”Man depends entirely [on exterior objects for] his physical and sensual ideas. One cannot deny that he carries in him all the faculties that are analogous to the objects that he can know, for what are all our discoveries if not the intimate view and the secret feeling of the relation that exists between our own light and those things; however, we can have no idea of a sensible object if that object doesn’t communicate to us its impressions, and we have the proof of this in that a defect of our senses deprives us, either completely or in part, of the knowledge of those objects. […] It is therefore certain that regarding sensible objects and their analogous ideas, man is in a complete servitude.” (Tableau Naturel des rapports qui existent entre Dieu, l’homme et l’univers, ed. DRC p.25)

The idea of man’s complete servitude, the enslavement of his mind by the society, culture, and world in which he is born and lives can be traced back to another famous thinker: Plato. In Book 7 of the Republic, Plato lays out his allegory of the cave, conversing with Socrates:

”- And now, I said, let me show in a figure how far our nature is enlightened or unenlightened:--Behold! human beings living in an underground den, which has a mouth open towards the light and reaching all along the den; here they have been from their childhood, and have their legs and necks chained so that they cannot move, and can only see before them, being prevented by the chains from turning round their heads. Above and behind them a fire is blazing at a distance, and between the fire and the prisoners there is a raised way; and you will see, if you look, a low wall built along the way, like the screen which marionette players have in front of them, over which they show the puppets.

- I see.

- And do you see, I said, men passing along the wall carrying all sorts of vessels, and statues and figures of animals made of wood and stone and various materials, which appear over the wall? Some of them are talking, others silent.

- You have shown me a strange image, and they are strange prisoners.

- Like ourselves, I replied; and they see only their own shadows, or the shadows of one another, which the fire throws on the opposite wall of the cave?

- True, he said; how could they see anything but the shadows if they were never allowed to move their heads?

- And of the objects which are being carried in like manner they would only see the shadows?

- Yes, he said.

- And if they were able to converse with one another, would they not suppose that they were naming what was actually before them?

- Very true.

- And suppose further that the prison had an echo which came from the other side, would they not be sure to fancy when one of the passers-by spoke that the voice which they heard came from the passing shadow?

- No question, he replied.

- To them, I said, the truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of the images.”

We are in exile without realising it — the perfect prison. If we examine our thoughts, we can see how much they are modulated and inspired by exterior contingencies, by our education, by our culture, and by our environment. Even the language we speak and think in most certainly has a huge influence on what we think. Plato goes so far as to say that even the objects of our thoughts are shadows of images (puppets) that are at best a caricature of their model, not the real thing.

When someone breaks away from the prevailing “mindset”, others (society) tend to view them as mad or a genius. These cases are relatively rare simply because our brains and thoughts are “formatted” by our circumstances, imprisoned as it were. Yet, we all have original ideas, or inspiration, but how often do we allow those ideas to surface and to actually drive our actions?

A major American philosopher, Ralph Waldo Emerson, elegantly captured this sentiment in Self-Reliance (1841):

“I read the other day some verses written by an eminent painter which were original and not conventional. The soul always hears an admonition in such lines, let the subject be what it may. The sentiment they instil is of more value than any thought they may contain. To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men,--that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost,--and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment. Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, the highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato, and Milton is that they set at naught books and traditions, and spoke not what men, but what they thought. A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for US than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility then most when the whole Cry of voices is on the other side. Else, tomorrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.”

Ideas of pure intellectual objects

Now what about ideas of objects that have no existence in the world of senses, or that do not relate directly to the objects our sense relate? When you think of a square, you image a geometrical figure that has no existence as such in the natural world; more abstract ideas, like justice or beauty do not require us to think of an individual case of justice or injustice, or of a beautiful or ugly object to understand what we are talking about. More-so, the idea of God, except in the case of idolatry, has no mental representation and even less a physical one.

