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What must I do (and why me)? |79
goals, not in whether we accept the jurisdiction of the moral law over
our acts. Man is a moral being, since for him moral truth is a question
of being and non-being. If he misses it, he perishes, just like the deer
which fails to measure the width of the chasm before its legs correctly
and falls into its depth.
‘There is therefore no question of the appearance of self-awareness
creating a gap in the course of evolution and of man’s freedom being a
kind of anomaly in the life of nature, which makes the expansion of our
species similar to that of a cancerous tumour, as claim the desperate
nature-lovers. The fatal effect of technological civilisation on its
environment represents merely the failure of a single spectacularly
unsuccessful adaptive strategy. The human population, far exceeding
the Earth’s carrying capacity, with its resource-wasting way of life and
brutal technological power, has, in the absence of ethical barriers,
destroyed in a few generations the incredible wealth of Earth’s lifeforms.
(Our outlook is worsened by the fact that this strategy eliminated
cultural diversity first, which was hitherto the chief source of the flexible
adaptability that characterises the species. An unprecedented
homogenisation took place; currently almost the entire human race is
following the same unsustainable pattern.) The consequence, from the
perspective of life on Earth, of man being “let loose”, is merely one of
the anomalies which appear in nature from time to time and have
cataclysmic consequences: mass extinction of species, the transformation
of the climate, etc. In the cases where the anomaly is caused by the way
of life of a species, the resultant catastrophe which destroys the species
and restores balance is itself the negative feedback. If homo sapiens is
but one of the living species, then this must happen here too: the
consequence of excessive human intervention is the quick extinction of
the species. This possibility exists; its occurrence is increasingly likely,
but by no means a necessity.
The question is not whether it matters to nature what we do with it.
In nature the laws of generation and destruction are applied with
majestic indifference; only man can call anything good, bad or neutral,
because only man names those that exist: only he has a world - the world
of language, i.e., of meaning.
To judge well, man has to have some measure of the good: he requires
ethics. But he cannot hope for more from it than general principles
whose contradictory nature is revealed in every taut situation. The
“uncertainty” of his situation and the way in which someone responds
to this situation distinguishes him not only from the other beings, but