The Ascent of Humanity

[Salem1]

http://www.ascentofhumanity.com/introduction.php

School, economics, technology, machine, science, religion, our concept of self and other, nature, spirit... these are some of the keywords of this book. I really can't be bothered to sum it up in this post, but I ask you to read it. I fortunately and finally found this a month or so ago by sheer stumbling upon through google. Now I regard the discussions we usually have here, like on economics and religion, in a new way - those discussions are now obsolete to me.

[CamilleBonparte]

http://www.ascentofhumanity.com/introduction.php

School, economics, technology, machine, science, religion, our concept of self and other, nature, spirit... these are some of the keywords of this book. I really can't be bothered to sum it up in this post, but I ask you to read it. I fortunately and finally found this a month or so ago by sheer stumbling upon through google. Now I regard the discussions we usually have here, like on economics and religion, in a new way - those discussions are now obsolete to me.

See you around then?

[Gaidin]

So he found a book and now he doesn't like us anymore?

Ok.

[Salem1]

Don't be so lackadaisical, I'm not committing TWC-suicide or whatever and I'm not looking for your attention. Read the book, it's all there online for you. I don't do this as a sort of self-proclamation but for you... however cliché that may sound.

[Gaidin]

Tell us what the book's about and maybe it might be worth a shot.

[The Dude]

While the topic covered by the author is interesting and I'll probably spend my time reading it sooner or later, I'm doubtful that this is going to be shedding any new light on matters. Added to that, there's no book in existence at all that invalidates all discussion, ever.

EDIT: Oh dear, the author begins by elevating all discussion of technology into the realm of mysticism. Yeeeaaahh... I think I'll read this with a watchful eye. I'll end up preferring Heidegger by miles I'm sure, now there's a man who understood technology for what it is.

[SigniferOne]

While the topic covered by the author is interesting and I'll probably spend my time reading it sooner or later, I'm doubtful that this is going to be shedding any new light on matters. Added to that, there's no book in existence at all that invalidates all discussion, ever.

EDIT: Oh dear, the author begins by elevating all discussion of technology into the realm of mysticism. Yeeeaaahh... I think I'll read this with a watchful eye. I'll end up preferring Heidegger by miles I'm sure, now there's a man who understood technology for what it is.

Just fyi, the whole thing is just refurbished German Idealism, that's all.

[Salem1]

In short, it's about human civilisation. How our ascent is really a descent, what our conceptions of the world and ourselves are built on and why they are so self-destructive and also his solutions. That's not even a complete sum up, but really it's so much that to sum it up I would have to write a shorter version of the book itself. The book is available online for reasons he will tell you in the book. He also mentions how the republicans and democrats are both insufficient and also comments on liberalism, marxism, bolshevism, but that's not to give the impression that it's a political book which it isn't at all.

But again for me to sum it up is for me to reduce the contents of the book. It's about more than just what I've managed to say here, it's more than worth a shot.

And of course discussion isn't invalidated. I just mean that discussions like Republicans vs Democrats are now even more obsolete to me. To me, it didn't shed new light - and he himself takes this up, that no one really sheds new light - but it did so in a more complete package than I have ever seen before. Sort of like having all of the puzzle pieces but having no clue how to put them together nor that it makes a puzzle, then this book comes along and zaps them in place.

[basics]

" In short, it's about human civilisation. How our ascent is really a descent, what our conceptions of the world and ourselves are built on and why they are so self-destructive and also his solutions."

Salem1,

The above should tell you that it is the nature of man that is the root of the problem and not the technology. I cannot imagine what his solutions might be but I do know where the solution lies and it is not with him.

[Salem1]

Thanks Dude, gonna read it.

" In short, it's about human civilisation. How our ascent is really a descent, what our conceptions of the world and ourselves are built on and why they are so self-destructive and also his solutions."

Salem1,

The above should tell you that it is the nature of man that is the root of the problem and not the technology. I cannot imagine what his solutions might be but I do know where the solution lies and it is not with him.

According to Eisenstein it isn't the nature of man which is the problem but our denial of the true human nature in favour of an illusion. He says that this is the root cause of the other issues, our flawed conception of self and other, and civilisation as we know it enforces this flawed conception - this is what he gets at when he gets to Darwin, for example.

[basics]

" According to Eisenstein it isn't the nature of man which is the problem but our denial of the true human nature in favour of an illusion."