Saint-Martin, again:

”Independently of the ideas that man forms daily about perceptible objects through the action of these objects on his senses, he has ideas of another class, of a law, of a Power that directs the Universe and those material objects; he has the idea of the order that presides over it; he is even drawn, as if by a natural movement, towards the harmony that seems to produce and drive them.
He cannot create a single idea, yet he has that of a superior strength and wisdom, which is at the same time the end of all laws, the bond of all harmony, the pivot and the centre from which emanate and where end all the Virtues of Beings.
If these ideas form an absolutely different class from those we have of material things; if no material object can produce them; since the most perfect animals do not announce any similar, although they live, just as man does, amongst these objects; if, at the same time, no idea in man arises but through exterior means, this signifies that man is in a total dependance, for his intellectual as for his sensible ideas, and that, in both orders, although he has the seed of all these ideas in him, he is forced to wait for exterior reactions to animate and produce them. He is neither master, nor author of these ideas, and despite the intent of concentrating on a particular object, he cannot be sure to fulfil his goal without being distracted by a thousand foreign ideas.
We are all exposed to involuntarily receiving these disorderly, painful and importunate ideas that pursue us, in spite of us, with worries, doubts of all kind, that interfere with our most satisfying intellectual pleasures.” (Natural Table, pp: 26—27)

As Saint-Martin points out, man is in a complete dependence: he depends on exterior objects to form ideas, but one may add that he depends on contingencies throughout every aspect of his life. A major contingency is death, of course, but not it’s the only one: you may plan to become a professional football player, and irremediably injure your knee; or to organise a barbecue and it rains, etc.

According to Plato, man even depends on a guide to be pulled “out of the cave”:

”And now look again, and see what will naturally follow if the prisoners are released and disabused of their error. At first, when any of them is liberated and compelled suddenly to stand up and turn his neck round and walk and look towards the light, he will suffer sharp pains; the glare will distress him, and he will be unable to see the realities of which in his former state he had seen the shadows; and then conceive some one saying to him, that what he saw before was an illusion, but that now, when he is approaching nearer to being and his eye is turned towards more real existence, he has a clearer vision,--what will be his reply? And you may further imagine that his instructor is pointing to the objects as they pass and requiring him to name them,--will he not be perplexed? Will he not fancy that the shadows which he formerly saw are truer than the objects which are now shown to him?
[…]
And suppose once more, that he is reluctantly dragged up a steep and rugged ascent, and held fast until he is forced into the presence of the sun himself, is he not likely to be pained and irritated? When he approaches the light his eyes will be dazzled, and he will not be able to see anything at all of what are now called realities.”

For Saint-Martin, where, then, do man’s “higher” ideas come from?

“[…] The intellectual faculties of man are an undeniable proof that there are […], outside of man, intellectual and thinking faculties which are analogous to his Being, that produce thoughts in him; since the motives of his thoughts do not belong to him, he can only find them in an intelligent source which has relations with his Being.”(Natural Table, p: 27)

Free will leads to Truth

So is man just a puppet? We may be dependant animals, but we are rational animals too as Aristotle said, and first and foremost, we are able to analyse ideas (an activity which we commonly refer to as thought), and decide between them according to their perceived benefit. In short, we have free will:

“However, although man is as passive in his intellectuals ideas as he is in his physical ideas, he still has the privilege to examine the ideas that are presented to him, to judge them, to adopt them, to reject them, to act according to his choices, and to hope, through an attentive and focussed walk, to reach one day the invariable pleasures of pure thought; all things that derive from the use of freedom.”(Natural Table, p: 28)

The outcome of a disciplined perusal of our free will is to reach pure thought, truth, Beauty, or to contemplate the light of the sun as Plato puts it:

“[M]y dream as it appears to me is that in the region of the known the last thing to be seen and hardly seen is the idea of good, and that when seen, it must point us to the conclusion that this is indeed the cause for all things of all that is right and beautiful, giving birth in the visible world to light, and l the author of light and itself in the intelligible world being the authentic source of truth and reason..." The Republic, 517b-c.

Tags: Louis Claude de Saint-Martin, Beauty, Ideas, Exile, Contemplation