Erich Gutkind : as prophet of the New Age

technology. Man has created a world which owes nothing to nature and everything to his own creativeness—a world of cities, states, laws, history, painting, music, religion, philosophy and mathematics. This whole realm, which is altogether different from—and indeed antagonistic to—nature is what Gutkind calls ‘world’. And the greatest of all inventions which emancipated man from nature was that which culminated in the concept, and gave him his power of logical thinking. This was man’s ability in the continuous flow of his conscious experience to isolate moments as separate existences and to fix them by giving them names. We know that in practice everything is continuously changing. Rivers flow, living things grow and decay, and houses fall into ruins. We know too that there are many different rivers, many shades of green, and many different kinds of house. Yet the words ‘river’, ‘green’ and ‘house’ are supposed to represent fixed realities each of which is, and always stays, the same. And the same permanence and precision is meant to apply also to words denoting abstract ideas and all inner experience, even those most changeable and elusive of all things, our emotions. This enabled man to be no longer oppressed by nature outside him, for it enabled him to treat everything else as ‘things’. He could fix them and make them stand still while he looked at them and learnt about them, and finally gained the power to use them.

This act of naming is graphically described in the book of Genesis, when God brought all the animals and birds in turn to Adam to be named ‘and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof’. This last phrase shows very clearly the sense of power which naming things gave to man, and the connection of names and magic is well known. And we see this process being repeated again and again by every young child as it learns the names of things. Once he has isolated little bits of reality out of the sea of consciousness and sensation, he can start to learn the properties of each and how they behave relatively to one another. And in the course of doing this ancient man, as every child does, gradually isolated himself.as a thing or being separate from all else. He objectified himself. He became not merely a whirlpool of sensations, feelings, desires and imaginings or a body with all its senses and reactions, but felt that there was a centre to all this, around which it all revolved and by virtue of which he said ‘I see’

8