Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: The anthropometric turn
- 1 Narrating the animal, amputating the soul
- 2 Conrad and technology: homo ex machina
- 3 The Lawrentian transcendent: after the fall
- 4 Woolf's luminance: time out of mind
- 5 Doubting Beckett: voices descant, stories still
- Conclusion: Humanness unbound
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
1 - Narrating the animal, amputating the soul
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 July 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: The anthropometric turn
- 1 Narrating the animal, amputating the soul
- 2 Conrad and technology: homo ex machina
- 3 The Lawrentian transcendent: after the fall
- 4 Woolf's luminance: time out of mind
- 5 Doubting Beckett: voices descant, stories still
- Conclusion: Humanness unbound
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
To study Metaphysics, as they have always been studied appears to me to be like puzzling at astronomy without mechanics. – Experience shows that the problem of the mind cannot be solved by attacking the citadel itself. – the mind is function of body.
Charles DarwinBut the awakened, the enlightened man says: I am body entirely, and nothing beside; and soul is only a word for something in the body.
Friedrich NietzscheFor life is always expressing itself in us and through us, even in our most seemingly ethereal statements … One must accept the reality of our total immanence to nature, to this biosphere, revolt against which can only be pathological, thus provisional, and destined to fail.
Luc FerryRevolt against the biosphere may be a futile gesture, but its influence on the mind can be mitigated, and the sense of human helplessness tempered, through the implementation of an internal order. The dominant Western mode of ordering, which held strong until the eighteenth century, was derived from Aristotle's comments in his biological works. These writings yielded a schema of animal and plant life, a linear series of increasing perfection with man at the head. This table, the scala naturae, later dubbed the ‘great chain of being’, established the hierarchy of species. After man came (other) mammals, then cetaceans, reptiles and birds, all the way down to sponges, the lowest of animal forms.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Modernism, Narrative and Humanism , pp. 24 - 55Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2002