On the timeliness of the four elements
The long history of the doctrine of the four elements with its aspects of understanding outer nature and human being himself came to an end at the beginning of the 19th century. The reasons were partly immanent to science development. On the other hand the technical infrastructure of modern living environment creates a restricted perception. The subject only perceives what is man made. It remains the illusionistic suggestion of man being dependent only from himself. At present, the four elements have become topical again in the macro area in ecological disaster scenarios; in the micro area in meditation teachings, which revive symbolic correspondences of a micro-macrocosmic kind. For the time being, man remains an earthling. Before he gets lost in a self image of being some kind of an existentialistic project, the human being has to realize in an act of immanent self-transcendence: The basis of my ek-sistence consists in an elementary flow of substances. In the anthropocene, the discourse on alienation must first become elementary again.