Date: Wed, 21 Feb 2001 12:25:57 +0000
Subject: Re: <fwd> S.J. Gould on new genome findings


a belated interjection... I've only skimmed this thread lazily (especially those posts of
Catweasle {sorry, cat, but part of a habit recently})

Rene recently spake thusly:

>Jan, Malik, Catweasle,
>
>Sure, guilt is something personal. Meanwhile any possible sort of disaster 
>is spelled out in any possible sort of "information". Amazing to see, how 
>Catweasle - thanks for your reaction - completely refuses to see the 
>enormity of destruction, that science made possible, and real, in the last
>century. 
>What was the consequence of this finest positivist period of the fin de
>siecle,
>wherein German, French, English, American scientists worked like monks for
>the 
>ever rising humanity: the industrial killing of WW1. (compared to which a
>crusade
>is just a holiday)
>Something, another lazy philosopher, Nietzsche, had seen coming, and warned
>for with
>a loud voice. He advised Bismarck, to lay arms down ... 
>N.: "The interim-character of national wars" "Europe only wants one thing:
>to become one."
>"What if Napoleon ..."  Etc., etc.
>(For the morbid relation of this to the holocaust see: Omer Bartov: Industrial
>killing: World War 1, the holocaust, and representation. The idea: The only
>way
>to prevent the horrible massive killing, is horrible massive killing of those,
>who want to horrible massive kill you. 
>The term "representation" may come as a surprise, behind it is Heidegger's
>Erlebnis.)

Is this not a good moment to contemplate Heidegger's assertion that science and the
scientific, and all who sail in her, are held in the sway, in the grip of technology
{particle accelerators, computer simulations and modelling, drugs, etc}, in the
'safekeeping' of control methods and the dispensations of the techno will-to-power, etc.
One aspect of the holocaust might be seen as an application of modern management science,
mass production and conveyor-belt techniques, and, the sudden growth of new industrial
chemicals in equal parts...? Surely relevant on this list is Heidegger's twin statements
concerning (the essence of) technology: that the essence of technology is nothing
technological (it [is] Being]; that the essence of technology holds sway as the greatest
danger AND can dispense/give the one saving power? What is swaying, gripping, holding and
giving in this context? Are we held captive by technology/science when we only ever think
it in technological/scientific terms, only and always technologically and scientifically?
Or is this a release, this thinking along the lines of what is to be thought?

ashes to ashes (and from ashes)

MichaelP



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