#11"
Along with the Ptolemaic theory the ancient anthropology fell likewise into oblivion. Man ceased in effect to be a microcosm, a theomorphic being standing at the center of the universe, and became instead a purely contingent creature, to be accounted for by some sequence of terrestrial accidents. Like the cosmos he was flattened out, shorn of the higher dimensions of his being. Only in his case it happens that ‘mind’ refuses to be altogether exorcised. It remains behind as an incomprehensible concomitant of brain-function, a kind of ghost in the machine, a thing that causes untold embarrassment to the philosophers. The fact is that man does not fit into the confines of the physical universe. There is another side to his nature — be it ever so subjective! — which cannot be described or accounted for in physical terms.
And so, in keeping with the new outlook, man finds himself a stranger in a bleak and inhospitable universe; he has become a precarious anomaly — one could almost say, a freak. There is something pathetic in the spectacle of this ‘precocious simian’; and behind all the noise and bluster one senses an incredible loneliness and a pervading Angst. Our harmony and kinship with Nature has been compromised, the inner bond broken; our entire culture has become dissonant. Moreover, despite our boast of knowledge, Nature has become unintelligible to us, a closed book; and even the act of sense perception — the very act upon which all our knowledge is supposed to be based — has become incomprehensible.
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Meanwhile all the ideal aspects of human culture, including all values and norms, have become relegated to the subjective sphere, and truth itself has become in effect subsumed under the category of utility. Transcendence and symbolism out of the way, there remains only the useful and the useless, the pleasurable and the disagreeable. There are no more absolutes and no more certainties; only a positivistic knowledge and feelings, a veritable glut of feelings. All that pertains to the higher side of life — to art, to morality or to religion — is now held to be subjective, relative, contingent — in a word, ‘psychological’. One is no longer capable of understanding that values and norms could have a basis in truth. How could this be in a world of ‘hurrying material’?
And so man has become the great sophist: he has set himself up as ‘the measure of all things’. Having but recently learned to walk on his hind legs (as he staunchly believes), he now fancies himself a god! ‘Once Heaven was closed,’ writes Schuon, ‘and man was in effect installed in God’s place, the objective measurements of things were, virtually or actually, lost. They were replaced by subjective measurements, purely human and conjectural pseudo-values.’
Thus, too, all the elements of culture, having once been subjectivized, have become fair game to the agents of change. Nothing is sacrosanct any more, and at last everyone is at liberty to do as he will. Or so it may seem; for in reality the manipulation of culture has become a serious enterprise, a business to be attended to by governments and other interest groups.
We find thus that cosmology does indeed ‘implicate values’; one could even say that eventually it turns into politics. So too a pseudo-cosmology necessarily implicates false values, and a politics destructive of good. It is by no means a harmless thing to be cut off from the higher spheres or from the mandates of God. Our civilization has forgotten what man is and what human life is for; as Nasr notes, ‘there has never been as little knowledge of man, of the anthropos.’
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— Wolfgang Smith, Cosmos and Transcendence
Sunt sigur ca ce-i acolo se sintetizeaza intr-o fraza, maxim doua.
