Anthropocentrism

Cosmological Anthropocentrism

In the Old Testament, common sacred text for Judaism and Christianism, in the book of the Genesis, where is related the creation of the world by divine activity, the human being is the last one to see the light of life and the only one to come out of the Creator's hands as His own “image.” Moreover, God gives Man the authority to “rule over” every other creature living in water, in the air or on the ground (Genesis 1:26–29). This fundamental belief of the natural superiority and domination accorded to the human beings from the very beginning by the divine Creator himself has lead to an anthropocentric vision of the world for the cultures following the abovementioned religions.

It is noteworthy that Man doesn't occupy such a privileged position in any other religious cosmogonical tradition. The modern scientific thesis of Charles Darwin (1809–1882), defending the evolution of all natural species, considers the human being as one animal among the others, which explains the harsh metaphysical opposition, which still goes on, between the evolutionists and the Christian theologists who interpret their sacred texts literally(although representatives of many official churches have declared since the end of the 19th century that they don't consider Darwin's theory as contradicting their own doctrines).

We would like to underline also that despite the diversity concerning the origins and the “natural place” of man in the world, both theories accept the actual final issue of the human condition: There are particularities in the human species(especially linked to handcraft abilities and to intellectual faculties) that gave us the possibility of an extraordinary expansion, often by chasing or by subjugating many other natural species.

In fact, the “privilege of domination” (be it accorded by a divine will or by a mechanical natural development) over the other living creatures of the Earth presented a negative side for a great part of human societies: the feeling of difference and alienation from the whole. Man, especially in the Western civilizations, became progressively a “stranger” for the natural environment. The opposition between the notions of “nature” and “culture” emerged. A certain nostalgia must have remained, expressed symbolically in many myths, traditions, and beliefs relating a lost original human condition of happy and unconscious unity with all parts of nature, inspiring a wish of “eternal return.”

Concretely, the human attitude toward the other living species and the natural environment in general has largely followed during the last centuries a strict and ignorant anthropocentrism, which has led to inconsiderate destruction of the natural environment, in favor of the human profit. It is only during the last decades that human beings have recognized the great ecological problems they have created, a situation for which we may still suffer the consequences in the long term. Under the light of this new understanding, we may say that the necessity of certain changes in the anthropocentric way of behaving toward the other components of the planet has started to become an inescapable evidence.

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