Our main question, arguably, is the question of human nature, given that the main socioeconomic and sociopolitical issue of our time is the issue of social organization and social hierarchy, and in turn, hierarchy revolves around the individual human nature, with the “essence” being at the heart of human nature. It is therefore individual human nature which determines a person’s place in the overall social organization and social hierarchy. And as mentioned before, the essence is largely spiritual in nature.
And in terms of an examination or rumination over the spirit or soul, our starting point is of course Aristotle. In turn, the starting point for Aristotle himself was the two basic characteristics of the soul, namely, movement and sensation. To borrow from Aristotle: “The starting-point of our inquiry is an exposition of those characteristics which have chiefly been held to belong to soul in its very nature. Two characteristic marks have above all others been recognized as distinguishing that which has soul in it from that which has not – movement and sensation. It may be said that these two are what our predecessors have fixed upon as characteristic of soul.”
And if human nature is all about soul and soul is all about movement, it follows that this movement of the soul is essentially a movement through various degrees and states of being, or “mental states.” The whole of human nature is the collection or the whole of these mental states. To borrow from Hume: “I may venture to affirm of…mankind, that they are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity and are in a perpetual flux or movement.”
In a word, thought. To borrow from Spinoza:
“Since man is a created, finite thing, and so on, it is necessary that what he has of thought, and what we call the soul, is a mode of that attribute we call thought, without any thing other than this mode belonging to his essence; so much so that if this mode perishes, the soul is also destroyed, although the preceding attribute remains immutable.”
It follows that man retains his true nature as long as he retains the attribute of thought. Without thought, man and his true nature perishes, as Spinoza contended. But thought is of course a priori to the individual and his nature, in the sense that even if man and his true nature perishes, thought remains intact. To borrow from Descartes yet again: “Cogito, ergo sum” (“I think, therefore I am”). And in reality, the body and sensation are merely an “extension” of movement and thought. The body and sensation encompass the attribute or characteristic of “extension” in the sense that both body and sensation are an “extension” of the original attribute and characteristic of movement and thought. Moreover, the reality is the thought, and in turn, the thought is made manifest in the mode of an “idea” to borrow from Spinoza. In sum, everything stems from a thought. For the reality is that “no other mode which would belong to the essence of the soul of each thing, except the idea, which must be of such a thing as really existing, and which must exist in the thinking attribute. For such an idea brings with it the remaining modes of love, desire, and the like.”
Adam A. Azim 