Salem1,

Yet it is my understanding that Einstein believed that something much superior to evolution contrived to make things as they are. However can you elaborate on this true human nature and what the illusion is?

[The Dude]

" According to Eisenstein it isn't the nature of man which is the problem but our denial of the true human nature in favour of an illusion."

Salem1,

Yet it is my understanding that Einstein believed that something much superior to evolution contrived to make things as they are. However can you elaborate on this true human nature and what the illusion is?

Not Einstein. Eisenstein. The author linked in the OP

[Salem1]

However can you elaborate on this true human nature and what the illusion is?

I think he will do it much better, it is his words after all . Here is the section: http://www.ascentofhumanity.com/chapter2-1.php

Although you won't get the complete picture from just that. It's engraved everywhere in the book, so really you can read anywhere and you will find it but I think that's the main chapter about it.

@Dude, That text seemingly only increases in convoluted abstractions without making any point or applying it to something concrete, but I can never grasp what his point is or what he's getting at. I suppose the text was just an appetizer and indeed there is no point in it.

[Salem1]

Haha, if it isn't Signifier. I was actually thinking of you while I was reading the parts about religion and I see your rash assumptions are still in full flair.

[Scipio Africanus Maximus]

Yeah.... So I just read several pages at random and they all seem to say the same thing: Technology and scientific advancement is bad. Think I'll pass. I happen to be rather fond of both.

[Salem1]

Yeah.... So I just read several pages at random and they all seem to say the same thing: Technology and scientific advancement is bad. Think I'll pass. I happen to be rather fond of both.

A fundamental misconception, he explains this in the end IIRC. He too thinks that technology and science can and have done good. He goes deeper than just ''tapped water makes it easier to drink = technology is good'' or ''we make bombs = technology is bad'' although he does of course give examples of both of those cases. If you think he's anti-technologic or anti-science, you just haven't read the book properly and if he was then I wouldn't have made this recommendation. Instead of trying to label and simplify (you will get to these sections in the book too), take your time and understand it.

I'd read the introduction again if I were you.

[The Dude]

I'll post a little excerpt from Heidegger's work here Salem so you can see the difference between the two texts. They both deal with the same issue, but one manages to excite the reader and get him to ask questions and the other draws a whole bunch of strange conclusions at the very start and then proceeds to mystify the topic. You can decide which text is which.

In what follows we shall be questioning concerning technology. Questioning builds a way. We would be advised, therefore, above all to pay heed to the way and not to fix our attention on isolated sentences and topics. The way is a way of thinking. All ways of thinking, more or less perceptibly, lead through language in a manner that is extraordinary. We shall be questioning concerning technology, and in so doing we should like to prepare a free relationship to it. The relationship will be free if it opens our human existence to the essence of technology. When we can respond to this essence, we shall be able to experience the technological within its own bounds.

Technology is not equivalent to the essence of technology. When we are seeking the essence of "tree", we have to become aware that That which pervades every tree, as tree, is not itself a tree that can be encountered among all other trees. Likewise, the essence of technology is by no means anything technological. Thus we shall never experience our relationship to the essence of technology so long as we merely conceive and push forward the technological, put up with it, or evade it. Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it. But we are delivered over to it in the worst possible way when we regard it as something neutral; for this conception of it, to which today we particularly like to do homage, makes us utterly vlind to the essence of technology.

According to ancient doctrine, the essence of a thing is considered to be what the thing is. We ask the question concerning technology when we ask what it is. Everyone knows the two statements that answer our question. One says: Technology is a means to an end. The other says: Technology is a human activity. The two definitions of technology belong together. For to posit ends and procure and utilize the means to them is a human activity. The manufacture and utilization of equipment, tools, and machines, the manufactured and used things themselves, and the needs and ends that they serve, all belong to what technology is. The whole complex of these contrivances is technology. Technology itself is a contrivance, or, in Latin, an instrumentum.

The current conception of technology, according to which it is a means and a human activity, can therefore be called the instrumental and anthropological definition of technology.

