You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
As cultures evolve, the sensate qualities of immediate experience tend to be relinquished for intellectual forms more conceptual in nature. Possibly the primary exemplar of such development is language, which grows in an exceedingly complex way, and lingual forms often create rather than follow reality. Deviations from such forms come to be looked upon as pathological without necessarily examining their existential meaning or genesis. There is, of course, nothing wrong with conceptualizing, but we sometimes forget that a concept in order to be truly communicative must carry a message on a lower level, i.e., have emotional meaning. Primitive man had concepts, but they were more immediately related to his personal world of experience, and in this experience his body played a uniquely mediating part.
Thus, as culture attains higher social forms it dessicates itself by abstractions and reduces the immediacy of personal experience. The prevalent cry of alienation and “loss of meaning” today is just that quality of culture which denies the body and ignores the integrative aspects of its impulses. A rather distasteful image of Muggeridge's is perhaps apropos here. If mankind consists of pigs eating at a trough, then culture is the one pig which raises its head to look around. But if the pig becomes enchanted with what he sees and fails to lower his head, he is apt to lose his piggish identification. The analogy is that man is first a biological animal and if, like Icarus, he flies too high toward the pure sun of abstraction, he will have to pay a considerable price in divorcement.