The predators and prey of the ancient world of our ancestral hominids are not the same as the predators and prey of the modern concrete jungle. The methods and tools have changed. Predators have evolved and adapted to the new realm of the modern world. Muscle, claw, fang, speed and agility of the ancient, wooded, dense jungle has been replaced by the language, laws, critical thinking, abstract constructions, manipulations and the mathematics of the concrete jungle of modern human civilization. It is this distinction between brawn and brain that is the foundation for understanding the transition from érōs through philía and into agápē.
There is a basic “which came first, the chicken or the egg” question regarding biological evolution and character development with respect to the events leading up to modern humans and the function of learning as a facilitator of characterological change. Reflecting on the fact that language plays a critical function in the learning processes of modern humans, language did not occur until the voice box of our ancient ancestral hominids shifted to its current location. On the surface, it appears self-evident that the biological change had to occur before language could develop to the robust status it holds today.
Further reflection brings us to consider that our ancient ancestral hominids were thinking before that biological shift occurred. They hunted and gathered food. They had to locate suitable shelter. They had many obstacles that needed to be overcome and defenses to implement. It is my contention that they improved upon these activities as they gained more experiences. Learning, while we perceive it to be closely connected to language, was occurring before the advent of vocalized language as we understand it today.
If thinking and learning were happening daily before the shifting of the voice box, then is it not possible that the continued need to improve and increase thinking and learning might have stimulated the shifting of the voice box? To put this into current science and evolutionary terms, those hominids that were more involved in thinking and learning tended to survive better and have more offspring that had a greater probability to survive over offspring of others. Moving along with the ideas of adaptation, survival of the fittest and other explanations of how evolution works, the shifting of the voice box greatly facilitated the advancement of language development. Exactly when the larynx dropped down to its current location in modern humans is not known to me. Current researchers of the evolution of language in hominids compare modern human anatomy to that of our nonhuman hominid counterparts and highlight three unique characteristics differentiating our anatomy from our primate cousins. Nonhuman primates have a higher positioning of the larynx. The lower position of our larynx together with an increased thoracic innervation and laryngeal air sacs allows modern humans to make the diverse sounds (phonemes) necessary for our language production. The repositioning of the larynx from that of our ancient hominid ancestors is considered to be a significant development that promoted language development.
The invention and advancement of language greatly facilitated the exchange of one individual’s thinking with another individual who could likewise share his or her thoughts — communications grew in number and depth as thinking and learning likewise grew in its sophistication. This is all too obvious when considering the advancement of those ancient ancestral hominids to their modern human progeny of today’s world. Add to this line of thinking that individuals who were doing more thinking and learning were more successful than others who were doing less thinking and learning and therefore were more attractive to mates who were attentive to the stimuli that differentiated those individuals. When males and females who were doing more thinking, learning and attempting to communicate mated together, the chances of passing along the DNA involved in those activities would be passed along to future generations. Additionally, and this is for sure a speculation, biological mutations occurring within this group might have urged along the process for shifting the voice box to its current position. So which came first the shifting of the voice box or the attempt and great desire to communicate more?
To attempt to get clarity on these matters, focus on the birthing of the offspring. The newborn hominid knows very little about the reality of the world into which he/she is born. Every offspring has much to develop and much to learn. Reality preceded me and it will persist beyond my passing. While I am a part of reality, I am not Reality. While I am part of the universe for a relatively very short time, I am not The Universe. This is true of all hominid offspring. In truth, this is true of all living creatures.
That being the state of my birth, my first stage was to learn about the environment into which I was born. My first task was to begin to learn how to survive the reality that surrounds me. Learning starts with reality. Perception is taking in the stimuli generated by our environment and heeding the stimuli triggered by my biochemical and neurological interaction with the reality surrounding me. Perception is the first step in dealing with reality. Awareness is attending to that stimulus. As I attend to different stimuli, I begin to note what relationships exist between the many stimuli that have my attention. An early stimulus to which all normal, healthy offspring respond is the feeding feedback loop. I got hungry, the discomfort I felt was most likely communicated with my crying. At other times, when happy and content, I may have cooed. Cooing and crying are forms of communication, but they are not what we now consider to be language. So I communicated without language. My body and brain had to grow and develop. My body and my brain would go through growth spurts. My brain was not developed fully when I was first born, but there would be a considerable burst of brain growth early after my birth. The small head size makes for an easier delivery for the mother.
