By: ecko4inc

ecko4inc — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 23:47:51 +0000

Shades of Nietzsche in the next-stop-eddington post. The wanderer and his shadow. Nietzsche askes: what will we sacrifice for science and to the will to truth? Of course it can never be forgotten Nietzsche went completely insane and died alone; apart from the somatic causes for his madness, his table of values, his joyful unreason, his gay science, also drove him into the sleep of reason for the last ten years of his life.
Et in Arcadia ego.
I am emale, a shadow of the man of letters. Then there’s the man of numbers – the physicists. This in itself is a cruel parody of the figure of the scientist. Richard Feynman was a very funny man, a Fool full of anecdotes and mischievousness (see “Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynman!” by Richard Feynman).
For every Eddington, there’s a Feynman (but I think Feynman the physicist would have agreed with Eddington when he said ‘the path of science must be pursued for its own sake’ – its in the essence of knowledge, to pursue truth in itself – but as Nietzsche says: why not untruth? Surely you must be joking, Mr Nietzsche), just like for every Descartes, there’s a Spinoza, and every Hegel will have a Kierkegaard…
“This is the Night, the interior of human nature, existing here – pure Self – and in the phantasmagoric representations it is everywhere. We see this Night when we look a human being in the eye, looking into a Night that turns terrifying… Into the Night the being has returned.”
Hegel (the humanist? – but is there really such a thing? aren’t all humans, humanists? the living idea of being[-human]?
Would you say the virtual world – like Web 2.0 – is the end of history? I’m undoubtedly using a vulgar interpretation of Hegel, the dialectical representation of history. I think perhaps one day we will not look at what’s behind the man or woman in the daylight of (scientific, calculable) reasoning over the earth, but into his or her eyes and see the eternal Night that lies within… ourselves.
“The instant of decision is madness.”
Kierkegaard
The individual and God’s love is incommensurable with reality. And the fear and trembling in this (self-)knowledge exemplified in the gap, the difference between maths (the non-phonetic languages of the ‘hard’ sciences) and words (the phonetic languages of the humanities) will inform my decision as to which table I sit at and with whom I eat my dinner and drink my wine and make jokes and conversations: staring at a desirable woman across the table… Looking into the “I” of the subject making the decision – and thereby speaking, making a statement (hopefully one that will impress!) – I find a necessary fiction, a real phantasmagoria: the desiring machines.

Comments on: Next Stop: Eddington

By: ecko4inc