Issue 37: What We Are, What We Try to Be

What We Are, What We Try to Be

There is a point, somewhere in the long arc of prehistory, where the human being becomes visible not as a creature among others, but as a tension. It is not marked by a tool, or by fire, or by the first drawing on a cave wall. It is marked by something less visible: the distance between what we are and what we try to be.

Much of what we know about early humans comes to us as fragments—bones, tools, traces of fire, pigments on stone. From these fragments, we construct narratives. We infer intention, we project meaning, we imagine structure. It is tempting to see a steady progression: from simplicity to complexity, from instinct to reason, from nature to culture. But this progression is not smooth. It is held together by a contradiction that does not resolve.

We are shaped by a biological inheritance that we did not choose. Our bodies, our instincts, our emotional patterns—these are the result of processes that precede us by hundreds of thousands of years. They are shaped for survival within specific conditions that no longer exist in the same form. And yet, within this structure, something emerges that attempts to exceed it. It does not replace it. It moves within it.

We plan. We abstract. We imagine futures that are not yet real and act in anticipation of them. The earliest farmers planted seeds in anticipation of what was not yet there, holding in mind a sequence of events that would unfold over time. In doing so, they acted on something invisible. This capacity—to act not only in response to what is present, but in relation to what is possible—marks a decisive shift. It is not a departure from our nature, but an extension that never fully detaches from it.

The more we extend ourselves outward, the more this tension becomes apparent. We learn to control our environment with increasing precision. We cultivate land, domesticate animals, construct systems of exchange, develop tools that amplify our reach. We store knowledge outside ourselves—in language, in writing, in images—and pass it forward. Human achievement accumulates. Each generation inherits not only a biological structure, but a growing body of techniques, ideas, and representations.

And yet, this accumulation does not resolve the tension. It sharpens it.

We master the environment, but we do not master ourselves.

The same mind that can design systems of remarkable complexity remains susceptible to impulses it cannot fully account for. The same capacity for abstraction that allows us to plan also allows us to misinterpret, to project, to construct narratives that exceed the evidence. Our rationality, often taken as the defining feature of our species, operates within limits that it cannot escape. This is not a failure. It is a condition we repeatedly misrecognize as a failure.

If we imagine freedom as the complete control over our own destiny, then we are not free. We did not choose the structure within which we think, feel, and act. But if we understand freedom differently—as the capacity to become aware of this structure and to act within it—then something remains open. Not unlimited possibility, but constrained movement.

This tension has often been named, sometimes imprecisely, as the domain of the soul.

Perhaps what has often been called the “soul” is not a substance, nor a hidden essence, but the experience of this gap. The awareness that what we are does not fully coincide with what we attempt to become. It is not located in the body, nor in the mind alone, but in the distance between them. A space that cannot be eliminated, only inhabited.

Prehistory does not resolve this. It only reveals its early form. In the careful placement of a body in the ground, as seen in Neanderthal burials, sometimes accompanied by objects that served no immediate practical purpose, in the repetition of images deep within caves, in the first attempts to shape the environment, we begin to see the outlines of a being that does not coincide with itself. A being that carries its past as a constraint and its future as a projection.

We master the environment, but we do not master ourselves.

What we are, and what we try to be.

Everything that follows unfolds within that distance, as if every human gesture were an attempt to close it, and every result a reminder that it remains.