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[[Daniel Dennett]] draws a convincing and insightful parallel between an animal's [[physical]] environs and human environs,; not only human artefacts (clothes, houses, tools), but also the "[[virtual]]" environs of the discursive cobweb: "Stripped of /the 'web of [[discourses]]'/, an individual human [[being]] is as incomplete as a bird without feathers, a turtle without its shell." <ref>Daniel C. Dennett, <i>[[Consciousness]] Explained</i>, New York: Little, Brown and Company 1991, p. 416.</ref> A naked man is the same nonsense as a shaved ape: without [[language]] (and tools and...), man is a crippled animal - it is this [[lack]] which is supplemented by [[symbolic]] institutions and tools, so that the point made obvious today, in popular [[culture]] [[figures]] like [[Robocop]] (man is simultaneously super-animal and crippled), holds from the very beginning. How do we [[pass]] from "natural" to "symbolic" environs? This passage is not direct, one cannot account for it within a continuous evolutionary [[narrative]]: something has to intervene between the two, a kind of "[[Vanishing Mediator|vanishing mediator]]," which is neither Nature nor Culture - this In-between is not the spark of [[logos]] magically conferred on homo sapiens, enabling him to form his supplementary virtual symbolic environs, but precisely something which, although it is also no longer nature, is not yet logos, and has to be "[[repressed]]" by logos - the [[Freudian]] [[name]] for this monstrous freedom, of course, is [[death]] [[drive]]. It is interesting to note how [[philosophical]] narratives of the "[[birth]] of man" are always compelled to presuppose a moment in human (pre)history when (what will become) man, is no longer a mere animal and simultaneously not yet a "being of language," bound by [[Symbolic law|symbolic Law]]; a moment of thoroughly "perverted," "denaturalized&quot;, "derailed" nature which is not yet culture. In his anthropological writings, Kant emphasized that the human animal [[needs]] disciplinary pressure in order to tame an [[uncanny]] "unruliness" which seems to be inherent to human nature - a wild, unconstrained propensity to insist stubbornly on one's own will, cost what it may. It is on account of this "unruliness" that the human animal needs a [[Master]] to discipline him: discipline targets this "unruliness," not the animal nature in man.<br />

In [[Hegel]]'s <em>Lectures on [[Philosophy]] of History</em>, a similar role is played by the reference to "negroes": significantly, Hegel deals with "negroes" before history proper (which starts with ancient China), in the section entitled "The Natural Context or the Geographical Basis of [[World]] History": "negroes" stand there for the human spirit in its "[[state]] of nature," they are described as a kind of perverted, monstrous [[child]], simultaneously naive and extremely corrupted, i.e. [[living]] in the pre-lapsarian state of innocence, and, precisely as such, the most cruel barbarians; part of nature and yet thoroughly denaturalized; ruthlessly manipulating nature through [[primitive]] sorcery, yet simultaneously terrified by the raging natural forces; mindlessly brave cowards... <ref>[[G.W.F. Hegel]], <i>Lectures On the Philosophy of World History, Introduction: [[Reason]] in History</i>, Cambridge: Cambridge UP 1975, p. 176-190.</ref> This In-between is the "repressed" of the narrative form (in this [[case]], of Hegel's "large narrative" of world-historical succession of spiritual forms): not nature as such, but the very break with nature which is (later) supplemented by the virtual [[universe]] of narratives. According to [[Schelling]], prior to its assertion as the medium of the rational [[Word]], [[The Subject|the subject ]] is the "infinite [[Lack of Being|lack of being ]] /<em>unendliche Mangel an [[Sein]]</em>/," the violent gesture of contraction that negates every being [[outside]] itself. This insight also forms the core of Hegel's notion of [[madness]]: when Hegel determines madness to be a [[withdrawal]] from the actual world, the closing of the soul into itself, its "contraction," the cutting-off of its [[links]] with external [[reality]], he all too quickly conceives of this withdrawal as a "[[regression]]" to the level of the "animal soul" still embedded in its natural environs and determined by the rhythm of nature (night and day, etc.). Does this withdrawal, on the contrary, not designate the severing of the links with the <em>[[Umwelt]]</em>, the end of the subject's immersion into its immediate natural environs, and is it, as such, not the founding gesture of "humanization"? Was this withdrawal-into-self not accomplished by [[Descartes]] in his [[universal]] [[doubt]] and reduction to <i>[[Cogito]]</i>, which, as [[Derrida]] pointed out in his "<i>Cogito</i> and the history of madness", <ref>acques Derrida, "<i>Cogito</i> and the history of madness", in <i>[[Writing]] and [[Difference]]</i>, Chicago: The [[University]] of Chicago Press 1978.</ref> also involves a passage through the moment of radical madness?<br />

