Next Essay: Dialectic of Enlightenment - Chapter 1
posted by dennisn on September 13th, 2012 at 7:19AM
posted by dennisn on September 13th, 2012 at 7:19AM
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posted by dennisn on December 8th, 2012 at 4:08PM
Done. A bit late.
Similar to my criticisms of that previous essay on art, this essay too was essentially an emotional rant against determinism and "exploitive modern/industrial capitalism". I suppose the fears it highlights aren't entirely irrelevant, but I think they aren't sufficiently explored. He paints science (enlightenment) in an incredibly negative way. On page 40 he claims that "science distances man from nature." But the sole purpose of science is to understand nature. Such biased re-definitions of these general concepts are litterred throughout the essay. When he talks about "science" he is actually referring to something more like "traumatized over-intellectual slaves-of-the-system blindly obeying external incentives." When he talks about "nature" hs is actually referring to some pre-conceived and biased notion of some ideal state of existence. This is absurd on many levels. One can easily argue that everything we do and see is natural -- by definition. We are a product of nature. Our minds, and bodies, and everything we do in our ecosystems. It would be like telling crows that it's unnatural to use twigs to hunt for their food. Similarly, he paints "entrepreneurs" as some traumatized evil people, on page 39, "who have a compulsive nature for war and contract". That's an absurdly warped re-definition of the word. Does Sergei Brin intrinsically want war? Obviously he is speaking relative to his time, in a highly exaggerated way, but this diminishes the importance of his writing, into merely personal and emotional and non-literal ramblings. He criticizes ignorant labourers and their bosses. On page 36 he mentions "the modern worker in a factory" as some kind of yoked oarsman, who's thoughts are restricted and atrophied. On page 37 he asserts that brutal working conditions and slave-like conformity are a necessary consequence of industrial society -- that "machines disable men". Now, while I have no doubt that there is some truth to this, he has no justification to extrapolate this to anything beyond the extremely narrow and brief slice of human history that he inhabited. Were he alive today, I'm really curious what he would write on the matter. He goes way too far and assumes, based on such scanty evidence, that man is inherently evil. On page 4 he claims that "man only wants to understand nature in order to dominate it and other men." Scary. On page 27 he claims there is more to "cognition" than "mere apprehension, classification and calculation." But never really explains what. By definition, the two things are synonymous. All you can know, is that which is knowable. It seems like that isn't enough for him, and he painfully tries to persuade us that that isn't enough, or that there might be something more out there. Which is insane. He claims this is some kind of "subjection of reason to what is directly given", on page 26. On page 16 he bemoans that "nothing at all may remain outside [the scope of the perceptible]." Not only is this false -- we are free to reason and theorize any crazy theory we feel like -- but how is this something negative or repressive? Does the quark not exist because we haven't directly perceived it? Would he consider believing that we can fly, while falling off a skyscraper to be a more liberating theory? Probably. On page 11 he attempts to equivocate science to the same level as any other absurd theory. He claims that "every specific [scientific] view succumbs to the destructive criticism that it is only a belief." Why would such criticism be destructive though? If I believe objects fall down to the earth, and they repeatedly do after repeated experiments, how would that belief be considered "destroyed"? On the other hand, if I believe rocks float in air, and they don't after repeated experiments, would that not be a better method of destroying views? In other words, conformity to reality should be the only measure of the truth / validity of a view. Expecting something more, is absurd. |
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posted by jenni on October 11th, 2012 at 10:53AM I am quite a few pages into it and I just don't understand whats going on ...
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