Exposition: Man-The-Creator and the “Prototype of Action”

Abstract

Man, the mediator between the natural and the cultural, finds himself in the unlucky happenstance dramatized so poignantly by Pascal in the seventeenth century: on the one hand, a reed blown about by the wind; and on the other, possessed of a mind capable of understanding his situation between the “two infiinities” of the incomparably great and the infmitesimally small. But a mind is a fragile thing, and the same imagination that enables us to project other possible worlds, the same symbol systems that permit our understanding of the real world and to contemplate a better one, may victimize the symbolizer, render most alienated the most powerful of imaginations. For this reason, man is the weakest link in “the great chain of being”, one of those “unit ideas”, 1 which, according to Arthur O. Lovejoy, permits the development of a discipline that has come to be known as “the History of Ideas.”