Functionalism Versus Vitality

[Anonymous No.15764671]

Why was this deleted? It's from a book.

"We must keep in mind that the exactness which the natural sciences have achieved, or are trying to achieve, no matter how far it is carried, refers only to the mechanical exactness of both the process and the subject of perception. Such exactness does not give us certainty beyond the certainty of facts found in repeatable experiences. Exactness in this sense is in fact correctness, but it is not truth, for it is meaningless to talk of truth where merely something mechanically repeatable has been ascertained. Truth is not identical with repeat ability; on the contrary, it is what absolutely cannot be duplicated. Hence truth has no place in any kind of mechanics. The term "scientific truth" is therefore quite equivocal. It is based on experiments, and it is used where some mechanically exact phenomenon has been made intelligible, provable, and capable of being repeated.

But the fact that something can be proved, tested, and repeated is no criterion of truth. If the scientist asserts that this exactness is synonymous simply with truth, or with a higher truth, the assertion shows only that the scientist's terminology itself is inexact. What sense does it make to call the proposition, "Two times two equal four," a proposition memorized by firstyear school children, a truth? Truth is not learned; one does not become more truthful by learning and by knowing much. Nor do we become truthful by exact thinking. A mathematical proposition does not become true just because it describes a fact with exactness, not even if it gets repeated a million times. The apodictical certainty of mathematical propositions lies entirely and completely within the field of exactness and correctness; but their content of truth equals zero, like that of any arithmetical proposition. Scientific truths are not "higher" truths. Where they claim to be, these claims are usurpations by the mechanical exactitude. It would be better to discard the term scientific truth altogether because its validity is merely descriptive.

The striving for exactness characteristic of the natural sciences must here be gauged in a different manner – not with those measuring instruments developed for the purpose, but from a point of vantage entirely beyond all science and scientism. No one will deny that it is needful and legitimate to seek such a point of vantage, unless, of course, we make science our religion, surround it with walls of dogma, and sanctify all its methods. But this would render all investigation and analysis impossible."

[Anonymous No.15764676]

"We will start from an observation which no one who has ever made it can forget. For to observe our modern civilization means to raise the question: Is there not a direct connection between the increase of knowledge concerning mechanically exact processes and the fact that modern man, in a strange manner, loses his individuality, loses his balance, his grip upon life, feels increasingly endangered and susceptible to attack in the security that is his due? This inner security, of course, means something different from the security which can be bought by any kind of measurable method. For it concerns man's place and role in life and is related to human freedom. No methodical science can ever give to man that kind of security, not even the most systematic kind of exactitude. The trend of our exact sciences is not toward purely intellectual knowledge. On the contrary, it has been sharply opposed to the way Parmenides strove after knowledge; it is typically analytical, inductive, dividing. Thus, causality and, in its train, functionalism push to the fore, and all individuality is lost. Thus too, all things mechanical predominate, and with them that brutal optimism and conceit of civilization which characterize the course of the technological age; until eventually the point is reached where a man is broken by his blind lust for power, is punished, and thereby forced to change his way of thinking."

[Anonymous No.15764773]

>>15764671
Nice pasus anon, who wrote this?

[Anonymous No.15764810]

>>15764671
so u r just redefining truth as not a correct statement or fact but some kind of higher purpose in life?

[Anonymous No.15764863]

Didn’t Hume say this about billiard balls like 300 years ago?

[Anonymous No.15765699]

>>15764671
science like economic dispositives can't be stopped.
We are barely catching up with the things that already exists in the world
We either accelerate or go monkey. There is no middle ground anymore, it's too late for that.

[Anonymous No.15766955]

>>15765699
Societies of mechanical rationalism and hubris rarely announce their weakness, the coming of the end. This is perhaps a secular defense against one of the most powerful theological forms, just as the rebels announce the impossibility of eschatology, unleashing it like a curse.

Stopping material forces is not the intent, this is a misunderstanding of the problem and precisely why the marxist/socialist positions failed, then allied with liberalism. One cannot simply smash technology and the scientific means, this would ignore the destructive tendencies which they rely on - as the luddites themselves participated in the process of planned obsolescence. Materialism cannot solve its own problems, or if faith in perpetual motion persists this faith must also deny all possibility of change. In other words, that which resides outside of nature cannot be and physical nature must subsist in a permanent state even as it is plundered as material to be refined as fuel. This world character explains the manner in which morality is reduced to bare function, all while being refined into its explosive qualities. The logos as mechanised laws of movement.

