The human reality in rupture

Certainly it is in continuity. What is urgent however today is to insist on the rupture. The human reality is in rupture of intelligibility and rupture of being. There is abruptly a threshold, a rupture of level, the emergence of a gigantic ‘contradiction’ in the middle of a large ‘diction'.

In the Judeo-Christian space, man occupies a unique place among all the beings of the universe. This place is refused to him today. He is no longer this special citizen of elsewhere. He is just an animal of the branch of the vertebrates and the class of the mammals who appeared through evolution in the natural history of life, He is not marked any more by the untouchable sacral mystery. The understanding of himself is locked within the strict limits of nature, becoming an increasingly easy to handle object of knowledge and power.

Today one would like to ‘reduce’ the human being, and bring it back into the ‘bubble’ of our power and knowledge. Chance and necessity want to be from now on the key words of the intelligence of the emergence of man. The chance governs sudden appearance. The necessity manages what emerged. The chance makes madly spring up the being in the nudity of its contingency and its factitiousness. The necessity articulates what sprung up according to a necessary order. The chance is in the structure of the genetic code, chemically arbitrary, resulting from a series of arbitrary choices which enriched it little by little. The necessity lies in the natural laws which govern the physicochemical structures and phenomena and, therefore, guarantee to the accidental weathering or the microscopic accident to be accurately retorted and translated.

Vitalism lost his ‘soul’. In less than two centuries the `mystery' of life is handed over to the strictly materialistic articulation. Life is just increasing complexity of the matter.

The rich complexity of the human being is reducible, all the same as that of any living being, to a `structure' which functions thanks to the combinative articulation of simple elements. It is a question of bringing back the human reality at the lowest common denominator, ‘common’, i.e. with the remainder of the nature itself reduced to its simple biological and material dimension. The difference buckled in the dull reign of the ‘same’!

From now on man is not more but one chapter of a natural history. Simply a species among other species in evolution! He is no more this particular living being which occupied its privileged place in a system of natural classification, i.e. of a hierarchical order, a reflection of the eternal wisdom of the Creator. The hierarchical discontinuity makes place for continuity of life through time. The human being, like each `species', represents nothing but one kind of historical accident of a genealogy of life. Only one provisional structure at a given time of the evolution… A child of a purely chemical adventure… A residue of a primitive soup… A product of self-buckling loops? Man, today, does not seem to be able to understand himself differently than by buckling the loop of his immanence.

The animal exhausts its possibilities in a symbiotic behaviour. The man as an animal does not escape this need. But he is not locked up there. Something in man refuses the installation inside limits. Man is an odd animal that the animal realm does not manage to contain.

Human specificity would not be intelligible without the difference and the going beyond of the difference. This differential animal, the human being, does not cease digging holes in the plenitude of what is naturally given, tirelessly filling them and tirelessly still digging them.

goto