George Breeden Blog 2

Reading: Sacred and Profane Beauty, by Gerardus Van Der Leeuw

Primitive Understanding of Action.

Van Der Leeuw creates a careful distinction between the world of the primitive man, and the world of the modern man, in his work Sacred and Profane Beauty. In doing this he presents an interesting perspective on how the primitive man interacts with the world. Van Der Leeuw writes that the primitive man understands: “All action, not merely the wonderful and inexplicable, takes place through ‘power,’ even though it is only in unusual cases that it is worth while expressly to emphasize this power to designate that act as magical, holy.” (p.11) What this means this that while the primitive man may not necessarily seen the sacred or holy in all actions, nevertheless they understand every action to contain a certain degree of greater power. This can easily be applied to the different arts, where primitive man would understand whatever creation or performance to be a powerful act. Likewise this can be translated to even the most mundane actions of eating or sleeping. To the primitive man those actions are full of power that is to be respected, and in some cases feared. What the understanding of this perspective makes apparent is that we lack this kind of interaction with the world, now a days. The question this presents is, why do we lack it? What caused us to abandon this interaction? These would very difficult questions to answer, but nevertheless they are important to consider.