Facs
Transcript
which one gets in one week. Now what does this mean? This means that something is going wrong with the ideal of personality as it has been carried through in Protestantism and humanism, and in the alliance of these two in many Protestant groups, and in many secular groups too. What is wrong with it? My answer is: In spite of the greatness of the idea of personality, the ideal of personality is a distinction of this ideal [idea?]. Man indeed is in his structural essence determined to become a personality, to use his individual basis (with vitality, community and nature in him and around him) to impregnate it with forms and meanings. That is his destiny. For that, he is determined; but on the other hand, what has happened is that this concentrated, conscious, self- controlling personality has suppressed and cut off the relationship to the basis on which it has arisen.
Let us first look at nature, the relationship of man and nature. This relationship is, in types of Protestantism and type of humanism, a relationship of control and nothing but this. Religiously speaking, the Renaissance idea of the infinite being-present in the finite, of every finite – nature and history – has been transformed into the idea of a kingdom of God, or a will of God, or a law of reason, which is in opposition to the natural powers, and demands their suppression. Now first, this was very much in the line with the analysis I gave about the status of industrial society, in the period of history in which we are living. Nature means a tool, but not an end in itself, not a mirror of the divine potentialities in every atom and in every plant and animal. This is denied as European romanticism, and since romanticism has become a name-calling word –