This brings us to the necessity of Fall: what the Kantian link between dependence and autonomy amounts to is that Fall is unavoidable, a necessary step in the moral [[progress]] of man. That is to say, in precise Kantian [[terms]]: "Fall" is the very [[renunciation]] of my radical [[ethical]] autonomy; it occurs when I take refuge in a heteronomous Law, in a Law which is [[experience]] as imposed on me from the outside, i.e., the [[finitude]] in which I [[search]] for a support to avoid the dizziness of freedom is the finitude of the external-heteronomous Law itself. Therein resides the difficulty of being a Kantian. Every parent [[knows]] that the child’s provocations, wild and &quot;[[transgressive]]&quot; as they may appear, ultimately conceal and express a [[demand]], addressed at the [[figure]] of [[authority]], to set a firm [[limit]], to draw a line which means &quot;This far and no further!&quot;, thus enabling the child to achieve a clear [[mapping]] of what is possible and what is not possible. (And does the same not go also for hysteric’s provocations?) This, precisely, is what the [[analyst]] refuses to do, and this is what makes him so [[traumatic]] – paradoxically, it is the setting of a firm limit which is liberating, and it is the very [[absence]] of a firm limit which is experienced as suffocating. THIS is why the Kantian autonomy of the subject is so difficult – its implication is precisely that there is nobody outside, no external agent of &quot;natural authority&quot;, who can do the job for me and set me my limit, that I myself have to pose a limit to my natural &quot;unruliness.&quot; Although Kant famously wrote that man is an animal which needs a master, this should not deceive us: what Kant aims at is not the philosophical commonplace according to which, in contrast to animals whose behavioral patterns are grounded in their inherited instincts, man [[lacks]] such firm coordinates which, therefore, have to be imposed on him from the outside, through a [[cultural]] authority; Kant’s [[true]] aim is rather to point out how the very [[need]] of an external master is a deceptive [[lure]]: man needs a master in order to conceal from himself [[The Deadlock|the deadlock ]] of his own difficult freedom and self-responsibility. In this precise sense, a truly enlightened &quot;mature&quot; human being is a subject who no longer needs a master, who can fully assume the heavy burden of defining his own limitations. This basic Kantian (and also [[Hegelian]]) lesson was put very clearly by [[Chesterton]]: &quot;Every act of will is an act of self-limitation. To [[desire]] [[action]] is to desire limitation. In that sense every act is an act of self-sacrifice." <ref>[[G.K. Chesterton]], <i>Orthodoxy</i>, FQ Publishing, 2004.</ref><br />

Derrida leaves no doubt that, "/a/s soon as Descartes has reached this extremity, he seeks to reassure himself, to certify the <i>Cogito</i> through God, to [[identify]] [[The Act|the act ]] of the <i>Cogito</i> with a reasonable reason." (58) This withdrawal sets in "from the moment when he pulls himself out of madness by determining natural light through a series of principles and axioms" (59). The term "light" is here crucial to measure the distance of Descartes from [[German]] [[Idealism]], in which, precisely, the core of the subject is no longer light, but the abyss of darkness, the "[[Night of the world|Night of the World]]."<br />