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A Strange Story

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Edward Bulwer-Lytton

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“The ability of an object to constitute itself as a subject is thus defined, in the first instance, by the objective context provided by the genus; that is, the capacity or incapacity of an object to constitute itself as an individual subject depends first and foremost on the kind of thing the object is. For mechanical, chemical, and externally purposive objects, the power of the genus is determined essentially as violence insofar as these objects cannot constitute themselves as subjects through a predicate due to their very nature as defined by their genus. For example, a rock, qua rock, can be determined through a predicate externally - by means of external impact from other objects and forces (it can be crushed or cracked into pieces) or by means of human definition and conceptualization (this rock is igneous and that one is sedimentary) - but is cannot determine itself through a predicate and constitute itself as a subject by means of its own activity. The power of the objet to constitute itself as a subject is necessarily defined in relation to its essential Gattung-predicate, a predicate that manifests the power of violence insofar as the object is unable to constitute itself as a subject by means of this very same predicate. The third characteristic, finally, is that power as violence directs itself against individuality. In specifying that it is only in the presence of the freedom of self-consciousness that the power of the genus can be determined as fate, Hegel writes the following: 'Only self-consciousness has fate in the strict sense, because it is free, and therefore in the individuality of its 'I' it absolutely exists in and for itself and can oppose itself to its objective universality and alienate itself from it'. Individuality is thus defined as an existence in and for itself that can stand opposed to and be in contradiction with its objective universality or genus, while continuing to manifest the genus's power as identical with its own self-relation. Without the ability to oppose its genus, the ability to be self-alienated with respect to its genus, the object is not, strictly speaking, an individual (it remains a mere particular, a token of its type entirely interchangeable with other tokens of the same type). Individuality is therefore not only the power of the object to constitute itself as a subject through its predicate, but moreover, this power of self-constitution is essentially also the power to oppose, contradict, and transform the genus by means of the genus's own power as manifest in the determinateness of an individual.”

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Book:Hegel's Concept of Life: Self-Consciousness, Freedom, Logic
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“Indeed, it is this threefold character of man—the fact that through his spiritual intellect, which is so much more than merely rational, he has an affinity with the divine, while with his body he is linked to the material world—that gives him such a key position and role in the universe. He stands between God and the material world, between heaven and earth. In the old formula, he is the microcosm.' In fact, all things in creation have their meeting-place in man, and man is potentially all things. Properly seen, nothing is external to him. This is in contradistinction to the modern scientific view of things, which presupposes precisely that man does regard the world of nature as an object external to himself. It presupposes a loss of that consciousness in which nature is seen as part of his own subjectivity, as the living garment of his own inner being. Consequently man has also lost the sense of his role in relationship to the rest of creation. Displacing himself from nature, depersonalizing and objectifying it, he has destroyed the harmony and reciprocity that should exist between them.”

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Book:The Rape of Man & Nature: An Inquiry Into the Origins and Consequences of Modern Science
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“The mechanistic character of modern science is marked by a desire to dominate, to master and possess and to exploit nature, not to transform it, or to hallow it. It presumes that the earth belongs to man, not man to the earth. In this it simply reflects the self-assertion of its agent, the disinherited reason which, having completed its revolt against what surpasses it, now seeks to impose its laws over the rest of life. Man’s loss of his sense of harmony and reciprocity with nature—his destruction of the nuptial bonds between them—is itself the consequence of his loss of his sense of his status and role as the link between heaven and earth, the channel through which all commerce between them passes.”

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Book:The Rape of Man & Nature: An Inquiry Into the Origins and Consequences of Modern Science
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“God’s enhumanization has not only ‘taken manhood into God’; it has also taken the whole created world into God, has resurrected it and transfigured it in its very depths. It is only man’s continuing alienation from the ground of his being that prevents him from realizing this, that throws a veil of opacity between God and man, God and the world, an keeps them in a state of false division and disunity. Correspondingly, it is through overcoming this alienation, and through remaking himself in the image and likeness of the divine that is at the heart of his own subjective life and that confers on him his unique quality as a person, that he shares in the priesthood of Christ and in that sacrament of love and beauty in which all things, released from their bondage, live, move and have their being. Outside this relationship, apart from this sacrament, man has no real place in the world, or the world in him. He is but a tormented shadow of himself, and his world a forsaken wilderness, and on both he is compelled to seek ever further revenge for that crime against his own nature which he refuses to acknowledge, still more to expiate.”

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Book:The Rape of Man & Nature: An Inquiry Into the Origins and Consequences of Modern Science
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“This is why the gradual erosion of the significance of the Incarnation over the last centuries (to the point to which the whole idea of it appears to some to be virtually superfluous where Christian doctrine is concerned) has meant the erosion of the true significance of man as artist. Man has lost his sense of his role as mediator between God and the world; he has lost his sense that the forms of his art should mirror the divine and that unless his work possesses this sacramental quality it will be as vacuous and ugly as most of the articles which now surround our daily lives, public and private. A social order which deprives man and his practices of their sacramental quality is already dead, no matter what frenetic activity it may appear to manifest.”

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Book:The Rape of Man & Nature: An Inquiry Into the Origins and Consequences of Modern Science
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“He has more or less eliminated the idea of God-manhood from his mind. Having rejected the understanding that his life and activity are significant only in so far as they incarnate, reflect and radiate that transcendent spiritual reality which is the ground and centre of his own being, he is condemned to believe that he is the autocratic and omnipotent ruler of his own affairs and of the world about him, which it is his right and duty to subdue, organize, investigate and exploit to serve his profane mental curiosity or his acquisitive material appetites. The deification of man as a fallen mortal entity has led, as we are only too well aware, to the most extreme forms of cruelty and rapacity, forms which deny the unique and absolute value of the human person and of every other created reality. The assertion that man is merely human has resulted in a dehumanization possibly without parallel in the history of the world.”

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Author:Philip Sherrard
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“One has to judge things by their fruits. And one of the fruits of modern science, clear for all to see, and implicit in the philosophy on which it is based, is the dehumanization both of man and of the society that he has built in its name.”

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Book:The Rape of Man & Nature: An Inquiry Into the Origins and Consequences of Modern Science
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