sdv wrote:
>
> Terry
> There are endless attempts by human beings of diverse areas of expertise to
> place 'man' back at the centre of things - it remains one of the supreme
> failures of what can be regarded, at least here, as failing discourses.
> Just because physics, that extraordinarily political science attempts to
> maintain and resurrect a religious, neo-spiritual element, does not mean
> that it succeeds.
As someone else has recently posted (on this list?), physics has
at least in the 20th century begun to understand that all measurement
requires a *measurer*. The dignity of man (woman, child...) is
not ontical [i.e., something belonging to the domain of things that
can be measured]. It should be fairly obvious that even John Henry
was smaller than even a little mountain.
Man's dignity is twofold: (1) ethical [a la Levinas...], and
(2) ontological: Man as *measurer* is the condition-sine-qua-non
for anything to be measured, e.g., for there to *be* a
"physical universe".
> The sciences of evolution, psychoanalysis, astronomy and
> physics vehemently deny this. To suggest that humans are significant in the
> face of the universe is to invite the 'nach drach tory' of supremicism.
"Drang nach tory"? I don't get it -- can you explain?
But the case with psychoanalysis, even more so than with
physics, is a "mixed bag". Freud was both a psycho-physics naif
and also a hermeneuticist. Talk about "splitting" and
"dissociation"!
I would suggest Donald Winnicott's _Playing and Reality_ as a
start at addressing the part of psychoanalysis that I find
constructive here.
>
> Curiously i think that Levinas, that most religious of contemporary
> philosophers, put it quite well '... the finite being that we are cannot
> in the final account complete the task of knowledge...' In his modesty he
> places the desire for 'knowing' as a relationship with the other... Always
> a recognition of not knowing and an awareness of lack.
Levinas is a difficult "case". I cannot go "with him" so far as
to abase the self to elevate the other (for, in that case,
it seems to me that the ultimate way of honoring the
other would be to abase *him* so he can have
The Good, too...). But I think Levinas has a
lot of value to say (as does his ethical antipode, Heidegger).
Concerning "a recognition of not knowing and an awareness of lack",
etc., I think Husserl is not stating something so different
from what at least some scientists feel: that knowledge is
an *infinite task*. ("The way is everything; the end is nothing"
--Willa Cather)
> To suggest that
> science is detsined to place humans at the centre of things is to remind us
> that sciences destiny is to resurrect god after neitsche and modernity
> killed it. Personally I believe it is well dead.
To be "in the center" is not necessarily anything to be
happy about. Job and Abraham and the Babel-onian master
craftspersons would have been a lot better off had their
"place in the cosmos" been more *peripheral*!
But, seriously, I completely agree that man is *ontically*
indifferent -- Heidegger has the lovely phrase: "Es gibt",
to describe all-that-which-is: it all "just is, without
reason" (and I feel that anyone who really appreciates
that idea will wish to vomit in consequence...). This
occurs at many levels, including that "the universe" can't
care about anything, and most of societies for the most part
don't really care about most of the persons in them ("Food for
powder!", as Shakespeare's Falstaff said in contradistinction
to: "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori!").
Reflective self-consciousness is the "transcendental
condition" for there being any opinion about anything (including
opinions like: "Consciousness is just a secondary
quality of molecules in motion").
I think there is a divide which runs through consciousness in
our society, perhaps similar to what Julian Jaynes
talked about in 1000BC Greece: There is the form of consciousness
which is naively immersed in experience (what I, for one,
was childreared into...), and there is the form of
consciousness which has taken "the transcendental turn"
(Kant, Husserl, et al.). The latter is not
comprehensible by the former. Perhaps Aristotle's
statement also applies here:
That condition the god is in always, but man only sometimes.
>
> However I know that I am a trivial insiginificant creature in the face of
> the universe who is just trying to do the best it can...
Both/and -- utterly insignificant to in-significance,
but very important to importance (which latter itself, of course,
is, in its turn, of no consequence to that which
is inconsequential, i.e., to the "Es gibt"....
"Yours in discourse [which is, among other things,
where alone the universe has a place to be]...."
+\brad mccormick
--
Let your light so shine before men,
that they may see your good works.... (Matt 5:16)
Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)
<![%THINK;[SGML+APL]]> Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [log in to unmask]
914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua NY 10514-3403 USA
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