The Grey Man
το φως εν τη σκοτια φαινει
A particular idea has been haunting my brain for the past year or two years, and I want to hear what some of the clever members of this forum have to say about it.
Ernst Haeckel's well-known formula is "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny," meaning that the development of an individual specimen may resemble the development of its species in some way. I don't know the specific details of Haeckel's naturalistic theories, but there is reason to believe that he was at least generally right. We speak of species using words that we would normally use to speak of their specimens (e.g., man was in his infancy when he was stalked by the saber-toothed tiger), and write about individual lives in terms would not be out of place in an historical account (e.g., Mark won a battle with depression); and such analogies are often justified by frank similarities between the literal meaning of the message and its metaphorical one.
My query is whether the development of a man (or mankind) may not also resemble the development of the universe as a whole or, if change cannot justly be attributed to the universe, at least what it is essentially, notwithstanding all the temporal accidents of observation by which we paradoxically distinguish between 'I' and 'I'. Does our direct experience of the will and intellect of the observer tell us something about the observed, matter and space? Can we say something fundamental about the universe by drawing an analogy between it and the life of man?
Obviously, such an analogy would be cosmological rather than zoological, theological rather than naturalistic, and would lie at the intersection of science and religion, perhaps expressing the essential core or distillation of human knowledge, precisely as God or matter is supposed to be the 'Hypostasis' or unconditioned 'absolute' substantial to the phenomenal world of relativity. What think you?
I think there is an element of human experience that science does not recognize, something that Goethe (who, tellingly, was both a poetical genius and a first-rate naturalist) understood, though he could never convincingly communicate his insights to the civilized world. I mean the demonic. I mean tension—not physical tension, but personally felt anguish, abandonment, the dark night of the soul. Science must needs look at things like this through the screen of cool, impersonal observation, enmeshing suffering within a latticework of actions and reactions that can be analyzed and correlated in abstracto. But such calculations always fail to account for a residue. The most insidious experimental error of all is the experimenter himself who, invariably, must put down his tools, go to bed, and receive nocturnal visitations of hope and fear, as we all do.
Ernst Haeckel's well-known formula is "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny," meaning that the development of an individual specimen may resemble the development of its species in some way. I don't know the specific details of Haeckel's naturalistic theories, but there is reason to believe that he was at least generally right. We speak of species using words that we would normally use to speak of their specimens (e.g., man was in his infancy when he was stalked by the saber-toothed tiger), and write about individual lives in terms would not be out of place in an historical account (e.g., Mark won a battle with depression); and such analogies are often justified by frank similarities between the literal meaning of the message and its metaphorical one.
My query is whether the development of a man (or mankind) may not also resemble the development of the universe as a whole or, if change cannot justly be attributed to the universe, at least what it is essentially, notwithstanding all the temporal accidents of observation by which we paradoxically distinguish between 'I' and 'I'. Does our direct experience of the will and intellect of the observer tell us something about the observed, matter and space? Can we say something fundamental about the universe by drawing an analogy between it and the life of man?
Obviously, such an analogy would be cosmological rather than zoological, theological rather than naturalistic, and would lie at the intersection of science and religion, perhaps expressing the essential core or distillation of human knowledge, precisely as God or matter is supposed to be the 'Hypostasis' or unconditioned 'absolute' substantial to the phenomenal world of relativity. What think you?
I think there is an element of human experience that science does not recognize, something that Goethe (who, tellingly, was both a poetical genius and a first-rate naturalist) understood, though he could never convincingly communicate his insights to the civilized world. I mean the demonic. I mean tension—not physical tension, but personally felt anguish, abandonment, the dark night of the soul. Science must needs look at things like this through the screen of cool, impersonal observation, enmeshing suffering within a latticework of actions and reactions that can be analyzed and correlated in abstracto. But such calculations always fail to account for a residue. The most insidious experimental error of all is the experimenter himself who, invariably, must put down his tools, go to bed, and receive nocturnal visitations of hope and fear, as we all do.
