Today’s world could seduce us to make dangerous comparisons. Already Saint-Augustine said that people, while constructing their own world by the means of basic, natural material, tend to make a specific failure concerning their view on reality as a whole. It concerns a failure that rests on an unjust inductive reasoning. This failure originates from the fact that we tend to assume that, similar to our constructed world, also nature, out of which we recruit the material to build our world, should be nothing more than another construction. Admitted on the one hand that it is possible to consider nature as if it were a construction, and that engineers factually cannot consider it otherwise while it is their duty to submit the forces of nature to man’s will as to realise his deepest aspirations — we, on the other hand, must experience repetitively that this ‘construction’ of nature, time after time, turns out to be very different from what we believed it to be, and it also seems to be much more complex than we had thought before. And this experience warns us not to take our knowledge for an absolute one: we have to stay aware of the fact that our ideas about nature are just provisional creations by ourselves and that these ideas will never loose their provisional character. While constructing the world, we consider nature as our example: we build up our world similar to the wonderful example that is nature to us, tending to consider God as a kind of a ‘super-engineer’ and, in this way, our constructing activity makes us feel a little divine. Nevertheless, the ennobling effect ascribed so frequently to human work can never result from any similarity with the divinity: the concerned analogy reduces the divine to human proportions rather than it should deify man.

This remark is not just a game with words: in the illusion of any deification of one’s self by the means of one’s work, the divinity is being reduced just to be a worker and an engineer, and nature is being reduced to a mere construction. Yet no one of us, made of flesh and bones, is able to create flesh or bones. We cannot create any breath of life, any spirit or any living being. Man just makes material constructions. When ever working with living material, our activity is limited to the process of trial and error concerning those mechanisms in life which are subdued to the mechanics of lifeless matter. In this way, man can produce tools that, in their turn, can ameliorate the reach and the efficiency of his actions. Man’s tools are a kind of ‘lengthening-pieces’ of his hands, his body and his mind, but without the body and the mind they cannot function as they do not have any autonomy; they do not have any functionality on their own. Man’s tools borrow their meaning and their whole being integrally and exclusively from man himself: without man they have not the slightest utility, and so it is excluded definitely that one ever could ascribe some intrinsic value to these objects, which means that they can never ‘exist’ apart from man and on their own.

An analogy between man and society has been applied more often in the course of the history of man inquiring the being of his own identity: as we all know, billions of cells constitute the unity of the human body thanks to the specific laws of nature which keep them together, which keep them all functional, which keep them alive. As a consequence of this, we spontaneously tend to compare the body with society that has its citizens as its own specialised cells which stay functional thanks to the existence of social laws. Sometimes, this analogy is being made that far that some of us ascribe to society a kind of a ‘spirit’, an ‘identity’ — even so strongly that one could easily think that its value were superior to the value of the human persons which, in that very case, are being identified with the mere citizens. E.g. in certain forms of communism this failure is being made very often, but also all those kinds of systems which are being subdued to entities even much more difficult to identify, such as an uncontrolled ‘free market’-system. In contemporary Western societies, ‘welfare’ is often being identified blindly with ‘well-being’, often representing nothing else but an economy which is going ‘well’, in the mere sense of just ‘fast’. As if the quality of our life and our happiness ever could depend on velocity, and more specifically: on the velocity of economical changes. This evil only suggests that Western people are often ‘people on the flight’, for it is only in this very situation than one can get advantage from the speed characterising his movements. Apart from this, it would be much more natural to identify happiness with rest, which we all tend to do spontaneously. It is true that one can find some sound analogies between man and society, as he can find them as well in comparing the world of the atoms to the world of the stars — countless analogies of that kind are thinkable. We just want to say that thought in terms of analogies is in fact an old and a primitive modus of thought: it has certainly its own qualities if applied well, yet it can also mislead us badly; and it has never been an easy task to overcome the inertia of thought. In comparing the human being to a society, we may never forget that the unity of a man is not in an exhaustive way comparable with the unity of a society. Alike man is not comparable exhaustively with a machine, a computer or an animal. It is often due to the mentioned inertia, laziness or superficiality that there is given way to misconceptions; yet we can become their victims quite easily.

