enowning
Wednesday, December 12, 2018
 
In City Journal onto-theological time.
In Heidegger’s view, our task is to wait for whatever new form of the revealing of things will take the place of technology. That new form will have something to do with reverence and the divine, he believed, though not as we know them from the Bible. As Heidegger said of technology: “Only a god can save us.” Heidegger uttered this comment in an interview for the German magazine Der Speigel in 1966, though it wasn’t published until after his death in 1976. His remark, however ambiguous, proved prescient. A year later, Lynn Townsend White, Jr., a historian of medieval technology, published a short but extraordinary paper, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis,” in which he argued that all modern science and technology, no matter where practiced or by whom, was “Western in style and method.” Why so? Because what people do to nature is conditioned largely by religious belief and because “the victory of Christianity over paganism was the greatest psychic revolution in the history of our culture.” Our belief in progress was “unknown to Greco-Roman antiquity or to the orient”; the ancient philosophers believed that time was cyclical and that Earth and the cosmos were eternal.
2nd law of thermodynamics ∴ cosmos is finite.
 
Comments:
Here's that rather "short but extraordinary paper"
 
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