Awareness of what parts of reality I perceive is not enough to foster development. A degree of reflection is required to make associations between clusters of stimuli to which I attend. Reflection is a state of musing over or contemplating what has been perceived and finding meaning in that stimuli. Perception, awareness, and reflection leads to the action taken by the individual as he or she learns. Additional reflection upon the consequences of actions taken and their roots in that individual’s perceptions along with their original musings facilitates further learning and refines judgements regarding appropriate actions which will benefit rather than harm. Overall learning is cumulative. What I learn today is integrated into what I have learned in days past and serves to verify or dispute or alter what I believe to be true about the reality into which I have been born. Perception, awareness, and reflection can likewise be applied toward the internal perceptions of reality embraced and built upon by my learning. The totality of what I have learned correctly or incorrectly about the reality into which I was born and the reflections and conclusions about that cumulative learning constitutes my consciousness. A sense of self apart from the mass of humanity populating the reality of which we are all a part is a component of consciousness. A simple demonstration of what I understand consciousness to be is to observe Ginger, my border collie, when we watch movies on the TV screen. Ginger watches the images on the screen and at times reacts to the movie. She will growl, bark, or look at us to see if we are reacting to potential dangers portrayed in the movie. In short, she reacts as though the movie and the images are real. My consciousness of the movie and Ginger’s consciousness of that same movie is not the same. I am more conscious of the reality of our experience than Ginger is.
Consciousness is critical. It is critical in understanding érōs, philía and agápē. A child’s consciousness is not as robust as the consciousness of a fully functional adult human. Just as the newborn’s body must grow and develop so too must the consciousness of that life grow and develop. Perception, attending, reflecting, and meditating about one’s cumulative learning, as well as making judgements and evaluating results, lead to a developing and expanding consciousness.
Not much consciousness is required by érōs. The ANS breeding and feeding feedback loop governs the lust inherent in breeding. Consciousness, however, is more important with issues of philía. Character traits related to philía include loyalty, companionship, cooperation, dependability and more. When érōs is infused with philía, the individual seeking to mate with another must transmit stimuli which demonstrates his or her ability to be loyal, cooperative, dependable and more. The individual seeking a mate must be able to discern or perceive that stimuli demonstrating loyalty, dependability, cooperation and other related character aspects required for a match. Polar bears, as we have seen, do not need a high level of consciousness above the needs of érōs. Sufficient copulation appeared to be all that was needed from the mating pair. Consequently, the ‘love affair’ is brief. When sufficient copulation has occurred even though the pair may linger for a brief time, polar bears quickly proceed upon their separate journeys. That said, it must be highlighted that some consciousness is required to overcome the severe aggressiveness inherent in the males which portends severe danger. Both males and females must be conscious of this potential outcome. Upon meeting, the potential breeding pair must perceive and attend to pertinent stimuli which will lead to disaster or congenial cooperation. It appears that cardinals and bald eagles have more requirements for being a mating pair. As requirements increase, the level of consciousness increases as there is a greater need for better judgments when choosing a mate.
Sidebar: The focus here is to use some known facts about mating pairs of animals to demonstrate the distinction between érōs and philía and how consciousness plays a role in distinguishing the movement from érōs into philía. My sole purpose at this point is to find a way to communicate the relationship between érōs, philía and different levels of consciousness. My purpose is not to accurately describe the authentic, definitive, internal consciousness of polar bears, cardinals, or bald eagles. The main focus is the movement from érōs through philía and into agápē experienced over time through the evolutionary path traversed by modern human beings.
It is my contention that agápē cannot be achieved without a higher level of consciousness than that required by philía. The consciousness that agápē requires must meaningfully and accurately evaluate conflicts between what has been taught, instilled, and demanded by significant others and what has been learned as a contradiction of the views propagated by those in such powerful places. The level of consciousness must be sufficient to allow the individual to transcend the concerns pertinent to judgements regarding philía traits of loyalty, companionship, cooperation, dependability and related characteristics.
The inspiration triggering this reflection passed through my consciousness as I laid on my deathbed facing my current wife as she was watching some movie on our flat screen. I had taken my last meds for the day and was pain free, calm and comfortable waiting for sleep to cloak my vision of her peaceful countenance. Before sleep came, a warm, soothing feeling quietly seeped into every part of me. I was totally filled with how important and wonderful she was in the quiet of the night. I thought of my love for her. I thought of all of the history that we have shared, the struggles, the triumphs, the laughs and the tears of pain. I felt that I was aware of everything without having any words.
My cognitive self now wonders if I had a moment in which I was attending to the total reality of my life but without any accompanying language. I was suspended for a moment or two in the totality of my reality. Words fail me here. A poem is needed. The totality of my reality was her reality and mine shared but not as a past tense, nor as a present tense, nor as a future tense; but as a condition of being. My reality and her reality were not separate but I was crystal clear that I was separate from her as she was certainly separate from me. The reality that I felt was neither fragmented nor disjointed. It was wholly integrated and uniquely distinctive regarding identities. Once this pregnant, fleeting moment passed the only best cognition that I could muster was “love.” I was aware of my love for her, but that does not adequately capture my moment of pregnant awareness. For many years I have been telling my wife how much I love her. This moment was more than that. Almost instantly after the word “love” formed in my thinking, a question in bold letters formed: What is agápē?
