Lindsey Pritchett - Man's Need For A Beyond

In class, we discussed man's longing for an awareness of a beyond, or the wanting for there to be more to life than the physical manifestation of it that is experienced through the body. Man longs for more, a relationships with the cosmos, god, or some promise of an afterlife. However, literate societies, as they move away from "qualitative totality," detached man from cosmos. The modern man experiences life through a quantitative viewpoint, extinguishing the desire for a relationship with place. Man becomes homeless and his existence is experienced as meaningless as we move away from valuing the world fully. Civilization, as one Italian Humanist claimed, detaches our minds from out senses. The civilized man begins to want everything in a timely manner, caring less about the quality of the product. He lives in eternal chronos, linear time with no sacredness. It is a reduced existence, as it defines boundaries and rids life of it's mystery. By ridding something of it's mystery, we are objectifying it. Naming it, and thus controlling it. Colson Whitehead's quote capitalizes on this idea: "Isn't it great when you're a kid and the world is full of anonymous things? Everything is bright and mysterious until you know what it is called and then all the light goes out of it... once we knew the name of it, how could we ever come to love it?.. for things had true natures, and they hid behind false names, beneath the skin we gave them."
To me, this quote signifies much of the relationship to the external world that indigenous peoples experience. There is a childlike wonder in everything they experience. The living beings around the individual have power. In the "civilized" world, we name and analyze everything, stripping it of mystery and power. We eradicate the element of surprise from the nature of other beings, animate or otherwise, and, in effect, take on a godlike power that would make Fredreich Neitzsche proud.