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Mankind and the Planet, past, present and future Philosophical SpeculationsPage 913. The prospective social order of mankind, the birth of a biologically adjusted group-form of mankind, is the pre-condition for opening up the true biological powers of the human being. While this lies in a very distant future, all ideal principles of justice, truth, happiness, power, life, freedom etc., constitute formal and abstract pointers in that direction. Current political ideas and theories are approaches, still faint and inadequate, simplifications of some procedure or other moving in that direction. The inadequacy is marked by the fact of their solely social character. A true exploration of the social problematic cannot be isolated as a 'social' problem alone, but is bound up with all other research, social, natural and philosophical. It follows that there is an inner connection between man's true biological group-form and the highest degree of power over nature that mankind is able to achieve. Both condition one another. Man attains the ultimate stage of his evolutionary life only when - not before – his group-form is achieved. That may well signify the beginning of an ability in man to interfere with nature on a cosmic scale. 14. The nature of the human mind is, to a large extent, inter-individual. That means, biologically speaking, that the human mind has a function, non sexual and non physically procreative, in sustaining and continuing the life of the species, that corresponds to the physical function of the sex and procreative organs as inter- or supra-individual organs. The mind is the biological organ for the human community or group. Just as there is a material correlation between the mind and the group-phenomenon in the context of the continuation of the species, so a correlation would exist between the physiology of the mind of the individual organism and the physical entity that constitutes the group-phenomenon. From a cosmic perspective, the social phenomena within the human species may be seen as grouping and regrouping phenomena within a process of a vast division of labour that leads to what is called a social 'order'. To some extent, this order can even be understood, literally, as spatial arrangements of the individuals of a group. Seen cosmically, the lives of individuals form an order that originates in more or less suitable order-principles of the group, where the agents that determine the grouping and regrouping are of a mental character. The working of individual minds is comparable to the working of force-lines in an electric or magnetic field, grouping – there in a rigid manner – iron particles. The mind is the source of a social order that may be interpreted as a ' field-phenomenon' of a higher degree. These 'fields' are in a state of incessant formation and re-formation because they are an expression of the ceaseless development that aims at the best adjusted group-form of mankind; this aim, as already mentioned, is a distant one because the present principles of group order – physical strength and a mental make-up that warrants success in politics, technology and business – are at a great remove from the principles of order of a well adjusted human group. (The constant succession of fields, ever new and changing, is exactly that which, in biology is termed 'development'). However, the existence of good and bad, workable and unworkable , suitable and unsuitable principles notwithstanding, the process of ordering and the structuring phenomenon as such, the field-phenomenon of the human group, with all that that presupposes and comprises, constitutes, so far, the highest expression, the summit of evolution in the cosmos, the highest known human phenomenon. It embraces and requires all achievements of the human mind, down to seemingly solitary individual minds. In terms of a scale, the group-formation, or the order of mankind in the making is the highest phenomenon in the world. |
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