Diálogo con Claude Frochaux sobre L’homme seul

Abstract

This paper focuses in the panorama and diagnosis that Frochaux outlines in his text L’homme Seul about culture and civilization as distancing of man with respect to nature. Such idea is resumed in his theses “The history is biology engrafted on the geographical.” For the author one of the several consequences of this situation is that such distancing was consolidated and arts were stagnated, just as the progress made profane all the reality and all mystery and holiness vanished from it. The canon disappeared. Reality was divided between the sacred and the profane; profane was all that was conquered by man, sacred all unconquered by man. So history could be perceived as the permanent struggle between sacred and profane. The distancing is promoted by society’s eagerness for material development. Linked with it, progress has generated in us some guilt. Progress implies guilt, as a fatality. For man, distancing from the animal world where was created, is the price that should be paid for becoming the man of today, erected as the centre of all creation. But one could ask watching the ways of the current world: ¿Was not such that was lost more valuable that such that was won? ¿Was that rupture and distancing from the natural and animal world worthy of the society we now have? This betrayal of man to both nature and animals creates him a permanent guilt, guilt that do not disappears despite the progress achieved by him. This guilt is the original guilt. Seeking putting himself above the natural and animal world man believes he is superior. But man has only refined the animal skills and has used them for the destruction of nature and the animal world. All that is animal is extremely multiplied when transformed into human. Man is a synthesis of a little bit of all animals. But no animal species makes war among its own members as man do. Frochaux faces history, economics and arts with all these theses, leaving on us a strong feeling of scepticism.