Man may be excused for feeling some pride at having risen, though not through his own exertions, to the very summit of the organic scale; and the fact of his having thus risen, instead of having been aboriginally placed there, may given him hope for a still higher destiny in future. [1]Owen Flanagan echoes this after a fashion here:
The twenty-first century will give us naturalists our best chance so far at explaining what it means to be a human animal and how we might go forward guided by wisdom as we explore some of the promising futures among the multifarious psychopoetic spaces open to us. It is a gift, a matter of great cosmic contingency, that we are self-understanding animals, enchanted beings, who can understand and guide our lives to places and ways of being that are more truthful, beautiful, and good. [2]
Footnotes
[1] The Descent of Man (1872), quoted in Science, 2 Oct 2009
[2] from One enchanted being: neuroexistentialism and meaning (2009) by Owen Flanagan
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