on earth. The human brain has been developing much before the homo sapiens became modern man. Most likely around 2,00,000 years ago when modern man was still a hominid, a pre-human. We don’t know exactly when tools made out of stones were invented. But this much we know that the tool-making faculty is present in some mammals. There is it seems a strong relationship between tool-making and the complex concepts which I associate with ideas. As the human hand and human brain developed together to tackle the outside world, the dexterity started creeping in both the hands and to brain.

What I am trying to elaborate is precisely not a very starling discovery or such thing. If we study, e.g. ancient Mesopotamian relics which include pictograms and the Mesopotamian writings we can see that about 5000 years before the human brain had started speculating about things which they encounter and experience in their day to day living. Prior to such discoveries when early man used to live in caves to protect themselves against the inclement weather, they drew beautiful drawings on cave walls. These drawings depicted animals, tools, humans and demigods. Some of these drawings still show the color which they used to make these drawings. Miraculously enough these colors has survived some 25-30000 years. These drawings further show that human brain was taking leaps on evolutionary steps. We are now getting to know that ancient humans sort of anticipated what is going to happen next. This is perhaps a momentous discovery, a discovery which made proto-man a modern man. They understood that if a beast was around there was a possibility that it would attack them. If the clouds gathered on the sky, then there was a chance that rain would come. They anticipated that when a female is going to give birth; and how she is going to wean the child. This needed protection of that pregnant female. As a matter of fact, such protection is seen also in other animals. But not in such an elaborate manner which humans have shown and still show.

Idea, or a complex of ideas, are not easy to grasp in a absolutely rational manner. Man has to use what could be called the inner voice to explore ideas. If we study ancient poets and philosophers, we can see how they have groped their way through the mesh of ideas. Sometimes they draw foolish conclusions and sometimes they were so modern that we wonder. It was Freud who first gave us the concept of unconscious, which is innermost layer of our brain. The unconscious is meant to store all sorts of information, good or bad, harmless or harmful, and often when you use our conscious brain to know a thing, it can sort of deceive us. He developed these concepts in a elaborate manner and studied history, religion, sociology etc. through this. His disciple, Jung accepted this unconscious part of brain, but he differed largely from his master’s basic ideas, which were largely sexual in orientation. After his getting away from Freudian concept he developed a vibrant theory that the unconscious stores archetypes and mythical concepts. Further the unconscious expresses itself in the form of archetypes and myths.

Mythology is a fascinating aspect in the history of ideas. Mythology is, if they are explored in a more, should we say rational manner, it provides us many answers to what happened much before historical concepts developed. There is little doubt that the historical concepts were deeply entwined with their religious and sociological concepts.

The history of ideas is an ongoing process and it keeps revealing to us many strange beautiful and even dangerous aspects of our evolutionary history. Truly speaking we are not very much aware in a concrete sense, what proto-humans or hominids were about 200,000 years ago. However it seems that if we keep looking at mythologies and related phenomenon, we would be perhaps in a position to know what and how we started developing, albeit, very slowly towards turning into modern man.