Emmanuel Swedenborg's philosophy of the human organism

power to create society in his own image. His creation is an act of freewill.

In developing mind and freewill, Man has lost the sense of organic form and connections. The concept of the Grand Man, as a pattern or idea, corresponds in the human mind to that selfdetermining power of creation in the physical organism. Man’s freewill consists in his freedom to choose whether or not he will unite his will with his understanding and act in a manner contrary to his natural self. In this context, Swedenborg puts the divine as the opposite of the natural.

The creation of the Grand Man as an earthly society depends on Man’s freewill at some particular time in history. There is, however, another sense in which the Grand Man exists and has always existed. After death a man has no freewill, but in the world organism of men’s minds his ideas and actions survive and have effect. Their resurrection and fulfilment may happen years or centuries later. In the memory of mankind certain men are recognised for the great services or dis-services which they have done for the human race. It is the world organism of humanity which judges and evaluates their actions and gives them immortality.

Swedenborg was not accepted or recognised in his own day. He was even tried for heresy by the theologians. Today it is possible that people might well accept the notion of the human organism as the basis of their religious ideas of heaven and hell, of God and the devil. What is more doubtful is whether scientists would reconsider critically the idea of teleology—that is—of purpose in the universe. Science at present works in the realm of what Swedenborg calls the natural mind; the sphere of effects which the mind analyses and separates from their connections. This analytical approach of science and its result in demythologising the universe has been a necessary step for human thought. Before the human mind can re-create the world, it has, as it were, to destroy it first. But creation without goal or purpose is meaningless. On what basis is it possible to decide what material is useful and what merely excrement? If the concept of organism is accepted as a universal pattern, then synthesis can begin of all knowledge and sciences on the basis of their relation to human

society. This synthesis would be the function of philosophy.

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