Stian’s Reviews > The Phenomenon of Life > Status Update

But if we ever entrust or resign ourselves wholly to the self-corrective mechanics of the interplay of science and technology, we shall have lost the battle for man. ... The automatism of its use - insofar as this use carries beyond the recurrent meeting of the recurrent emergency created by itself - has set the goal of happiness in principle: indulgence in the use of things.

There are those who cheer the surge that sweeps them along and disdain the question "whither?"; who hail change for its own sake, the endless forward thrust of life into the ever new, unknown, the dynamism as such. Yet, surely, for change to be valuable it is relevant what entity changes (if not toward what), and this underlying whatness must in some way be definable as that nature of "man as man" which...

Control, by making ever more things available for more kinds of uses, enmeshes the user's life in ever more dependencies on external objects. There is no other way of exercising the power than by making oneself available to the use of the things as they become available. Where use is forgone the power must lapse, but there is no limit to the extension of either. And so one master is exchanged for another.

As human satisfaction is different from animal and far surpassing its scope, so is human suffering, though man also shares in the animal range of feelings. But only man can be happy and unhappy thanks to the measuring of his being against terms that transcend the immediate situation. Supremely concerned with what he is, how he lives, what he makes out of himself, and viewing himself from the distance of his wishes...

Kant only exemplifies a long-dominant trend: the idea of the theoretical subject separate from praxis, and more particularly of the passive or receptive nature of "mere" sense and sense knowledge, is deeply ingrained in the philosophical tradition and has decisively determined the course of epistemology.

According to cybernetics, society is a communication network for the transmitting, exchanging, and pooling of information, and it is this that holds it together. No emptier notion of society has ever been propounded. Nothing is said on what the information is about, and why it should be relevant to have it. The scheme allows no room for such a question even to be raised.