Prisoners of Our Own Achievement
I was greeted this morning by an insightful ”JCS Online” post by my friend, Gregory Mercurius Nixon. As I understand it, he is arguing that even our emotional experiences, those “feelings” we imagine to be most pure and elemental, are inexorably bound up in our symbolic nature. Our experience in its entirety, is cooked into a symbolic stew such that we can never again experience the world or ourselves, in the raw. This is the cornerstone of a theory of knowledge.
Greg signed-off with the following quote:
‘As compared with the other animals man lives not merely in a broader reality; he lives, so to speak, in a new dimension of reality. There is an unmistakable difference between organic reactions and human responses. In the first case a direct and immediate answer is given to an outward stimulus; in the second the answer is delayed. It is interrupted and retarded by a slow and complicated process of thought. Yet there is no remedy against this reversal of the natural order. Man cannot escape from his own achievement. He cannot but adopt the conditions of his own life. No longer in a merely physical universe, man lives in a symbolic universe. Language, myth, art, and religion are parts of this universe. They are the varied threads which weave the symbolic net, the tangled web of human experience.’ (pp. 24-25)
Cassirer, Ernst (1944). *An essay on man: An introduction to a philosophy of human culture*. New Haven/London: Yale University Press.
Crucifixion, P. Picasso, 1930 (The tangled web of human experience)
A wonderful quote from your friend. it occurs to me that the point he makes that ‘man cannot escape his own achievement. He cannot but adopt the conditions of his own life’ while true (I think) is largely transparent. At what pint while swimming through the sea of his experience does the human fish know there is such a thing as water?