Some people think that the problem of Man today is his separation from nature.
The truth is that life and its apparent "laws" represent a system, and as a system they have reached another level in Man.
Life reached the level of potential conscious transcendence in Human beings.
This means that in a Human being, life can be integrated holistically into meaning. In fact that conscious integration of meaning and the transcendence of the simple animal reactivity into a conscious inner causality taking command IS the essence of the Human principle.
It is not something alienated from nature. Humans are the higher level nature has reached and it is wrong to say that "our nature" is the nature of some previous forms we have transcended - that our "true nature" would be the nature of apes or monkeys, as some anthropologists in search of the anthropological "grail" seem to think.
Some believe that with our "Human behaviour", with our social values etc, we are agressing some "true" (implicitely animal) nature.
Not so. Our Human nature is the level that we have reached now, even if just potentially in many.
It is not the level of apes, it is what we are now. It is the potential of our nervous system and its holistic relation to the world, the transcendence to inner causality - the very thing that makes Humans - the Human Nature!
So what is the problem?
The problem is not the nature that we "abandoned" and should "regain", the problem is the nature that we haven't fully realised yet, the potential that we have become but haven't embraced yet.
Today, so many postodern relativists promote the idea that values are arbitrary historical categories, that there is no truth, that we are just animals etc. They search the "truth" about ourselves in the behaviour of animals, birds, apes, monkeys...
This is completely wrong, because many Human Values are not something arbitrary. Many traditional Human Values are in fact the prescientific cultural articulation of the new transcendent level that nature has reached in Man. They are the software of that holistic Human system, they are the attempts to articulate in our cultural software that thing that makes us Humans.
The fact that this articulation is mixed with many arbitrary elements, or connected with various systems of beliefs does not invalidate it.
It is very important to distinguish the core from the historical perishable forms that sustained and supported it.
It is not just about the evolution of some sets of pragmatic behaviours related to social interaction either. The game theory of egoism revisited - animal/biological egoism adapted to collective life in society - like many believe.
There is much more to it than that. There is a real qualitative jump, a change in the nature of the system itself, not some "illusion" of Humanity as just an extrapolation of animal principles.
It is a question of the Whole, what the Whole became as a system, not just a question of accumulation of parts
Man is in between two worlds. He has reached the level where his nature is his new potential, a potential no animal nervous system has.
That nature spontaneously tries hard to express itself. We witness it every day in our desperate battle for meaning.
But we have not understood it yet, we have not circumscribed it yet. We have succeeded, in our best historical moments, to articulate it partially in some forms which corresponded to the level of knowledge or ignorance of those moments. We have put it in our software - our culture - in those forms, and we rely on that software to perpetuate it trough time.
But as such software is still imperfect, still historically idiosycratic, still primitive, still prescientific, we are often tempted to abandon it all and return to our previous levels - those levels that need no software, no conscious integration.
This is impossible of course. There is no turning back. All we can do is make us miserable.
Let me not be misunderstood here. Our Human Nature IS. It does not depend for its existence on any software.
The Human Nature is the integrative transcending potential that biologically spontaneously tries to express and circumscribe itself. But it needs knowledge, and whatever knowledge we gathered about ourselves, we have put it in our culture, our software.
There is a feedback loop between our biological Human Nature and the knowledge we need to implement it and express it. Trough this feedback loop between our nature and the ways we articulated in our culture, our values etc. we advance, as individuals and as a species.
The solution is not to turn our back on our Human Nature, it is to embrace it fully, it is to finally understand it and articulate it in a full explicit way.
This may not only be possible, it may already exist
The full explicit knowledge of it will be realised sooner or later, one way or the other.
Until it does, the duty of every individual is to search his heart and decide which is it.
Is it the animal or is it the Human.
Is there a Truth in you and in Human society, or is it all just relative?
Look inside and decide.
You are not deciding just your own destiny, but the destiny of this whole species we like to call "Humanity".