File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_2003/lyotard.0305, message 103


From: gvcarter-AT-purdue.edu
Date: Fri, 30 May 2003 21:20:19 -0500
Subject: Re: Intelligence of man, God, Nature.



Hugh suggests:

> Science leads me to believe that Nature created Man, who created gods, and
> eventually a  single God.  This narrative gave the priests indisputable
> power so long as they convinced their flock that they were the only ones who
> knew God's will.

"Nature's" narrative?  Does Nature have a story to tell?  Right now I'm reading 
Jane Marie Todd's Autobiographics in Freud and Derrida wherein she tries traces 
Freud's narrative of the Rat Man, the Rat Man's narrative via Freud, and James 
Strachey's narrative of Freud's narrative of the Rat Man via a revision of THAT 
narrative.

All this is to say (this time via Heidegger) that Science's narrative of Nature 
may, well, be non-self-reflective.  

Heidegger quotes Max Planck:  "Reality is what can be rendered measurable."

But such measures--such as a single God--forgets the human life-world (i.e. the 
politics of attaching Mohammed to the Christian tale which attached itself to a 
Jewish narrative.)

I don't know:  attaching "indisputable power" to INDIVIDUAL priests seems, to 
me, to be just as egregious as attaching power to ONE god.  I mean, the 
narrative you posit is possible-plausible, but I'm not so sure it leads to a 
Laws of Nature?  Laws of the (un)natural maybe, but not Nature-qua-Nature.

"What intelligent humans do," Hugh (You) suggest, is build 
from "senses/memory/learing."

To quote Cage again--indulge, next wk it will meister eckhart =)--quoting 
Duchamp:

"He says, more or less, that one must strain to reach the impossibility of 
remembering, even when experience goes from an object to its double...If we 
didn't have this power of forgetfulness, if art today didn't help us forget, we 
would be submerged, drowned under those avalanches of rigorously identical 
objects."

But Hugh (You) say it better:

> Other animals with other senses inhabit other worlds.
 
gc


   

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