For all its understatement of Renaissance thought, this passing observation is arresting. Here, will found expression in the incomparable statuary of Michelangelo’s “David” and the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel; in Raphael’s “School of Athens”; in Leonardo’s “Last Supper”; and in scientific research. Imagination, stirred to life by the mother’s songs and stories, slowly formed around creativity conceived as the expression of beauty. Biology and socialization, in fact, cojoin precisely at the point where maternal care is the most formative factor in childhood acculturation. Biology is obviously important because the neural equipment of human beings to think symbolically and to generalize well beyond the capacity of most primates is a tangible physical endowment. The newborn infant faces a long period of biological dependency, which not only allows for greater mental plasticity in acquiring knowledge but also provides time in which to develop strong social ties with its parents, siblings, and some kind of rudimentary community.
It also lies in the moral probity and transcendental mentality that generalized the concrete image of nature so prevalent among peasant peoples into a Supernature that was as strikingly intellectual as it was willful in its abstractness. Behind such cosmogonies lies the dialectic of a contradictory rationality, at once liberating and repressive — as reason embedded in myth. Doubtlessly, real intellectual powers are being exercised; they are actualizing themselves with mythopoeic materials. The graduation of animistic thought from the individual to the species, from bears to the “bear spirits,” is an obvious preliminary to a conception of natural forces as humanly divine.
Geologic Age Dating Explained
But the thought without the act, the theory without the practice, would be an abdication of all social responsibility. Their capacity for success still must be proven by the situations in which they can really hope to attain their goals. None of the authoritarian technics of change has provided successful “paradigms,” unless we are prepared to ignore the harsh fact that the Russian, Chinese, and Cuban “revolutions” were massive counterrevolutions that blight our entire century. Libertarian forms of organization have the enormous responsibility of trying to resemble the society they are seeking to develop. Direct action, so integral to the management of a future society, has its parallel in the use of direct action to change society. Communal forms, so integral to the structure of a future society, have their parallel in the use of communal forms-collectives, affinity groups, and the like-to change society.
For the present, it suffices to say that wholeness is not a bleak undifferentiated “universality” that involves the reduction of a phenomenon to what it has in common with everything else. Nor is it a celestial, omnipresent “energy” that replaces the vast material differentia of which the natural and social realms are composed. To the contrary, wholeness comprises the variegated structures, the articulations, and the mediations that impart to the whole a rich variety of forms and thereby add unique qualitative properties to what a strictly analytic mind often reduces to “innumerable” and “random” details. In view of the enormous dislocations that now confront us, our own era needs a more sweeping and insightful body of knowledge — scientific as well as social — to deal with our problems. Without renouncing the gains of earlier scientific and social theories, we must develop a more rounded critical analysis of our relationship with the natural world.
Its use as a means of social manipulation and its role in restricting human freedom now parallel in every detail its use as a means of natural manipulation. Most of its discoveries in physics, chemistry, and biology are justly viewed with suspicion by its once most fervent adepts, as the controversies over nuclear power and recombinant DNA so vividly reveal. Accordingly, science no longer enjoys a reputation as a means of “knowing,” of Wissenschaft (to use the language of the German Enlightenment), but as a means of domination — or what Max Scheler, in a later, more disenchanted time, called Herrschaftswissen. It has become, in effect, a cold, unfeeling, metaphysically grounded technics that has imperialistically expanded beyond its limited realm as a form of “knowing” to claim the entire realm of knowledge as such.
Using paleomagnetism to date rocks and fossils
In fact the pragmatizer is a stupid creature;
408nothing is too beautiful or too sacred to be made dull and
vulgar by his touch, for it is through the very incapacity of
his mind to hold an abstract idea that he is forced to
embody it in a material incident. Yet wearisome as he
may be, it is none the less needful to understand him, to
acknowledge the vast influence he has had on the belief of
mankind, and to appreciate him as representing in its
extreme abuse that tendency to clothe every thought in a
concrete shape, which has in all ages been a mainspring of
mythology. It is no cause for wonder that an aspect of the heavens so
awful as an eclipse should in times of astronomic ignorance
have filled men’s minds with terror of a coming destruction
of the world.
The imagery of modern technical design has its origins in the epistemologies of rule; it has been formed over a long period of time by our very specific way of “knowing” the world — both one another and nature — a way that finds its ultimate apotheosis in industrial agriculture, mass production, and bureaucracy. Accordingly, the congregation’s view of society was more integrated and expansive than it is today, despite our rhetoric of “one world” and the “global village.” Important as material interests were in the past, even the most oppressed strata in Christian society would have found it difficult to reduce social problems to economic ones. So richly textured and articulated a society assumed as LatinLove a matter of course that material need could not be separated from ethical precept. To attain a “Christian” society, however broadly such words were interpreted, not only did systems of ownership and the distribution of goods have to be changed, but even as late as Reformation times, “matters of the soul” — the accepted mores, beliefs, institutions, and, in a more personal vein, one’s character and sexual life — required alteration. In organic societies, social life more or less approximates this state of affairs. Nature generally imposes such restrictive conditions on human behavior that the social limits encountered by the individual are almost congruent with those created by the natural world.
Chance is in the “lap of the gods,” and in Homeric Greece, these deities were hardly the most stable and predictable of cosmic agents. Until capitalism completed its hold on social life, merchants were the pariahs of society. Their insecurities were the most conspicuous neuroses of antiquity and the medieval world, hence their need for power was not merely a lust but a compelling necessity. Despised by all, disdained even by the ancient lowly, they had to find firm and stable coordinates by which to fix their destinies in a precarious world. Whether as chieftain or as statusless trader, he who would venture on the stormy waves of commerce needed more than Tyche or Fortuna by which to navigate. As we saw earlier, the word is simply meaningless to many preliterate peoples.
He exaggerates the aggressive and violent elements of that temperament, feeding it with mystical sustenance and supernatural power. Where women haven’t been conditioned into abject passivity, their emotional fortitude and mature behavior often make the men seem like spoiled children. As to their capacity for “abstract thought,” women probably contributed a sizable number of religious formulators — the true “generalizers” in preliterate communities — to the prehistory of humanity, as the wide prevalence of Celtic and Nordic shamannesses and prophetesses attests. Nor should we forget, here, that the oracular messages at Delphi, on which the leading men of ancient Greece counted for guidance, were delivered by priestesses.
Fossil species that are used to distinguish one layer from another are called index fossils. Usually index fossils are fossil organisms that are common, easily identified, and found across a large area. Because they are often rare, primate fossils are not usually good index fossils. Organisms like pigs and rodents are more typically used because they are more common, widely distributed, and evolve relatively rapidly. Relative dating methodsestimate whether an object is younger or older than other things found at the site.
What we so glibly call “Greek science” was largely a nature philosophy that imparted to speculative reason the capacity to comprehend the natural world. To understand and impart coherence to nature was an activity of the contemplative mind, not merely of experimental technique. Viewed from the standpoint of this rational framework, Plato and Aristotle’s considerable corpus of writings on nature were not “wrong” in their accounts of the natural world. The classical tradition stressed activity, organization, and process; the Enlightenment tradition stressed matter’s passivity, random features, and mechanical movement. The matrix from which objective reason may yet derive its ethics for a balanced and harmonized world is the nature conceived by a radical social ecology — a nature that is interpreted nonhierarchically, in terms of unity in diversity and spontaneity.
