A paradoxical animal

An animal properly abnormal if one considers only the standards of the simple biological life. Something like a negation in the middle of the massive vital assertion. We cannot buckle the loop of the animal realm without denying ourselves. The authentic human element is in exodus.

What is mankind? In face of this simple issue, our modernity is literally put to the question. After having despaired of the essences, the concept of humanity - but the other important concepts like life, death, justice, and much more, suffer from the same precariousness - risk to be never more than the truncated sum of a particular and partial perspective, nothing more than a vibration of an ideological fashion, just a resonance in the cultural space or an echo from the dominating speech. In short, this low common denominator of the greatest number and the statistical average is nothing more than a mimetic consensus on a minimum of `humanity'. A very big risk to short-circuit essential human dimensions!

Paradoxical intelligibility of the human being who is so much in continuity with what is naturally ‘given’ and who however becomes really comprehensible only in rupture with it!

It could seem - and etology encourages this - that the specific human reality can finally be reduced to the biological reality just simply transposed or sublimated. Something like an efflorescence appeared by evolution as an epiphenomenon of a reality basically and through and through of the same order. The naturalist intelligibility wanting to be in strict continuity with the “same one” can be right at 99%. The astounding is the remaining less than 1%. It is a small remainder which however opens an infinity. Little David who finally overrides the giant Goliath! To the human animal it confers a singular weakness and at the same time an extraordinary dynamics of survival despite the vicissitudes of evolution and history.

When a little weak prophetic voice emerges on the vast expanse of the materialist “Id” to begin babbling “I” then the new world of the spirit opens, the world of the the person and of freedom. And this is finally victorious of the totalitarian reductionism.

From there the naturalist vitalism manages to devalue human specificity and to regard the spirit as the contradictor of the soul, the ‘anima’, the animal. By doing so they are not completely wrong on the dimension of ‘weakness’ of the human condition, so much different from the quiet and powerful animal ‘certainty’. But precisely isn't this why the human being must refuse in order to be authentically human?

Man is like a wound in the flank of nature. Scandalous negativity and greatness together! In this way the human realm is provoked for going beyond of its animal reality. Without this fundamental gaping chasm how could man think? Without it would mankind be mankind?

Singular human condition which is really at home only where it is not yet! Man passes man infinitely. How could one summarize better the human coondition is in the state of exodus than by this aphorism of Pascal? Man is out of himself. Man is ahead of himself, very, very far ahead of himself.  

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