Marvin Conner Weblog

_An Essay on Man_, Cassirer. Bantam Books, NY, January 1970. Part II: Man and Culture Chapter VI: The Definition of Man in Terms of Human Culture. pp. 69 – 78. Plato took a momentous step in Western thought when he moved beyond Socrates' concentration on the individual and recognized the necessity of taking the perspective of corporate and collective human life in order to achieve a comprehensive philosophical account and understanding of man. While Plato began with the social form of the state, modern philosophy has had to acknowledge and incorporate other forms of giving order to human existence, including language, myth, religion, art, science and history. Somewhat paradoxically, the empiricist Compte lead the modern adoption of this perspective with his assertion that man must be explained by humanity and history rather than through the assembly of an anthropology out of individual psychological portraits. Later thinkers, however, rejected the idea that, becaus...

_An Essay on Man_, Cassirer. Bantam Books, NY, January 1970. Part I: What is Man? Chapter V: Facts and Ideals. pp. 61 – 68. Through his analysis of human knowledge, Kant demonstrates that the distinction between reality and possibility is a fundamental component of our thought. Unlike animals, which have no conscious access to the possible in their biologically and environmentally determined world, or God, who transcends possibility because every divine thought is also an actuality, human consciousness is characterized by this dual relation because of its reliance upon the symbol, which has an ideal meaning rather than a factual, thing-like existence. The element of the possible in symbolic expression is disclosed by its impairment in cases of mental disorder in which patients can function normally with tasks that are immediately at hand, but struggle or fail at tasks which require abstract considerations involving possibilities. These cognitive pathologies corresp...

Jesus made an emphatic distinction between wealth and spirituality when He drove the money-changers  from the Temple.  He also distinguished religion from politics when He told Pilate that God’s kingdom is a  “kingdom of Heaven and not of this earth”.  Spiritually mature people understand that, by setting the  marketplace and the assembly hall apart from God’s house, Jesus makes us responsible for our own  collective and individual life in this world.  He does not and will not become directly involved in, let alone  sanctify, human wealth and power, and the consequences of their exercise and accumulation are on us.  We are hardly forsaken, however, because Jesus gifts us, through His life and teaching, with a model of  thought and behavior that guides us in our responsibilities and orients our hearts toward the sacred.   The guidance provided by Jesus’ example must surely, then, include the respectful acknowledgement and  obse...

_An Essay on Man_, Cassirer. Bantam Books, NY, January 1970. Part I: What is Man? Chapter IV: The Human World of Space and Time. pp. 46 – 60. Space and time are the conditions of all experience of reality, and a philosophy of man must begin with an investigation of the specifically human forms of spatial and temporal experience through the indirect analysis of human culture. A hierarchy of types of experience is disclosed by this investigation, beginning with organic space, which characterizes the environmental context of organic survival, adaption and pure instinct. This is the level of action in which humans, due to their dependence on learned behavior, appear to be at a distinct disadvantage in comparison to animals. Next in order, is perceptual space in which the behavior of higher animals rises above instinctive reaction and the various senses are coordinated and combined into an increasingly complex type of awareness that approaches the next level of symbolic...