Sublime

Hans Jonas teaches that mortality is the gift the living give to the future. The wonder of life, awesome and terrible, is that it renews itself constantly, by sloughing off the old and embracing the new. Jonas calls that natality, the way life is renewed through the birth of new, young individuals and a series of new generations.

Jonas, Hans (1994): Das Prinzip Leben.

A great German philosopher argued that humans are precisely those creatures who always have their past with them and are always living toward their future, and that it is awareness of mortality that gives human life meaning, an idea that classical Tantra also embraced.**

To paraphrase Antoine Saint-Exupéry, we may say: rituals are in life what things are in space.

The Jews, therefore, stand right at the center of the perennial attempt to give human life the dignity of a purpose.”7

Man, the main object of these vast dispositions, is composed of flesh, soul, and spirit. But reduced to ultimate principles, his origin is twofold: mundane and extra-mundane.

The wider function of ethics – its ecological imperative – extends beyond anthropocentric concerns to biocentric concern for the continuing evolution of life.

Bureaucratically guaranteed survival under such circumstances means the expansion of industrial economics to the point where a centrally planned system of production and reproduction is identified with the guided evolution of the Earth. If such an industrially minded solution becomes generally accepted as the only way of preserving a viable environ