Hopefully, the groundwork has been laid. It is an absolute fact that I could not have answered this question as a child. Erōs, philía and agápē were not anywhere in my consciousness. I would first need to live through the vast experiences of my life that transported me to my college classes in Greek mythology and civilization and then to my deathbed when I gazed upon my second wife to know the deep reality of our relationship. I needed to work through the many perceptions, understandings, concepts, reflections, and insights of those experiences that grew and expanded my current consciousness. For me, I had to journey this far before my consciousness juxtaposed the loving of my second wife with the posed question, “What is agápē?” as I laid quietly and comfortably upon my deathbed.
I am not a saint. I have always owned that I am a sinner like all other human beings are sinners. We are all sinners because we all must learn and we learn from our mistakes. (Unless of course we refuse to learn from those mistakes in which case we remain ignorant of our erring behaviors.) It is not in my consciousness that saints are born saints. Christians and other religious individuals may derive and maintain their comfort in their understanding that I am just an unfortunate soul who has not been bequeathed with the gift of faith in which case the fault would not be mine, unless, of course, I have rejected the gift once offered. To the contrary, for those of you who have read Deathbed Reflections (2020), you have had the opportunity to perceive that my experiences with the Roman Catholic Church presented me with a very different understanding of evil and good in the world.
As a naive offspring I traveled through my childhood more or less as a normal male seeking to explore the world working to outgrow infantile narcissistic tendencies. Household rules, parental guidance, religious affiliations, and education wore away much of my childhood narcissism and imbedded a respect for law and order. When the rules were broken, consequences occurred. Those consequences were never pleasant. I struggled as an average male child right up to and through my years of puberty. Once off to college, I was pretty much on my own to fend for myself under the authority and the powers present in the world at large.
My years of puberty demanded that I cope with the force of érōs nagging relentlessly at my being. I sincerely believe this to be true of all males suffering varying degrees of aggravation. However, my aggravating érōs did not emerge into an environmental and social atmosphere like that of my ancient ancestral hominids, especially before the onset of language and villages. They had to survive more on brawn and less on brain even though they needed a good brain to thrive. I survive more on my brain even though I must not be perceived as a weakling physically or in demeanor. Competition among adolescents and adults is still formidable.
Reflecting upon issues of attractiveness leads to an understanding of the emergence and balancing effects of philía in tempering érōs. When it pertains to érōs, attractiveness in a mate is fused to survival. Recall that the brightness of the male cardinal’s red feathers is attractive because it cues the male’s foraging ability to find food high in nutrients that render the male’s bright red color. The black face mask of both the male and female cardinal is attractive depending on its size. A large black mask of the female is a good feature whereas a large mask on the male is not a good feature. There would have been features of male and female ancient ancestral hominids that would have been attractive to prospective mates based upon survival responsibilities of each mate and the roles each mate plays in the relationship of each in the mating pair.
Like offspring of my ancient ancestral hominids, I was first awakened sexually by the rawness of érōs. Attractiveness regarding females was mostly physical in nature. Advertisements, peer group opinions, movies, music and the vast stimuli radiating from all other forms of media as well as proclamations from authority and religious figures all put forth the array of stimuli targeting myself and other youth coping with the newness of hormonal transformations. Physical beauty was the dominant criteria determining attractiveness. With the accumulation of experience of trying to connect with females in the dating process, I began to form other criteria of attractiveness. How some females acted in the dating relationship as opposed to others led to a discrimination of stimuli that represented more characteristics of philía than physical characteristics prompted by érōs.
Loyalty became a high priority and has remained so. To this day, among adult mated pairs, breaches of loyalty (especially involving issues of érōs) are grounds for divorce with the offender in the weakest position legally. In the high school dating arena, males and females who chose to “go steady” meant that “fooling around” with other males or females was taboo. If caught, the break up would ensue; the culprit of the breach was proclaimed, and reputations began to be formed. Kids talked. Girls talked among themselves as did the boys. Dating pairs talked with each other and eventually “the word” got around. Going back again to the polar bears, cardinals, and the bald eagles, modern homo sapiens have more criteria which may form the basis of attractiveness. Loyalty is one criteria that distinguishes modern humans from polar bears but not from bald eagles and cardinals. Loyalty is more a part of philía than érōs because loyalty is not required for copulation, pregnancy, and birth. However, loyalty can make or break a mating pair.
