“The proper study of Mankind is Man. Placed on this isthmus of a middle state, A Being darkly wise, and rudely great…” (AlexanderPope, Essay on Man, Epistle II, of 1734).
I’ve become interested in the relationship between three ideas which are only partial pseudonyms …. Nature, creation, the environment. They all quite evidently point towards a common set of questions, namely, the relationship between human beings and everything else in the world. When you begin to think about it, however, they do point us in very different directions, particularly in relation to whether human beings are included within the general idea or are regarded as separate from a context which we regard from the outside. So the biblical idea set out in the book of Genesis specifies that we were only the final act in a longer process of creation. We might well stand in a peculiar relation to it, but we are too be understood as included in the creation process. The Enlightenment idea of Nature, however, definitely envisages human beings as regarding Nature (whether as “sublime” or “beautiful”.) This sense of opposition between human beings and the rest of the world is perpetuated in contemporary concern about “the environment”. This refers normally (at least by implication) to what surrounds us, and contemporary debate about the subject concerns itself fundamentally with what “we” (human beings) have done and are doing to “the environment”. We are not a part of that.
The genius of Pope’s aphorism is that he captures brilliantly the ambiguous position of the human race in relation to the rest of the world. The “proper study of mankind” is, indeed “Man” …. but what paradoxical beings we are, stranded in this “middle state”!
I am beginning to discover, in my playing with the image of the Green Man, what interesting possibilities it holds for the artistic exploration of these questions.
*Alexander, that is, not the Pope.