One of those dangerous analogies manifesting themselves more often in the minds of certain writers, concerns the so-called mind-body-problem. For more and more one tends to use the analogy between, on the one hand, the body and the mind and, on the other hand, the hard-ware and the soft-ware, i.e.: the computer (or: the infrastructure, the internet) and its content. This much to easy comparisons quickly lead to conclusions concerning human existence which consider the human body to be the carrier of its mental content, and in which the human body is being considered as being fully replaceable — and the stuff that it carries were no longer some personal soul or identity, but rather some kind of a ‘common good’ which can be described as a principally ‘immortal’ ‘culture’. In the human considering of himself by the turning of the considering of one of his own products, one makes the same mistake of induction against which Saint Augustine did warn sixteen hundred years ago. In the course of history this failure pervaded thought in a broad rank of various forms and it kept on in doing so until today. What makes the mentioned way of considering so special, is the interplay of some factors which ask our attention for just one moment.

The new technologies have appeared very suddenly: they are the fruits of the work of skilled and specialised people who, in their turn are ‘standing on the shoulders of giants’, as poets expressed it — giants who never before reached so high above us all. At the same time, new technology never before manifested itself in such a quickly, visible and user-friendly way for the benefit of almost all layers of the populations of the whole world. The knowledge and the skills required for the conduction of a motorised vehicle means literally nothing compared to the skills required for the development and the production of it, and this is still truer concerning the most recent of technologies. And so we now can observe that not only the new technology is being sold easily: we also swallow some ideas that seem to accompaign the mere material products, e.g. the idea that this technology would be that superb that probably life itself could take an example to it. And this remembers us of a story in the Old Testament, telling us about the potter ad his clay: “You turn things upside down, as if the potter were thought to be like the clay! Shall what is formed say to him who formed it, "He did not make me"? Can the pot say of the potter, "He knows nothing"?” (— Isaiah 29:15-17).

In brief: the idea that the mind-body-problem could be resolved, or at least that it could be explained thoroughly by the means of the perspective of the newest technology, is very misleading: it tends to make us believe that some clear solution for the very mystery of our existence would be on its way. In fact, in this way we do not make the slightest progress — on the contrary, for this mentality only weakens our vigilance.

Ironically enough the mentioned ‘new’ concept of man implicitly refers to an outdistanced and old-fashioned concept, holding that the body and the mind would be separable from each other. Yet man is made of one single piece, while only in the world of our conceptions, man can be divided up into a body and a soul. Analogously, we can speak about the matter and the form of a concrete thing, knowing very well that those two components are mere concepts: we will never find them in reality, simply because they cannot exist on their own — i.e.: autonomously and separated from each other. The body-length has no existence apart from the body that is being measured, as already Plato did remark, and in no way one can ask himself earnestly what it is that makes someone’s body longer than the body of some other person: is it because of the head, or is it because of the legs? In the same way, space and time do never appear separately, at least not in the real world, while nevertheless we still need both of the concepts in order to be able to describe our (real) experiences. In though, we divide the unity of the being, we break it up into pieces, exactly in the same way that we break up nature into pieces in order to build our world by the means of them.

But nature has not been built up out of pieces: nature is a unity and we ourselves make part of it — which makes this unity principally unknowable in an exhaustive way. Now, exactly the same happens concerning our language by the means of which we have to describe and to represent reality — which in fact is our thought. Our language is being built up out of its own elements, which we call ‘words’, ‘numbers’, and more things like that; yet those elements do not have a vast place in the real world which they try to describe, because, as the first of all poets, Heraclites, said: everything is flowing. The ‘spirit’, building up itself in language, is alike the world which we try to build up out of stones and other materials. But our world is not identical to nature as such, out of which it recruits its building-stones. In the same way, our thought — our language — is not identical to spirit. Nature and the spirit stand apart from the world and language respectively, and it looks alike this gap between both of them will always remain: the world will never become nature — the most splendid cities with gardens and acres disappear as soon as we stop to maintain and to cultivate them, while nature just remains what it is. In the same way, language and though in general will never approach the spirit out of which they recruit their ideas by the means of our dreams. The insight that comes out of our dreams precedes its formulation that, in its turn, stagnates, freezes and becomes stone as soon as it is being pronounced or written down. And this is the fate of all thoughts from the moment on that they are being expressed, written down and embedded by the framework of ratio which is identical for all of us. The raison why Old Greek civilisation adored ratio lays in the fact that, opposite to our dreams, ratio is identical for all of mankind. Yet simultaneously this characteristic of ratio is its own most tragic restriction. For the dream, once concretised and expressed in a specific idea, has become a dead dream, and the death of our dreams is the price they have to pay in order to be reborn in our common world. For that raison the (personal) dream is eternal, and the idea, the ratio that we all have in common, is temporarily — it has to be refreshed regularly, it has to return at vast times to the dream out of which it originates in order to resource; it has to die in order to be able to stay alive. And in this way it does not differ from man himself, for one’s individual life must die if at least human existence wants to survive.