3 Pre-Humanity And The Emergence Of Man
contact with some of the contents of this immanent serves as lever for the individual to engage in the horizontal evolution of the group to which one belongs. The one who lives that evolution for oneself gets the inspiration which generates the passion which leads to objectivations forming the concreteness of that life. As these objectivations are actually carried out they exchange time, the given time, into experiences for the individual who does the work and once they are accepted, as acceptable by sub-groups of the group around, they belong to the collective experience, contemporary or of the past. One grows in consciousness as if assimilating the collective experience when in fact only the correspondence of the content of an individual life and the content of collective experience is what we can call in to understand how the individual’s vertical evolution gets absorbed in the horizontal collective evolution. Contemporary search is what generates both the collective absolute as well as the individual’s, though they look very different from outside. Adults’ passion to live their present own absolute prevents them from sensing to what extent it is conditioned, as well as facilitated, by the history of the group — which is made of the remnants of experience of earlier generations of that group kept alive explicitly in the education offered to the young and implicitly by its effects on the common thought, common ethic of the group. While the actions of the adults at the level of their personal involvements in collective activities absorb their time and operate as if within a collective absolute, they prevent them from asking questions about the meaning of growing up in that collectivity. This growing up of individuals because it has aspects which change in time and do not last too long, seems to be made of accidents while the long adult life within an absolute molded by that living, seems stable and truly characteristic of human life. Both livings — adult and youth — are made on the same pattern of changing one’s time for one’s experience but the scales of time give them very distinct appearances. If boys and girls are pre-adolescents, and adolescents are pre-adults, let us call pre-human those adults who do not notice that they are 19