Serres
Cincinnati, 8/16/2010
Man is a stranger in the world, alienated from the dawn, from the sky, from things. He hates them and fights against them. His environment is a dangerous enemy who must be fought and who must be kept in servitude. Martial neuroses from Plato to Descartes, from Bacon to us. The hatred of objects at the root of knowledge, the horror of the world at the heart of the theoretical. . . .Can a paradigm itself be a disease? Are there afflictions of psyche and soma which feed on, draw their energy from, certain models of reality? Which would not/could not exist except in the world a "lethal" paradigm suffering from a "martial neurosis" makes real?Michel Serres, Hermes [The life-denying character of our paradigm] is based, simply, on intellection, and on a narrowly selected kind of intellection which gets only to dead ends in science. It excludes all the other human capacities to know and make sense of things. Instead, being based on a tiny part of a rare (peculiar) variety of human being, it excludes humans as whole beings and in general. It inevitably produces less-than-half-knowledge which when applied inevitably produces side-effects, and it is guided by an attitude that disdains the great majority of humans. It views reality as an array of fragments: splits the world into little dead pieces. It is a destructive, lethal, little paradigm.
Bruce Holbrook, The Stone Monkey
If so, then a revolution in the paradigm, a war (of words?) against our war metaphors, would be the only cure.
