It is increasingly common in the twenty-first century that things we thought we knew are disproven, either by scientific evidence or our own everyday experiences. There is a profound reason for this, and in an attempt to explain this reason I am writing a book, a practical guide for theorists that is now almost finished. It shows the development of the human being, its embodiment of various states of consciousness and cognitive and perceptive abilities. This evolution is investigated on a wide horizon, from the eighth millennium B.C. until our time. This wide horizon gives new insight into the course of history, including a high degree of brightness in the ‘Dark Ages’ and an ‘endarkening’ during the ‘Enlightenment.’
We are living through a lesson in humility that carries with it an impulse to transcend our current form of scientific inquiry: modern science has accomplished much, but much is also falling away from under our feet. The solid ground we were standing upon, for a few hundred years, has vanished: the loss of the ‘first principle’ of inquiry, as Dante Alighieri wrote in the fourteenth century:
“As every truth which is not a first principle is manifested by the truth of some first principle, it is necessary in every investigation to know the first principle to which we may return, in analysis, for the proof of all propositions which are subsequently assumed.” (1)
In the past decades to about 150 years ago, the first principle of scientific physicalism and philosophic positivism has fallen away, but a new first principle has not yet been established, or at least, not yet been mutually agreed upon. A relative state of panic in academia is the result and even physicists are now seating themselves on the chairs of philosophers, engaging in theoretical, abstract debates on monism, dualism and monadism in a far less productive way than how these debates took place around 1700 (e.g. Leibniz). (2)
The lesson in humility is painful because once upon a time, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there was the promise of certainty: knowledge would be objective and verifiable and certain within the new standards of modern science and natural science. This promise came from philosophers like Descartes and Kant, Comte, and from most natural scientists. I call the development of this stream the ‘Rise of Reliability.’
In the history of the evolution of human consciousness, this longing for secure knowledge was very understandable. At no point in history was consciousness as clouded as it has been since the early fifteenth century. Many a modern scholar will at first find this statement absurd. But in order to develop the intellectual capacity for abstract and reflective thinking, human beings during this time were split in two, as it were, with a sentient side and a sensory processing side. The faculties of other forms of human perception and cognition, such as suprasensory, imaginative, inspired cognitions, had to be clouded for the sake of the evolution of the reflective capacity of the “I”, the human agency of self, the source of morality and free will, the perceiving and cognizing agent. (3)
German technician and engineer Max Eyth (1836-1906) was amazed that Egyptian priests had known the number Pi π up to at least its thirtieth or fortieth decimal point. During the Egyptian era, people did not have spatial perception in the same way we do today, they had much more physical strength, and they did not yet have any abstract thinking capacities, but they did have other abilities that are clouded to us today. If an ancient Egyptian or Chaldean were to see a paper of modern science, they would not be able to understand it. When they looked at the sky at night, they saw something much more alive than what we are able to see today when we look at the sky.
In ancient India, it was known that the era of ‘Kali Yuga’ would arrive: The Dark Age of clouded consciousness, to be brought to humanity by Pramati. The ancient Greeks, a few millennia later, knew this, too. They called it Deukalion (Deu, divine and Kali, darkness, taken from Sanskrit), to be brought by Prometheus. Kali Yuga ended at the end of the nineteenth century. At this time, the few remaining so-called ‘idealistic’ thinkers struggled with illness or ended up in insane asylums. The era of abstract thinking and its societal effects had wreaked havoc in their souls: Friedrich Nietzsche, or Dostoevsky’s epilepsy, or Tolstoy’s illnesses and depression or Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov (1853-1900), who kept his fate mostly to himself until he died at age 47. Their suffering stemmed from experiences that are similar to those of Alexander the Great when he complained that he felt as if his teacher, Aristotle, was pressing together the bones of his skull – the ‘unreal’, dissociative experience of cold, abstract thinking, which reached its peak at the end of the nineteenth century. It is only this form of thinking that is tied to the physical brain, other capacities of thought, still present before the Greek era, are of non-physical origin.
In the context of the evolution of human consciousness, history starts to earn its meaning. The medieval centuries that have come to be called the ‘Dark Ages’ are seen in a perspective that makes this period look relatively bright compared to our age: Dante, Brunetto Latini, Pico della Mirandola, Raymond of Sabunde, Nicholas of Cusa, Johannes Tauler, Albertus Magnus, Jakob Boehme – they all protected the human agency of self as divine in an age when more sentient cognition had almost fully eclipsed and the existence of the “I” gradually became excluded from inquiry. In this context, the development that is called ‘the Enlightenment’, from Locke to Voltaire and Montesquieu, the process of silently separating the inner experience of morality and piety from epistemology, seems like an ‘Endarkenment.’
The past three centuries have been very illuminating, physicist Carlo Rovelli wrote recently, we have learned a lot, even though there are still many things we cannot explain, like thunder or how to prevent the flu.(2) The illumination of the brain has indeed succeeded, but the physical capacities must now be elevated in the service of the soul and spirit.
The lesson in humility and the impulse and opportunity to transcend the epistemological dead-end will continue for a long while. Abstract argument and counter-argument, defending one thesis against another thesis, will no longer bear any fruit, because the river of human evolution keeps flowing. The field of history eventually will no longer be founded upon mere external events, but instead will investigate the sacred river of human evolution in the forms, states and faculties of consciousness, subconsciousness, perception and cognition.
Isaiah 40:12:
Who has measured the waters in the hollow of his hand,
or with the breadth of his hand marked off the heavens?
Who has held the dust of the earth in a basket,
or weighed the mountains on the scales
and the hills in a balance?
New International Version
(1) Alighieri, Dante. De Monarchia. Translated by Aurelia Henry. The Riverside Press, Cambridge, 1904. pp. 5.
(2) Rovelli, Carlo. “There is No ‘Hard Problem of Consciousness'” in: Noema Magazine, May 7, 2026.
(3) See for instance: Solovyov, Vladimir Sergeyevich. The Crisis of Western Philosophy. Lindisfarne Press, Hudson, New York, 1996. First published in Russian in 1874: Krisis zapadnoī filosofii.
Written by Laura M. Slot, historian and writer with a focus on outsiders in twentieth century intellectual history. Her second book will be published Fall 2026. lauraslot.com
Citations and translations are encouraged if accompanied by a reference to this blog article.
Post image photography by Laura M. Slot 2024.