Technology as Destiny in Cassirer and Heidegger - Continuing the Davos De…
February 1st, 2009, search relatedRelated posts :: Technology as Destiny in Cassirer and Heidegger - Continuing the Davos Debate :: Technology as Destiny in Cassirer and Heidegger - Continuing the Davos Debate :: Technology as Destiny in Cassirer and Heidegger {part one} :: yarp of barb
Bernx at aol.com wrote:
> your term, “noumenal material ” is an oxymoron.
I of course took the term “noumenal” from Kant. I know that its etymology of “thing thought” is misleading for my meaning but unfortunately it is also the prevailing term in Western philosophy for the meaning I was intending, viz. thing-in-itself, that which intrinsically exists, that which is real in its own right (as opposed to phenomenon). In radical distinction to the prevailing empiricist view, when I speak of material stuff I don’t mean the phenomena (i.e. appearances) of material objects in the minds of observers; I mean the actual material stuff which I take to be “out there” in intrinsically real “container” space independent of observation. I am therefore distinguishing a genuine (noumenal) materialism from the view which usually usurps the name materialism, viz. physicalism (= the empiricist view that reality conceived of as a phenomenal world may be reductively described in terms of a subset of phenomena which we label “physical”). Physicalism deals only
with the appearances of matter in the mind streams of observers. But the appearances of matter are not matter. They are experiences. Noumenal materialism reasserts the reality of intrinsically real material substance in the face of a post-Kantian orthodoxy which has decided that space and time are purely mental forms of perception (as in Kant’s transcendental aesthetic) or, even less, mere conventional definitions. Noumenal materialism is a form of representative realism superficially akin to Locke’s and Newton’s in that it takes space and time to be noumenally real as well as material substance as a something which fills regions of space over time. (One important difference: instead of infinitely hard Democritean corpuscles I take material substance to be an infinitely divisible “ether”. And no, the Michaelson-Morley experiment did not decisively disprove the existence of an ether.) And yes I realize the irony of simultaneously holding to a form of representative
realism and being attracted to Heidegger’s philosophy. I disagree with Heidegger in substantial ways - yet also agree with him in substantial ways (though sometimes need to “redescribe” his views into my own terms).
> …Cassirer’s understanding of the Spirit and purposefullness of unfolding nature
> rather than its techno/mechanical explotation…
Cassirer was plainly in the grip of enframing and sought its furtherance though he apparently imagined himself as having transcended it. He distinguished religion from magic precisely by the fact that religion was already under the sway of technology and that this sway brought about a cultural change of meaning in which man for the first time experienced himself as an active willing force apart from and “above” a passive nature which lay there at man’s feet waiting to be used. Here we already have the concept of standing reserve. And he was very positive toward this exploitative imposition of human willing on the natural world provided only that the human ethical community should make this exploitation serve rational ethical goals. This is still enframing and, as history has demonstrated numerous times up to and including the present moment, is entirely consistent with tyrannical authoritarianism, class exploitation and colonialism.
