Demiurge
of the significances
See
the prehistoric hunter making up his arc. He
starts by cutting, that means by dismantling a structure, here the
given structure of a tree, to get the needed materials. He chooses
between woods, branches, lianas, etc., selecting them according to
their elasticity, their flexibility and their resistance. And still
to peel, to cleave, to cut, to knot, to tighten... giving little by
little another form to these materials. Dismantling a structure to
make up an other new structure. With the finished arc appears
something entirely new within nature. An original creation of man and
only of man. No other animal is able to have at its disposal the
natural structures in such a creative way. The arc calls for the
arrow. One creation calls for another one on the infinite way of
improvements and innovations.
Man
will go very far. He will learn how to dismantle more radically the
structures of nature to be able to restructure an increasingly
complex world starting from increasingly simple structural elements.
The whole of scientific and technical progress is thus conditioned by
this double dialectically reciprocal movement of analysis
and synthesis,
as well theoretical and practical, in the indissociable unit of 'homo
faber' and 'homo sapiens'. A double set of tools, at the same time a
technological one and semantic one, which makes that the tool is
never without being language also and that the language is never
without being tool also.
Man
is not the absolute creator of the significances. He cannot become
absolutely their 'master and owner'. Beyond meanings in its control
there are meanings which transcend him. The specific human
possibility, the speech, far from being locked up in schizoid
enclosure, is fertile only thanks to the breath which comes to him
from elsewhere. Man is the demiurge of the significances. From the
world such as it is given by nature, man has the possibility ad
infinitum to recreate the new world of culture. This re-creation is
achieved through a re-organization, through a re-structuring of
structures given by nature. All that nature gives, indeed, from the
simplest to the most complex, is always, already, constructed. Man
however has this extraordinary capacity to become master of the
structures of nature and specially of its structural ratios.
Man,
demiurge of the significances, takes the
nature out of its indifference. Before this exodus, nature is
properly unimportant. It tends towards sense zero. The true sense is
son of difference. And the initiator of difference is man.
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