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Relations Between Man and the World

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

Pierre Huard  and
Ming Wong

Extract

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The relationship man-world is of very great importance for the primitive man who finds himself perpetually (even when deeply engaged in mechanical or technical pursuits) in a state of subjective participation with his milieu. No distinction whatsoever exists for him between the self and the world, but rather a constant and intimate liaison, made real by a mythical behavior which leads us to consider the myth as the most archaic stage of knowledge (Leenhardt).

Prehistoric myths were prolonged in the cosmologies by which the civilizations of ancient Asia tried to contemplate the world under the category of totality. The procedure of their attempts was the opposite of that of contemporary science, whose attitude is extroverted. They accounted for phenomena by projecting upon them, lacking all objectivity, their own sensory, emotive, imaginative, or intellectual reactions as well as their own subjective notions, introverted in value, of hierarchy and order. Pushed on by an invincible anthropomorphic tendency, they constructed a humanized nature by means of analogical deduction.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 5 , Issue 18 , June 1957 , pp. 24 - 34
Copyright
Copyright © 1957 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

References

1. J. Needham, "Relations between China and the West in the History of Science and Technology," International Congress ofthe History of Science (Jerusalem, 1953).

2. "Sweet, bitter, hot, cold, color are but conventions. Reality is atoms and vacuum" (Democritus).

"These tastes, these odors, these colors, etc…. in relation to the object in which they seem to be found are nothing but simple names" (Galileo, Il Saggiatore [1623]).

3. "It may be that a single and unique fundamental matter, dispersed, divisible yet impene trable is the basis of all bodies, and that the differences we perceive among them are but the result of unequal sizes and forms, of rest and movement, and of the relative position of the atoms" (R. Boyle, 1627-91).

4. R. Nooykass, "Elementelehre des Iatrochemiker," Janus, 1937.

5. Cf. F. M. de Feyfer, "Paracelsus," Janus, 1941; Nooykass, "Die Elementelehre des Paracelsus," Janus, 1935.

6. Milton Kerker, "Herman Boerhaave and the Development of the Pneumatic Chemis try," Isis, March, 1955.

7. Clara M. Taylor, The Discovery of the Nature of the Air and Its Changes during Breathing (London, 1923); Nooykaas, The Concept of Element (Utrecht, 1933); J. Schraeter, "La Décou verte de la composition chimique de l'eau," Revue Ciba, 1946-48.

8. Cf. Ch. Lichtenhaeler, Les Dates de la renaissance médicale: Fin de la tradition hippocratique et galénique (1952); P. Huard and M. Wong, "La Notion de cercle et la science chinoise," Archives internationales d'Histoire des Sciences, 1956.

9. J. Needham, Science and Civilisation in China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954 and 1956), Vols. I and II.

10. Hall, The Scientific Revolution, 1500-1800: The Formation of the Modern Scientific Atti tude (London, 1954).

11. Histoire des populations françaises et de leur attitude devant la vie depuis le XVIIIe siècle.

12. Introduction à la psychologie (Paris, Vrin, 1946).