The Desecration of Man

The problem is not merely that the world has become prosaic. It is also that man has lost his sense of his own significance. The more we understand and control nature, the more we realize our own contingency and smallness amid the vastness of an impersonal universe. The unique intellectual brilliance of our species has, ironically, deprived us of any sense that we have special significance. As Pascal observed, the eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens those who reflect upon it. This is the ethos that haunts the work of many modern and postmodern writers: Kafka, Beckett, Sartre, Pinter. With no God-given human nature and no God-ordained human end, the question “What is man?” is easily answered: He is nothing much. His nature too is disenchanted. Read Full Article »