Tracy Saunders

Being and Paradox Tracy Saunders

MAN IS THE MEASURE OF ALL THINGS: PROTAGORAS. But is that necessarily true? We are a part of nature. Yet we all too often consider ourselves apart from nature; thus we put at arms length a problem in which we forget to include ourselves. We are caught up in this paradox. If we are to extricate ourselves from it we must redefine our centrality by appealing to our sense of kinship. We cannot do this within our Judeo-Christian tradition: it is too tainted, too staid. Too "fixed." Yet outside of this tradition, in the words of the Greek philosophers, the Taoists, the Buddhists, the early conservationists, and most surprisingly but most convincingly the discoveries of the quantum physicists, we may begin to find a home in which we and nature are given equivalent status in our own unique ways of contribution to this planet, our home.