For that matter, we ought to add that, strange as it may seem, this self-abasement will have an exhilarating effect; it will enable our Sartrian man to procure a kind of joy for himself, just as having themselves whipped, for some people, is a condition of erotic please… I have spoken, however, of this Sartrian self-exaltation and self-abasement as being beyond all just measure: it may be asked, where are we to get our measure from: to what other levels of being can man, after all, be properly related or compared? Will it be said that we must come back, quite simply, to the formula of the Greek sophist: ‘man is the measure of all things’. That, in fact, is a possibility. But the formula itself is a strangely ambiguous one, for it throws no light at all on just how man comes to understand himself and judge himself. But we can also perhaps say with considerable plausibility that the moral relativism implied in the formula, ‘Man is the measure of all things’, puts us on a path that will in the long run lead us to a degraded kind of humanism: a humanism that is parasitic on nature, as moss is parasitic on a tree.
Gabriel Marcel, Man Against Mass Society
Gabriel Marcel, writing in the 1950’s, probably didn’t imagine how literally prophetic his words here are. Consider the movement of deep ecology, which sees man as literally what Marcel describes here; nothing more than a parasite on nature. Perhaps it is ironic that from ‘man is the measure of all things’ we get ‘man is nothing but a parasite’, but this really makes sense when one takes on the view that man is nothing but an accident in a world not here to derive any purpose, in place for no reason or meaning. Even if its inevitable, amongst all the possible multiverses, that we should happen, it isn’t inevitable for any reason. There was never any monadic “Man must exist” uttered into the world, and so our existence is contingent on the existence of those sets of circumstances that brought us about. This is probably why “Mother Earth” becomes the nourisher of man, and man is seen as only able to get in her way.
Man has a being that he is at unrest with. He wants to be something, but he doesn’t want to be just anything; he doesn’t want merely a purpose, but a true purpose. He doesn’t want merely a place, but the true place. Not merely a happiness, but a true happiness. This is why man is so willing to give himself away, why he wants, in his salvation, to give himself away. Be it to God, nothingness, or technology, man sees his salvation in something outside himself.
This is at least true. Man cannot make himself have purpose if he doesn’t already have a purpose. What is the meaning of a meaningless maker? Nothing, after all. Man sees that he cannot bring about his happiness, so he gives himself out to the fullest to something that is at least perceived as immutable, something eternal, all-powerful.
Christians give ourselves to God. Buddhists give themselves to the Nothing. Atheists are apt to give themselves to something like transhumanism, a sort of scientistic soteriology. Man doesn’t look to himself for salvation, because our need for salvation comes from ourselves.
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