Anthropomorphism: the attribution of human characteristics or
behavior to a god, animal, object. It is considered to be an
innate tendency of human psychology.
Xenophanes said "but if cattle and horse and lions had hands or could
paint with their hands and create work such as men do, horses like horses
and cattle like cattle also would depict the gods shapes and make their
bodies of such a sort the form they themselves have…….
Ethiopians say that their gods are sub-nose and black and Thracians that
they are pale and red-haired"
Even the Jewish god has human traits, god gets jealous demands
that man only worships him. Think of the human traits that the Jewish god
has……… Jealous, anger, love, despair………. we endow not only the gods
with humanness but we endow nature itself with humanness……
we say how nature has been created to serve man… part of the historical
argument for the creation of god has been how nature is so ideal for
man and all the animals………we read into nature, human needs…
reality itself has a human component… Descartes began with his
assertion that all we can know is the “I”… this is a statement
that we can only know ourselves………… not as matter but as brain.
and German idealism beginning with Kant begins with the notion that
metaphysical matters can only be known through human reason…….
space and time is known through human intuition…and the theory that
physical objects can have no existence apart from mind which is conscious
of them……. Kant based on his theory of knowledge, that everything
spatial (space) or temporal (time) is only appearance…this is still
just anthropormorphism even if it is rather complicated…… reality
and nature still just exists from and only from our understanding of it…
thus the famous categories of Kant…everything in reality fits into
one of his 12 categories which are derived from the human mind………
Even the so called object/subject division of many centuries
is really just another aspect of anthropormorphism…….
the very way you understand the universe is based on human understanding
and human needs and human reason…………. the very way you understand
the universe is simple anthropormorphism………………
now, this anthropormorphism which has existed since the day apes,
climbed down the tree and first became human… is this a good thing,
a bad thing or a neutral thing???
should we begin to understand reality, nature by removing the
anthropormorphism that naturally exists within man, or should
we just accept it and move on?
the very way we see and understand reality and nature is based
on this anthropormorphism…. should we do something about it?
Kropotkin