Autor: Purcell, Brendan M.

Buch: The Drama of Humanity

Titel: The Drama of Humanity

Stichwort: Paläonthologie, Evolution, Interpretation, Aristoteles, Höhlenmalerei

Kurzinhalt: 1 Rasse, Larynx, Sprechapparat, Gehirn (stumm), Jonas: Eigenheiten d. Bildes: Trennung: Form-Materie, Lascaux, Ordnung - Unordnung, König

Textausschnitt: 1) Biochemical level
2) Physiological and Neurophysiological level
3) Imaginative/symbolic level
4) Intellectual level

3) Imaginative/symbolic level
() What's most interesting from our viewpoint is that these highly differentiated physiological data do not make sense considered at their own level, but require a specifically human context to be understood. ... 'the brain is dumb,' that considered on its own, without the conscious activities of the patient, no merely neurological examination of the human brain would yield an understanding of its characteristic features.
()
Hans Jonas ... properties of an image: it is a likeness; it is produced with intent; the likeness is incomplete (i.e., if something were copied in all respects, say a hammer, you would have another hammer, not its image). This incompleteness involves selective omission-the first deliberate omission is for the image-maker to select what is relevant or significant in the object represented. A second omission is to leave out all the senses except the visual. A third omission is to limit the representation to two dimensions, permitting greater expressive freedom in emphasizing what matters most.
()
The principle here involved on the part of the subject is the mental separation of form from matter. It is this that makes possible the vicarious presence of the physically absent at once with the self-effacement of the physically present. Here we have a specifically human fact, and the reason why we can expect neither making nor understanding of images from animals. The animal deals with the present object itself.
()
What the first humans convey, within the compactness of the primary experience of the cosmos, is a quest for and responsiveness to the mystery of existence equivalent to the much later philosophic and revelatory experiences. They have left behind in funerary and cultic remains powerful indices of their awareness of the bipolar nature of existence as an 'intersection of the timeless with time,