Future and evolution. Man who absolutely ought to remain

Abstract

In this paper, printed here in Russian translation, Eugenio Mazzarella, a well-known Italian philosopher and Heidegger specialist, inquires into the various paradoxes of the human condition, exposing, in particular, the paradoxical nature of the very moment of man's entrance into the world and of his place in it. What separates man from animals is his inability to belong entirely to the present moment: he cannot throw off the burden of the past and therefore desperately needs a future. Such is the humanization of anthropogenesis, the very moment when man emerges on his pathway from the beast. It is also in this very moment that the newly fledged human becomes aware of his fundamental deficiency, which is the reason why he alone among the living beings has the intrinsic quality of fearing to vanish. Man has no means to overcome his ontological instability, he can only compensate for it by transforming himself from homo natura, human being as a natural phenomenon, into homo cultura, human being as a phenomenon of culture. Two kinds of compensation are at his disposal: the religious compensation which by resorting to supernatural power helps overcome the anxiety and promises that individual existence may have a continuation provided that certain rules are observed, and the technical compensation which is a deliberate strategy of adapting to the challenges of ambient environment, aimed at surmounting the gap between a person and the world by consciously endeavouring to construct one's future in present time. However, the paradox of a quasi-religious attitude towards science is that the adaptive mechanisms of science show a marked and inevitable tendency to degrade and become less and less efficient, which makes the task of bridging that gap by means of science an impossible one. Equally paradoxical prove to be both Darwinian evolutionism which is unable to explain the radical qualitative change occurring at the moment of anthropogenesis, and the saltationism invented as an alternative to Darwin's theory. The very processuality of all life-forms ensures that there is a past allotted to man as a place in the natural history of the species, while simultaneously denying him a future where other forms will come to replace him. This notwithstanding, it is still in culture that man can find his only defence against the inevitable scenario of his disappearing from the scene of life: this defence lies in culture's ability to say “no” to the evolution and thus to gain a suspension of execution. The man of culture becomes a girdle about the evolution restraining its course with regard to himself. A being endowed with resilience who desperately stands up for himself against the millstones of evolution: this is the essence of man.