based on "Theory of Religion" by Georges Bataille
Animal is immersed in the World, does not see the world as separate from itself. Man sees that the World is independent of him, he will cease to exist and the world will continue. Man only resides in the World. Man can put himself outside the World - in nothingness where the Divine resides. This is called consciousness.
As a being separate from the World man remembers his past and identifies his individual path through life - a linear biography. Time that passes while Man sojourns in the World gives rise to anxiety which is calmed in various ways. The simplest - he wants to make his life propagate into the future, wants to add duration to what he is now. Man develops his durable person and identity.
Man makes a plan for his existence. Remembering the past he projects it on the future, prepares himself for the future. This is called Work - because the fruits of the effort are not consumed immediately but have a purpose of extending the duration of one's existence in the world.
A duck swimming in the lake has no similar identity, carries no papers, money, credit cards, has not done anything for himself. He has not made plans for his future nor followed up with work accumulating the resources and making arrangements. He lives inside nature and has no career to pursue.
But man through work converts nature to products that support his existence. He carves out a piece of nature and harnesses it to create a home for himself and his family.
A hunter kills an animal in the forest, uses the animal body for food for his family (or tribe), other parts of the body for tools that make his work more effective. An animal killed by a hunter has become a product and base material for other products. Right at the moment when the hunter picks it up the animal body becomes a product. No matter whether it is used by the hunter or his family, shared by the tribe, sold at a market - still it is a product.
So does the farmer who uses captive or domesticated animals to work for him - from hens laying eggs to horses pulling the plow. They are products and slaves and tools for making products.
And so it is with plants and fruits, inanimate stone and metal. Life and material torn out of the womb of nature - serving the needs of us - conscious, remembering our history and rationally projecting into the future, working to assure the duration of the past and present. This is the curse and sin of mankind - work that fragments the world and separates us from it.
When a bear kills and eats a rabbit or breaks a tree - he just eats the rabbit, or the twigs - but does not turn them into the product fulfilling the plan for the bear's survival or career. When man kills a rabbit or breaks a tree he first desecrates them turning them into products supporting his duration in the world - career, family, home.
We live under the yoke of work - and the yoke joining creation to destruction. Work is the factor that separates us from the World, from nature, from the Divine. Whenever we make something that lasts - we work. Creation is work and it erects the boundary between our home and nature, it makes the artificial inside the natural - thus creation destroys. Plan of life, career, social standing, "do you know who I am?", "what do you do for a living?" - forms boundaries, barriers between human beings, between Man and the World. We make the World that is there into a World for us.
This burden, borne out of the gift of consciousness, will be with us forever and bend the backs of the majority. All of us will always have a longing to breach these boundaries, to restore coexistence with nature, to be intimate with the World and the Divine, to lose one's individuality.
Why do I still respect humans? Because, unlike bears, we step, with varying degree of courage and depth, into the boundary.
April 2005