Natural Being and Coherent Society

Abstract

Science is a system of concepts and tools for knowing and living with nature. As such, it should be integral to any human society from the most primitive prehistoric culture to the industrialized nations of today. But whereas the primitive lived within nature by her knowledge which is the totality of her personal and tribal experience, the civilized man is imprisoned outside nature, of which, therefore, he can have no real knowledge. Cartesian mind-matter dualism and Newtonian mechanics began a process of the dissolution of our natural being; which Darwin completed by reducing organisms (including humans) to objects, isolated from the environment, and buffeted by blind selective forces. This deep '.. . Freud believed in the person as a social atom requiring community only as a means to the satisfaction of his needs; in a primary hostility so strong that only sheer necessity or common hatred directed elsewhere could join people in love; in a certain biological inevitability of hereditary constitution, anatomy, and development, which strictly limits human possibilities; in an inner private existence which, although in part the result of early personal relationships, seems in later life, to make only indirect contact with external reality. .. and finally in civilization as the result of thwarted libinous impulses which have been deflected to symbolic ends.. . .' [8]