Re: antihumanism post

dear list, john y, brian c, john m,
john young, thanks for your suggestions to pursue the immense gulf
between thought/application and thought-as-poetic emergence. Indeed,
Brian, whoever you are, has displayed an incredible ability to think the
relation between art and science and I would ask him to forward:

>Brian's take on the interplay, as I see it, between ideation, research,
engineering, architecture, science, the arts and applied technology gets at
the heart of linking powerful thoughts to beneficial action in the world.

sp:     of course, i would want to go carefully through the issue of
"benifical action" citing the humanism (assumption of infinite progress).
But to be clear that I am not against (Heidegger wasn't against) science
and technology as is often the mistaken apprehension, but rather there
has been an overemphasis on logical discursive practices (reason) and
that has left us in an overinstrumentalized condition where everything is
seen as a means-to-an-end. I am not against science and reason (it bears
repeating) Heidegger distinquishes between the Ontic (the reduction of
Being to an attention to things) and the Ontological (the ability to
listen to the poetic emergence of _B_eing). Heigegger says we need both
and he calls that framework or being able to maintain both the
"ontological difference." So it is toward that ontonlogical difference
that I would like to engage the issue of science and technology.


j young writes:
>I would hope that you might tell how your elegant metaphysics could lead to
>such action, or if not, why that is not suitable for metaphysicians.  No
>idle bait intended, you know this is an old quandry of philosophers, maybe
>the most hoary -- translating wondrous thinking into responsible worldly
>participation --

sp:to fully respect this question i need to introduce a few distinctions:
there are three general values in western culture:

        theoria- thought
        praxis-action
        techne-making

Classical culture valued techne or making as a value. Things were
understood as having value based on how they were made (relative to an
assumed and ordered cosmos). Renaissance and humanist culture shifted the
emphasis in Value to praxis, for something to have value one had to go
out into the world and DO something. But what has never been a value in
western culture is theoria-thought. And this is clearly the result of a
cultural bias. Thought is marginalized activity; "johnny, what are you
doing just sitting there, get up and DO something." as we know this
example in everyday life. So when john young writes: "translating wondrous
thinking into responsible worldly participation --." He is responsible to
the traditional values yet may not see how those values have been shaped
historically, leaving out other possibilities, other modalities of human
(dasien) or human being. thus my past (too strenuous) resistance to
thinking about architecture soley in terms of codes, beaurocracies,
government, client values, even values traditionally maintianed by the
design profession. And let's clear one other thing up about the term
metaphysician (john young's use of the term). I would call the thought of
humanism METAPHYSICS, and the thought of antihumanistsm, "thought at the
end of metaphysics." Meta suggesting an outside and uselessness, is
really more the characterization of traditional philosophy (concepts) as
oppossed to the thought in and around may '68 and the antimetaphysicians
like Foucault, Derrida etc, who are interested in problematizing the
frameworks of metaphysical thought. To deconstruct is to return some
unknown or marginalized other into the framework of reason, making that
framework shudder, something we are supposed to take notice of, to notice
that in every framework--to be a framework--must shut something out.


Richard Rorty and actually his reading of Heidegger is interesting in
the context of a concern for action vs. thought-as-such. Between
Pragmatism and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion. For didactic reasons here,
i will maintain the position of radical hermeneutics.

i'm going on too long.

Please, list, more voices, more thought, more questions, perhaps the
climate of this list is becoming more conducive to being a forum and for
j youngs' contribution to that climate i am grateful.

spn