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Sep. 21st, 2025|10:08 pm |
"Probably the most widely held view of man today in opposition to the older, traditional view is that man is simply one more of the brute animals - a superior animal, to be sure, but still just an animal, with the same questionable and transitory value of any other animal. And just as animals in general are creatures of instinct, with no real control over their instinctive drives or over the pull on their senses from the outside, so too man is impelled purely by the attraction of sense goods and by the blind drive of instinct.
A still grosser view of man sees him as a kind of machine, a bundle of conditioned reflexes which respond as necessarily to the impersonal laws of mechanics and physics as the leaf falling from the tree. Manipulate the physical stimuli which act on man and you can control both the individual and society as surely as you can control machinery: given the proper stimulus, the reflex will be mechanic, automatic, and foreseeable.
Common to both these doctrines is the view that man is a freakish, haphazard, evanescent appearance in an ever evolving universe, a chance collection of atoms, an insignificant dot destined to last but the flash of an instant in the vast perspective of time unending: a being without meaning, without destiny, without hope."
/ Daniel J. Sullivan, An Introduction to Philosophy. |
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