On Monday, June 7, 2004, at 07:30 AM, GEVANS613@xxxxxxx wrote:
So you want to mount your white horse and attempt to change human nature do
you?
No, the question is what should the term 'human nature' mean? You could just as easily say that it is in our nature to care for others and safeguard the natural world we dwell in for future generations and that self-destruction is a perversion of our nature. 'Human nature' is nothing other than the ability to look to the future and argue about how we should be doing things in the present based on the lessons of the past. Any assertion that our 'nature' is a fixed quality like predation is just that, a bare assertion, not a transcendental absolute. All bare assertions require the power to make them true.
The will to will, or in plain English - 'an ongoing fixity
and persistent intent of thought or purpose, ' is only metaphysical as part
of the cognitive rigidity of metaphysicalists
Your 'plain English' is never plain to me but rather a mixed bag of nominalist contortions salted with psychologism and peppered with rhetorical ejaculations. Generally a gobbledegook, at least that's how it reads to me.
The question posed was: 'What is so different with
Iraq? Both Nietszche and Heidegger urged subjugation by action by the strong over
the weak.
No, subjugation was a problem according to Heidegger, and its origin is the metaphysics of subjectness but as you refuse to read him and only want to mine bits and pieces of his text for your rhetorical anti-Hun writing I don't imagine that will make any sense to you either.
Malcolm in the bowels of Christ THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS 'GLOBAL POWER' and
'it' certainly doesn't have a 'brain' which is capable of exercising an
ongoing fixity of purpose.
Your quasi nominalism constantly reduces you to absurdity and I understand you can only read everyone else through your absurd AIT lens which leads you to conclude that it is everyone else that is absurd. From the other side of this dialogue however I can assure you that I find you as ludicrously pointless as you must do me.
the problem facing humanity is humanity not technology ...
It is the way that humanity uses technology that counts - you can either use a
boomerang to scratch your back or you can throw it and kill people.
Boomerangs were used for killing game and for ceremonial purposes, they were part of the tool set of traditional Aboriginal peoples who generally lived in a very stable complementary relationship with their lands. Nowadays the boomerang equivalent for us moderns is a shopping trolley in the meat section of a supermarket tied into local and international distribution channels to industrial abattoirs, meat farms, the industrial cereal agriculture that feeds the meat, logistical transport systems, the energy infrastructure that powers it all and provides the fertilizers, a biochemical industry to provide antibiotics, a banking and corporate system to finance the whole shebang, a government legislature to regulate it and armies of workers and managers to keep the meat moving onto the shelves day in day out.
The evolutionary pinnacle of predation is a mum reaching over to inspect a plastic wrapped chunk of dead flesh with a price tag and bar code attached to it. This act requires a very complex global network of technological innovation to support it, it requires a whole way of life as an 'equipmental totality of relations'. Part of Heidegger's question about technology is that it has become so complex and interwoven that the old notion that humans merely use technology to shape a chaotic world in their image overlooks the possibility that it is the technological setup itself that forms how we already understand the world within which we use technology.
Your assertion that 'it is the way that humanity uses technology that counts' doesn't take this possibility of a 'technological understanding' into account and merely subscribes reason and/or instinct as the arbiter of our use of technology. Your analogies are far too simplistic for me and I find Heidegger's problem concerning technology infinitely more philosophical.
Cheers,
Malcolm
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