Such a paradox lies at the heart of technology, material is nothing more than a means for it, a fuel. It is formless, without place. There are no beautiful structures to which it may lay claim, neither aqueducts nor classical bridges which increase in metaphysical strength even as they are worn away. The humaist declares the eternal form of this great beast, even as he admonishes it, and even as his technology is little more than a grain of sand before the Great Pyramids. Against Roman Roads his pomerium is the substratum of nature - Persephone rules where the Titans cannot.

The crystalline structure is stronger than the fasces, and much more useful. Yet, like the Aristotelian form of the knife, such pure technology lacks distinction, it is nothing more than the tool's leverage of itself. This is the marxist machine ecology, or technological singularity, however, such self-descriptive theories ignore that which is beyond them, that even that which appears as formless in the material world may have form beyond it. Kantian noumena as the post-Copernican Revolution: the heat death which revolves around the natural substratum. Perfection of the rational limits, without any possible use.

[Anonymous No.15766972]

>>15766955
nah bro
that's just wishful thiking

[Anonymous No.15766978]

>>15764863
Yes

[Anonymous No.15767000]

>>15766955
2
One can see this in the brutal form of industrial technology, the fabrication shop glowing like the eyes of the Cyclopes. Then in the Marxist formulation, which in metaphysical form would amount to the immediate sacrifice of the social contract for the limits of the technical world. The incapacity of economic means to equate to the power of an absolute machine fulcrum result in its pessimist romanticism.

The theory of AI is our Leviathan counterpart: perfection of an eternal order where change is its equal measure. Completion of the substratum and the final leverage of natural laws which will allow its return to itself, the monster which forms its own armour. There can be neither challenging-forth nor enframing for such a being, as he imagines himself outside of its territory. Our time is without dominion, and yet we exist in a pomerium than can never be defeated, for we ride on the shoulders of giants. Even our own corpse means as little to us as half of Germany hanging from the World Tree. Death to us is a vice which gives life, as virtue to Simplicius was a machination of his own foolishness. The dead forest increases its own power.

Loss of vitality may already be seen in the scientific and technical world. One need only compare the works of Kruppe, for instance, to that of Elon Musk. Technology is beginning its own exit from the world, dispersing as it can no longer find the explosive fuel upon which it relies. Its natural law has abandoned it. A valuable lesson can be learned from the observation Musk's rockets reverting to magic tricks: rather than brutal war material technology takes on the form of Shannon's Most Beautiful Machine. The scientific and economic 'dispositives' can only turn themselves off, as they were themselves only ever means of transition within an era outside of time. Technology for itself, but as pure theory. And the end of the rational formation of technology betrays a return to magical qualities, the realisation that the science and economics have outlived their usefulness.

[Anonymous No.15767010]

>>15765699
What is this creep on about?

[Anonymous No.15767021]

>>15767000
3
Of course, one still needs material examples, this comes in the spectacle of self-operating machines in the West where their speculative and captivating nature rising alongside a dead economy. Utopian realism as a final pessimism. Where similar machines are in real use they are developed by small armies, acting as the mercenaries of partisans. Their rough quality betrays a similarity to the halberd or trench rifle rather than any future victory of the machines. Total mobilisation remains the law, but tied to the abutment-like defenses of cities, thus the technology acts as little more than replacement of old battle means - the war dog and runner are eliminated, but preserved in the mind of the military technician. Nothing substantial has changed from the formation of the machine gun and artillery crews. The real technology in use is much like the livens projector, brutal and easily replicable.

Where technology follows its own rational means it is of the old world, dead in form. A means of obsolescence, the turning of the 'Janus-faced'.

[Anonymous No.15767028]

>>15766972
>posted one minute later
You didn't even read.

[Anonymous No.15767112]

>>15764863
Not at all, they are two completely different understandings of truth.

"Let us study the relation of technology to quite another field, the organization of schools and universities. As the technician enters this field, he converts all institutions of learning to his interest; that is, he promotes technical training, which as he claims, is the only up-to-date, useful, practical knowledge.

