Only later has the intimate essence of nature
translating human beauty into eternal stone, human experience into print words, and time itself stopp in art, in a simulacrum of eternity. Death befalls all living things; but only man has been able to extract from the constant threat of death the will to endure, and from the desire for continuity and immortality in all its conceivable forms he has obtain a more significant type of life, in which Man reems the smallness of the men individually. Lewis Munford, The Condition of Man . II «With the exception of man, no being is surpris by its own existence, but for everyone it is understood by itself, to such an extent that they do not even notice it.
In the calm gaze of animals the wisdom of nature still speaks; because in them the will and the intellect have not yet separat themselves sufficiently so that when they are together they can be amaz at each other. Thus, the Middle East Mobile Number List entire phenomenon here hangs firmly on the trunk of nature from which it has sprung and is a participant in the unconscious omnisapience of the great Mother. (…) (the will to live in its objectification) ascend vigorously and joyfully through the two kingdoms of unconscious beings and then through the long and wide series of animals, finally arriving with the appearance of reason, in man, to reflection: then he is amaz at his own works and wonders what he himself is.
But her astonishment is all the more serious because here, for the first time, she consciously faces death and, along with the finitude of all existence, she is also harass by the vanity of all effort. With this reflection and this amazement arises the ne for a metaphysics , proper only to man: that is why he is an animal metaphysicum . Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation . III “[In] the divid mind of man (…) crulity and disbelief coexist agonizingly. On the one hand, the disgust of death, a cold and concrete fact; on the other, not only eternal joy (or eternal torment), but much more sophisticat versions of life after death, which present problems inaccessible to our minds, since they escape the reasoning capacity of our species (although not, perhaps, to that of other species on millions of older planets). |