Loyalty is only one of many possible criteria defining the presence or absence or degree of philía in a modern human relationship between mated pairs. Other criteria would include reliability, truthfulness, honesty, and intelligence. Attractiveness of one potential mate to another directly correlates with the required criteria stored in the consciousness of those potential mates. A match of attractiveness occurs when such criteria is present and valued by both prospective potential mates. The dating process, courtship, and engagement serves to discover, assert, and verify that the required criteria is truly present in the existing relationship and has all of the signs of being maintained throughout the future of that relationship.
I have journeyed through the awakening of eros during my years of puberty. I have stumbled and danced through my high school and college years of dating. I have been through courtships that moved unsuccessfully toward marriage to finally achieve participation in a Roman Catholic marriage ceremony to sire twin sons only to struggle through a heart breaking, life-wrenching divorce. After gaining appropriate control over the aggravating harassment by the force of eros to dominate my focus, I began to attend to other issues that significantly pertained to the process of modern human mating. The attractiveness of modern males to females is related to the male’s ability to provide the necessities required to survive in the modern world of Homo sapiens. High school dating does not focus absolutely upon the ability to earn money. This does not mean that money did not play a strong role in high school dating. Having your own car to drive to school did have an important influence with some high school females. The amount of funds that the male could access for dating also played significantly in the ability to attract those females who were pursued by most of the males. There were other elements which attracted females: good looks, athleticism, displayed dominance within the peer group, overall popularity, wit (verbal come-backs) and others. I clump these attributes in the “this male is most likely to succeed” category. This category is about “this male will help me to survive in the world.”
I knew that I would have to step up and demonstrate that I possessed all of the necessary requirements to provide for my woman. Again, it must be noted, highlighted, and remembered that issues concerning survival are central and paramount in choosing a mate. For modern humans, the issue of surviving is centered on money. Money is the avenue for surviving. If you have zero means to procure money, then your chances of surviving in the modern world is greatly diminished. The opposite is also true. The more money you can access, the greater is your ability to survive and thrive.
I often wondered why some junior high and high school females maneuver males into situations in which the boys feel obliged to fight over the female attracting their attention. Physical prowess of males in junior high and high school seemed to attract some of the more sought after females. Weighing in at a puny 118 pounds, I was a skinny weakling. To my surprise, however, some girls were not attracted to aggressive males. Could this attractiveness toward physical confrontations be rooted in the necessity for our ancient ancestral male hominids to be physically superior as a required protection from other aggressive males and predators roaming the wild jungle before language and villages became commonplace? Why were some modern females not interested in, or even repulsed by, physical aggression? Was not the ability to protect still an important requirement and therefore a strong source of attractiveness?
Shelter, as a form of protection, shields us from the natural elements of wind, rain, snow, intruding animals and predators, etcetera. So, protection, as an issue of survival, is still paramount to modern females looking for a satisfactory mate. However, protection is not so dependent upon physical prowess but more importantly is dependent upon the ability to earn money. Money buys protection in the form of purchasing and maintaining a home in a gated community with a private security force to oversee the protection of all residences. Some females may have turned their focus away from brawn and onto the brain. We should consider this shift more deeply.
As modern humans, our living experience is very far removed from the daily experience of our ancient ancestral hominids before they lived in villages. We take for granted our language and all of our social institutions. We live as though all of what constitutes our daily lives has always been the reality of life. This is not so and it will take effort to attempt to understand the ramifications of our development into the modern concrete jungle of laws from the wild wooded jungle of our ancestral hominids. If necessity is the mother of invention or innovation, then protection may have been the cause for the development of villages.
A small family group wandering the wild wooded jungle must depend upon the physical prowess of the strongest male. When one small family group joins up with another small family group in a cooperating fashion whereby all individuals work to support the group in general, then protection from an outside threatening force is increased. Groups of individuals cooperating together greatly improves the efficiency of hunting and gathering chores as well as improving the ability to protect the group. If cooperation between individuals improves protection, hunting, and gathering, then the need to cooperate may have also stimulated the evolution of language since language facilitates the ability to cooperate and coordinate individuals as they work together to achieve a common goal. With the domestication of animals and plants, the need to wander lessened and the need to stay stationary to tend to fields of planted crops increased. In his Ascent of Man series, Jacob Brownski explains that the domestication of plants and animals and the development of villages produced a surplus of food which needed to be stored. I understood his explanation in this fashion. As hominids learned and cooperated, the necessity to resolve new issues arose which necessitated more learning to develop better ways of cooperating to offset new challenges. The brain and intelligence were quickly challenging physical prowess as a dominant feature for improving survival.