I have worked quite a lot on the understanding of what it is to be a humanist.

This hit the vogue in the both the Italian as well as the French renaissance and is now hitting again in the Danish renaissance.

After reading Heraclitus, inspired by a wonderful conversation I had with a beautiful lady, imagine that, I have come a few steps further in my understanding of humanism

The light is the truth. This is written in all the sources, especially Plato in his famous cave allegory.

But from there on the next question is; how does it really function, this enlightenment business.

As a base of understanding we have the cave allegory that essentially tells us, that enlightenment is dangerous and often not very welcome. The philosophers (academics) are supposed to, as a martyrdom, to profess the truth anyway, something this blog has done, to the prescribed martyrdom. Endless persecution, ridicule and so on. But that is the business of enlightenment, or as we say in my family’s newspaper “the highest enlightenment”, something we got from Brandes a philosopher of great strength, and a founding father of Israel.

But there is a bit more to it. Apart from the martyrdom of the true humanist, as he is professing truth, there are two modes of enlightenment. That of the sun, and that of the moon. The light of the sun g-d Ra and the moong-d Isis.

The light of Ra is fierce and blinding, the light of Isis is soothing and not blinding.

So if you shine like the sun, you get all the trouble, and if you shine like the moon, you get less trouble. You still get trouble, as my own miserable life is a testament to, but you tend to survive.

These are the conclusions I have found so far, but there is more.

Heraclitus adds to this understanding in the sense, that he tells us a bit about the process in a wider time perspective. One act of enlightenment will get you either martyred or will at least make you unpopular. But what is the point really? This is where Heraclitus adds to the understanding. He talks about the moral purity of the world.

When there is no light, there is only wicked and evil. When there is light, there is purity of ethics. The shearing enlightenment, just imagine in the time of classical Egypt the new dynastic rulers, aided by the temples of Heliopolis (the city of light, On) when descending on society, to give enlightenment to the people. It must have been a spectacle of imaginable beauty and fierceness, something we can only try to understand today, and the reason why Egypt has lived for seven thousand years.

We say we live in an enlightened world. I don’t think so, we do not have the very immense power, that the ancients had at their height of civilisation. We are living in a age of darkness far away from those day of light. There will not be a catharsis in our civilisation in the foreseeable future, because we are too far away from the source, and have forgotten the points of the enlightenment process, much less are we able to do it.

But, and this is the good news, we now KNOW why.

And with that information, maybe there will be another beautiful renaissance.

G-d bless the will to learn from the ancients, lest we do not forget our valiant tasks of enlightenment.