The ‘instinct vs intellect’ explanation is obvious, as thinkers throughout history evidence
“I once read that the great philosophers each had an acute grasp of their own small piece of an unthinkably huge and interlocking puzzle, but nobody has ever put the pieces together into a single coherent system. Well, that is no longer the case because Jeremy Griffith provides that great unifying, make-sense-of-everything synthesis.”
Professor Harry Prosen, a former President of the Canadian Psychiatric Association, in his Introduction to FREEDOM: The End Of The Human Condition.
Great thinkers throughout history have identified the basic ‘instinct vs intellect’ elements involved in producing the human condition, but it required Jeremy Griffith’s extraordinary denial-free approach to explain the critically important, reconciling and redeeming, good biological reason WHY the ‘war’ occurred
There have been many other thinkers throughout history who, like biologist Jeremy Griffith, have recognised that our divisive, competitive and aggressive human condition is a product of a clash between our instincts and intellect. Such thinkers include Moses, Plato and Hesiod, and in more recent times, Richard Heinberg, Eugène Marais, Laurens van der Post, Nikolai Berdyaev, Erich Neumann, Paul MacLean, Arthur Koestler, Julian Jaynes and Bruce Chatwin.
However, what was missing from the analysis of all these other thinkers was the ability to explain WHY this conflict occurred — which is that while gene-based naturally selected instincts give species orientations to the world, only the nerve-based conscious intellect can understand cause and effect and thus manage change; so when the fully conscious mind emerged and began managing change from a basis of understanding the instincts were in effect intolerant of such experiments, putting them at odds with the intellect. This understanding of WHY the conflict between our instincts and intellect occurred that Jeremy Griffith presents in Video/Freedom Essay 3 is all-important because it is only this clarifying, redeeming and reconciling explanation of the nature of the struggle between our instinctive self and conscious self that at last brings peace to our divided selves, and transforms the human race.
Watch Jeremy Griffith reveal the many thinkers throughout history — indeed many of the acknowledged great thinkers in history — who have recognised that the answer to our human condition lay in understanding that a clash must have occurred between our already established instincts and more recently emerged conscious mind in Video/Freedom Essay 4: The ‘instinct vs intellect’ is the obvious and real explanation of our condition, as all these great thinkers evidence.