Who would ever deny that it is correct? It is in obvious conformity with what we are envisioning when we talk about technology. The instrumental definition of technology is indeed so uncannily correct that it even holds for modern technology, of which, in other respects, we maintain some justification that it is, in contrast to the other handwork technology, something completely different and therefore new. Even the power plant with its turbines and generators is a man-made means to an end established by man. Even the jet aircraft and the high-frequency apparatus are means to ends. A radar station is of course less simple than a weather vane. To be sure, the construction of a high-frequency apparatus requires the interlocking of various processes of technical-industrial production. And certainly a sawmill in a secluded valley of the Black Forest is a primitive means compared with the hydroelectric plan in the Rhine River.

But this much remains correct: modern technology too is a means to an end. That is why the instrumental conception of technology conditions every attempt to bring man into the right relation to technology. Everything depends on our manipulating technology in the proper manner as a means. We will, as we say, "get" technology "spiritually in hand". We will master it. The will to mastery becomes all the more urgent the more technology threatens to slip from human control.

But suppose now that technology were no mere means, how would it stand with the will to master it? Yet we said, did we not, that the instrumental definition of technology is correct? To be sure. The correct always fixes upon something pertinent in whatever is under consideration. However, in order to be correct, this fixing by no means needs to uncover the thing in question in its essence. Only at the point where such an uncovering happens does the true come to pass. For that reason, the merely correct is not yet the true. Only the true brings us into a free relationship with that which concerns us from out of its essence. Accordingly, the correct instrumental definition of technology still does not show us technology's essence. In order that we may arrive at this, or at least come close to it, we must seek the true by the way of the correct. We must ask: what is the instrumental itself? Within what do such things as means and ends belong? A means is that whereby something is effected and thus attained. Whatever has an effect as its consequence is called a cause. But only no that by means of which something else is effected is a cause. The end in keeping with which the kind of means to be used is determined is also considered a cause. Wherever ends are pursued and means are employed, wherever instrumentality reigns, there reigns causality.

What Heidegger does is interesting. He first sets you on one path and has you think along, and then together with you he reaches a conclusion that at first glance seems true but then reveals itself to only merely be correct. That's Heidegger's technique, and that's how he gets to the essence of things. As he says at the beginning, questioning builds a way and this way is the one that is walked in his book.

The author you linked doesn't do this. His text is mystical, starts with unfounded conclusions and unsourced statements such as "some say" and "it is clear that". If he wants to talk about the importance of technology in relation to mankind then he first needs to get out of the chokehold of premature conclusions and mystical language otherwise the nature of our relationship with technology will remain as hidden from him as from the rest of us.

[chriscase]

It seems to be that we encounter this as a subtext in any number of different types of texts. The base concept is that there is something terribly, terribly wrong with us/the world/society as it exists right now, and that, some time in the past, things were better. Or at least, that whatever has gone so badly awry is linked/intrinsic to contemporary life, technology, psychology, or society.

It seems to me this is a fundamentally subjective judgment, an unconscious prejudice against the present and in favor of a mythological, imagined past. Of course there is a diametrically opposed view, that anything novel is intrinsically better than what has come before. I think these views together create an irrational, fruitless lens through which to view the world - past, present, and future.

Or maybe that's just me.

[Salem1]

You chriscase would be wrong to assume that he advocates returning to hunter-gatherer society or anything, think of it more like driving a car backward and then thinking that the world must be controlled because it drives forward, not sure how good a metaphor that was though. Really read it here, I don't really know how to sum it up. Maybe you can find the meaning here in chapter The Triumph of Technology: http://www.ascentofhumanity.com/chapter1-1.php

[chriscase]

You chriscase would be wrong to assume that he advocates returning to hunter-gatherer society or anything, think of it more like driving a car backward and then thinking that the world must be controlled because it drives forward, not sure how good a metaphor that was though. Really read it here, I don't really know how to sum it up. Maybe you can find the meaning here in chapter The Triumph of Technology: http://www.ascentofhumanity.com/chapter1-1.php

Ok fine. I read the frigging link. What did I find? A detailed attack against the futurist (what I referred to as pro-novelty) view, and a couple of paragraphs hinting at the diametrically opposed view. In other words, fodder for those complementarily useless lenses I originally referred to.

Some technology is useful, some is dangerous. Resources are limited, and we need to use them wisely. New and old technologies can be both useful and dangerous, depending on how they are used.

Do we have to hold up technology as the ultimate achievement of our species? Or cringe in terror of it? This seems to me to be an extreme and unproductive duality to labor under. We need to get a better perspective.