The Difference of Man and the Difference it Makes (Humans)

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Wednesday, July 08, 2009, 14:31 (5615 days ago) @ George Jelliss

George, - > My point is not that Homo sapiens is special but that evolved consciousness is special and important because in a sense it provides a way for the Universe to become "aware of itself". For all we know it may have already evolved independently elsewhere in the universe. There are of course dangers in using this type of language since it can be misinterpreted as implying, a la Deepak Chopra, that the Universe has some form of "Universal Consciousness" which is not at all what I mean. 
> 
> So you see that this argument is compatible with atheism. - Well... atheism is clearly not an ideology and as such is compatible with any ideology that doesn't invoke the supernatural... from Anarchism to Zen. - As I read Adler however, I realize that I agree with him more than I thought I would, and though he hadn't taken this tact--the main reason I fight the idea of man being drastically different is because I'm uncomfortable with him being separate from nature--though not in a materialistic sense. Which is stupid, in that since we invented agriculture... that's EXACTLY what we've done. - The shallow argument that seems to hover in my brain is one that is related to Nazism. (And Nietzsche again... "N" for brevity's sake.) - In "Thus Spoke Zarathustra," N writes often about a black abyss, and in one chilling reference he writes about the abyss staring back. Now, N is often blamed for Nazism, which is idiotic if you just choose to read the passage entitled "On the New Idol." That just shows that the Nazis pick and choose like everyone else does. At any rate, the reason why N is blamed for the Nazis is for an observation he makes that man is the creator of values... but he directly discusses in several sections (and in other books) that there are limits to this creation of values, namely that we first assimilate all the values of our parents and our society first. (Hitler took this idea and transformed the society that Nazi youth were raised in.) Note that this is the critical distinction that separates N from Existentialism; man isn't the sole forger of himself as Sartre would have us believe. Man has constraints. - Though the abyss has many facets--no part of N's writing is singular in meaning--in synthesizing the greater part of his work you can't help but come to the chilling conclusion that the only thing holding man back is--himself. The only check we have on our behavior, the only *real* control is society, and even that is tenuous. It is possible to master the society and thus drastically rewrite all values. - In this sense I find myself in the unsettling position of agreeing with religious moralists in that I schizophrenically alternate between praising man's virtues, and condemning him as "evil." It is the potential for evil that scares me most, and the more we separate ourselves from nature the more we can perpetuate the illusion that we don't need it nor need to treat it with dignity.