Facs
Transcript
space – this side we call “body,” it embodies itself in time and space; and the other side is “mind,” it is able to have relationship to universals, to principles, to laws, to norms, and is able to understand them and, beyond all this, to go into the ultimate problems of man's relationship to the eternal. All this is not a matter of physical or biological or psychological or sociological doctrine of man. All this is a matter of different theories, none of which contradicts essentially the situation of ultimate concern, and none of which confirms definitively the situation of ultimate concern. Here also we must be as cautious as in the other form of physics.
This leads me to a last consideration, namely the problem of genesis and validity. This is a very important problem in all these discussions – the genetic problem in relationship to the problem of validity. I hear again and again, “If you know how, e.g., religion or art or whatever it may be, comes into existence, then you have refuted it, then it has been shown that it is nothing else than.” Now this is a very poor kind of thinking. Everything has its genesis. Let us think about the genesis of love, of a love-relationship between a male and female. This love relationship, if you describe it genetically, has many causes: there is the chemical cause, which has to do with the sex substance of both sexes; there are the nervous dynamics in the body of each of them; there are longings of one for what he has not, and can have by the other one – all these things are there. There are many elements of anxiety, of loneliness, of guilt feelings, and there is finally something in which one individual being affirms another individual being in terms of surrender, trust, desire to be with him or her. Now this is the genesis. If you say that the fact that there are chemical processes participating in such a relationship