WHAT IS MAN?

1. As intimated above, Man, as we know him, is decidedly not of 'the Fall', but a rebel against it and thus against Nature. He is in part a creature of Nature, begotten but not made, dependent upon the flesh, but he can also transcend Nature and create a world of his own, unique unto himself, and in a variety of environments and climates. Man is more universal than any other species, more adaptable and capable of surviving in a great variety of conditions, though largely because he creates a stable environment for himself which is able to prevail against the Elements.

2. Man is, in essence, a civilizing being, for he responds to his ego in such a way as to project his sense of form onto the surrounding world and, in doing so, has developed civilization in a way and to an extent unrivalled by either the Cosmos or Nature. Civilization is not tangential to Man, as it arguably is to what precedes him, but what most characterizes him; for he is one who builds, on the basis of self-knowledge, against the strengths and beauties, not to mention weaknesses and uglinesses, of Nature and the Universe.

3. Man harmonizes with Nature only as and when it suits him. When it doesn't, he knows better than any other species how to go against it in pursuit of his own interests. He has taken this knowledgeable tendency based in self further than ants, bees, bats, swallows, owls, wolves, dolphins, and other such creatures. For it is only when civilization steps out of Nature that it is properly and recognizably civilized, even though it will continue to co-exist with it, as with an opposite.

4. But there are degrees and types of civilization, some more advanced than others, some more sensible than sensual, others the converse of this, whether on a higher or a lower basis, and dichotomies have arisen, or been perceived to have arisen, between 'the civilized' and 'the barbarous', as between those who would claim to represent civilization in the face of barbarous opponents whose closeness to Nature rendered them conspicuously uncivilized.

5. In reality, all men, without exception, are drawn, in self-knowledge, towards civilization, towards an order built around the man-made, with utilitarian and non-utilitarian artefacts, but not all men can be said to be as self-consciously aware of this as those who have developed civilization to a greater extent and have a formal self-image of themselves as champions or defenders of civilization against barbarism, meaning, in effect, of Man against Nature, knowledge against strength.

6. For if Man is not a creature of Nature but a being-apart from Nature who only comes into his humanizing own at that point when he becomes self-consciously aware of his knowledgeable essence, then those who were lacking or perceived as lacking in such awareness would appear barbaric, and their societies as being more beholden to strength than to knowledge - in short, as being more feminine than masculine in the degree to which they continued to identify with and even to worship Nature, or some aspect thereof, not to mention the cosmic preconditions of Nature in the noumenal Behind, that antithesis, we shall argue, of the noumenal Beyond.

7. It is only when he categorically turns against Nature, ceases to worship or identify with it, that Man can be said to have come into his human own as a being for whom knowledge takes precedence over strength, and female criteria, whether applying in the feminine to strength or in diabolism to beauty, are accordingly subordinated to male criteria. For until strength is subordinated to knowledge, it cannot be said that civilization, much less Man, has come properly to pass.

8. Therefore the real distinguishing characteristic between 'the barbarous' and 'the civilized' is the importance which they respectively attach to strength and knowledge, and no society or people that calls itself civilized can possibly be one in which strength takes precedence over knowledge, even if a sort of civilized manifestation of strength, not to mention beauty in the noumenal alpha and truth in the noumenal omega, indubitably co-exists, in the fourfold comprehensiveness of things, with knowledge, meaning the civilized knowledge of that which is mental rather than carnal, and accordingly finds its environmental parallel in the town.

9. For certainly the town is the context par excellence of civilized knowledge, of the phenomenal wisdom of a sensible environmental relativity, and until such a context comes significantly to pass, it is hard to imagine much progress being made in the way of a knowledgeable hegemony over both strength and beauty, both of which tend to be more prevalent in contexts, even civilized contexts such as villages and farms, owing more to sensuality than to sensibility.

10. But a knowledgeable hegemony in civilization per se is one thing, a truthful hegemony in culture per se quite another, and this is unlikely to happen in relation to Man, the creature, par excellence, of knowledge, whose commitment to civilized truth, to a 'bovaryization' of truth owing more to knowledge than to that which transcends it, tends to fall as far short of cultural truth as the natural knowledge of, say, bees or ants falls short of the civilized knowledge which belongs exclusively to Man.

11. Therefore if something more than knowledge is to emerge into life with an authenticity that causes knowledgeable truth to pale into relative insignificance, something more than Man will be required, and that something is the subject of my next chapter - namely, the Cyborg.