The significance of reforms in this direction must not be underestimated. They constitute a direct attack against the idea of a "rounded education" (encyclios disciplina) that prevailed in classical and medieval times. The consequences of this attack do not, obviously, consist alone in the decline of the role of grammar in education, in the retreat of astronomy and music, in the disappearance of dialects and rhetoric. This slashing, whereby of the seven classical "free arts" only arithmetic and geometry have survived, is by no means all. The technical science which comes to a position of supremacy is both empirical and causal. Its inroads into education mean the victory of factual knowledge over integrated knowledge. The study of ancient languages is pushed into the background, but with them there vanish also the means to understand a culture in its entirety. The logical capacity of the student, his capacity to master the form of knowledge is weakened. Factual knowledge is empirical and thereby as infinite as are the endless rows of causes and effects whereby it is described. We often meet with a pride in the boundless accumulation of factual knowledge, which has been likened to an ocean on which the ship of civilization proudly sails. But this ocean is a mare tenebrosum ("a dark sea"); for a knowledge that has become boundless has become also formless. If to the human mind all things are equally worth knowing, then knowledge loses all value. Therefore, it may be concluded that this factual knowledge will eventually drown itself in the ocean of its facts. Today the most valiant human efforts are swamped by the rising tide of facts. It would not be surprising if we were to become as weary from this vastness of knowledge as from a crushing weight which burdens our back.

Where emphasis is placed on facts, education strives for a handbook knowledge, imparted to the student through surveys, profiles, graphs, and statistics of the subject matter. True education is incompatible with this kindof knowledge and with this method of instruction, for the crude empiricism into which such training has fallen is a purely mechanical piling up of facts. This training lays no foundation. It contains no forming principle, which would be superior to, and would master, the subject matter."

[Anonymous No.15767123]

>>15767112
"That dubious adage which says: "Knowledge is power," is less valid today than it ever was, for knowledge of that sort is the very opposite of mental power; actually, it completely enervates the mind. Universities decline in the degree that technical progress spreads into them from the secondary schools. The university becomes a technical training center and servant of technical progress. Technology, in turn, does not fail to lavish endowments and new institutes upon the universities and to work strenuously for the transformation of the universities into conglomerates of specialized laboratories.

It should here be noted that the classic idea of a rounded education, confined as it was to the formation of culture and wisdom, stands in sharp opposition to the idea of an encyclopedia of sciences, that is, to a knowledge which is arrayed alphabetically like a dictionary or encyclopedia. The idea of an encyclopedia of sciences belongs to the eighteenth century. Knowledge of that description has been the forerunner of all modern technical science. It is the knowledge of a Diderot, a D'Alembert, a La Mettrie, who declared all philosophic thought to be null and void, who in works such as Histoire naturelle de l'ame and L'homme machine advocated an empiricism in which everything is explained in terms of causal reflexes between brain and body. The thought of Hume, their English contemporary , is stronger and finer, but his doctrine of the association of ideas, and the principles of all possible associations (he assumes similarity, contiguity in time and space, and cause or effect) lead to the same result (Philosophical Essays Concerning Human Understanding and An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding). According to Hume, perceptions are not in need of a substance that carries them, for all substances are merely composites of simple concepts and thought. These theories of associative thinking always tend to make the associations materially independent. However, to associate is not yet to think; in fact, the special capacity for association characteristic of many aclever head appears to be rather a substitute for independent thought. Hume may be considered the spiritual father of Joyce's Ulysses, a book that makes association independent, and destroys every intellectual order so radically that nothing is left but a great garbage pile of associations."

[Anonymous No.15767152]

>>15764671
>>15764676
>>15766955
>>15767000
>>15767021
>>15767112
>>15767123
Ever heard of paraphrasing?

[Anonymous No.15767153]

>>15764773
FG Junger - Die Perfektion der Technik
>>15764810
Truth was never correctness, and was always something closer to, or at least connected with, a 'higher purpose'. Although I wouldn't use those terms as truth exists independently and may even be against the moral order that is consistent with higher purpose. It may be in opposition to wealth or beauty.

[Anonymous No.15767167]

>>15764671
>Why was this deleted?
I was tired and took it for a schizopost at first sight and thoughtlessly reported it, and apparently that's exactly as much thought as the moderation team puts in as well. I'm sorry quotebro.

[Anonymous No.15767200]

>>15767152
Not sure what point you think you're making.

[Anonymous No.15767606]

>>15767167
Do schizoposters gain some respect because of this?

[Anonymous No.15767767]

>>15767152
>I can’t read though I browse a literature (image)board
At least he brought it here. You don’t even have to go to another website or resource

[Anonymous No.15767869]

>>15767767
>>15767152
To be clear, the three unquoted posts here >>15766955 are my own. I was just trying to answer the question, and work through the problems myself. My own thinking may diverge from Junger's or may not be as complete. I wouldn't want to misrepresent him or have people mistake my schizo outlines for his writing.

[Anonymous No.15769232]

go