A BRIEF HERMENEUTIC OF THE CO-CONSTITUTION OF NATURE AND CULTURE IN mE WEST INCLUDING SOME CONTEMPORARY CONSEQUENCES

In 1986, the book A World in Crisis? appeared. In it R.J. Johnston and P.J. Taylor remind us that the word 'crisis' is frequently used 'today' to characterise difficulties and problems. They note that the use of this word is, 'understandable' because ' ... many of the problems called 'crises' are very severe, suggesting to contemporary observers that they might be major turning-points in the course of world history' (p. viii). Likewise J. O'Connor in his The Meaning of Crisis (1987) argues that, 'The idea of 'crisis' is at the heart of all serious discussions of the modem world' (p. 49).1 The Brandt Commission report titled North-South: A Programme for Survival, claims that, 'The crisis through which international relations and the world economy are now passing presents great dangers, and they appear to be growing more serious' (p. 30).2 J. Galtung in his book The True Worlds writes that, 'There is a crisis in the world today, now felt even by those of us who enjoy the power and privileges at the top of the world' (p. 1).3 Of course these and many other works are all extensions of an anxiety traceable to Aurelio Peccei's work The Chasm Ahead.4 Obviously, to speak of 'growth', 'limits', 'chasm', 'turning-points', 'historic time', and things 'ahead' presupposes a spatial metaphysic manifested as causallinarity: materialistic fatalism. The crisis mentality that sells so well is a consequence of the post-Renaissance Western perspectival attitude that panics each time the world cannot be rationally controlled, which is all the time. The modem idea of progress has become senseless because it has become a permanent fixture in the Western world. For the same reason, which is traceable to the modem spatial metaphysics that is presupposed by the current discourse, crisis has become a permanent condition. The modern is obsessed with control as exemplified by the rise of the 'cult of efficiency', technology valuation, and 'scientific management', as well as the dominant philosophy of will expressed by Arthur Schopenhauer and Fredrich Nietzsche. The flip side of an obsession with control is expressed by a fear of fear-the terror of hysteria. This side of modernity is best expressed by Sigmund Freud's obsession with this 'illness'. Since the Renaissance, the perspectival mentality of the West has been intensely preoccupied with the conquest of space. This has also included the attempt to spatialise, and so control time. Thus we find the modern West obsessed with several fragmentations of the cosmos beginning with the subject-object dualism and continuing through a plethera of manifestations