Posts tagged “philosophy”:
The Qualities of the Totalitarian State
The spirit of the age that we currently finds ourselves in is one of rapid change (and often times decline) in the economic, political, and technological order of the world. Compared to the nineteenth century (and in many regards even the twentieth), when living standards where many times more squalid than today, there was then a sense of progressiveness, of growth and change that — as long as channelled in the correct direction — would be transformed into a new and wonderful world. That spirit does not exist today. Instead we have the idea that we are “sliding” back into the darkest depths of mankind’s history and that we will — posed with some certainty if not clarity — see the return of fascism and of the oppression of the state.
Continue ReadingOn Text
Text, as a system of recording symbolic representation for communication across time and space, is likely one of the most important inventions of mankind — second only the the symbolic representations themselves made possible by language. The general text, opposed to the specific form of writing, is useful primarily because it is a survivable and storable form of information that above anything else functions as lossy compression. These qualities make working with text more powerful than most other human inventions.
Continue ReadingThe End of History.
Francis Fukuyama is probably the person most connected to the concept of “the End of History”, but he is not the originator of it. Fukuyama’s intial article1 (that was then later expanded upon to the book The End of History and the Last Man) initially reads as a summary of the Kojévian interpretation of Hegel’s observation of the end of History. Fukuyama sees in the collapse of the Soviet order in eastern Europe as not just a victory of western liberal democracy, but as a showcase of this western system as the ultimate goal of human society entirely. This view of History ending seems to have been thoroughly debunked in our popular consciousness, to the point of simply naming the concept in my international relations class elicits chuckles across the lecture hall, and academic scholars praise Finland for “never [believing] that history ended in 1989”2. I have not read Fukuyama’s larger coverage of his thinking on this subject, only his initial article titled The End of History? as well as the original sources of Hegel’s Phenomenology and Kojéve’s lectures on it. In some regards Fukuyama has already faced much of this criticism preëmtively3, but somehow misconceptions still abound. I agree wholeheartedly with Kojéve’s experience:
Continue ReadingThe Philosophical Impacts of Nuclear Weapons
To answer the question of whether or not the invention nuclear bomb has been the most important event of human history is not an easy task. There are certainly numerous arguments in favour of such a statement; nuclear weapons have given us the thermodynamically most efficient form of releasing energy yet devised; they have given us the ability to quickly and easily destroy the major feats of our ancestors and possibly even those of our descendents; they have given us power beyond humanity’s comprehension. And yet the nature of a question of this broad a nature requires us to think more deeply about technological evolution and of our place within it. What constitutes an invention, and what makes certain inventions more important than others? Have the impacts of nuclear weapons, on both our materialist world and the cultural spiritus mundi, been large enough to warrant such a description? The Manhattan Project, despite its tremendous success from seemingly out of nowhere, was not a gift of Prometheus. The project itself was an industrial effort of incredible proportions, and built upon the recent cumulative advances in nuclear physics, quantum mechanics, and special relativity. It is therefore difficult to see the invention of nuclear weapons as a being a particularly important event from the left-handed qua limit perspective, while for those looking in from a right-handed perspective may see the Trinity test as a defining point in human history, especially given the role in the popular consciousness nuclear weapons were given during the cold war.
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