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Disenchantment?
19th Century
Romantic Poets (19th Century)
Wordsworth: "We murder to dissect"
Keats: "clip an angel's wing and unweave the rainbow
20th Century Max Weber
"Iron Cage" Scientific
progress is a fraction, the most important fraction, of the process of intellectualization
which we have been undergoing for thousands of years and nowadays is usually
judged in such an extremely negative way.
What does intellectualization created by science, and by scientifically
orientated technology, mean? Does it mean that we…have a greater knowledge of the conditions of life under which we exist than had the aboriginal in the Western Hemisphere before contact with Europeans? Hardly. Unless he is a physicist, one who rides on the streetcar has no idea how the car happened to go into motion. And he does not need to know. He is satisfied that he may “count” on the behaviour of the streetcar….The aboriginal knew incomparably more about his tools... Scientific progress means something else, namely, the knowledge or belief that if one but wishes one could learn it at any time. Hence it means that principally there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but rather that one can, in principle, master all things by calculation. This means that the world is disenchanted. One need no longer have recourse to magical means in order to master or implore the spirits, as did the aboriginal, for whom such mysterious powers existed. Technical means and calculations perform the service. This above all is what intellectualization [scientific progress] means.
Buber: I-Thou versus I-It
I
contemplate a tree.
I can
accept it as a picture: a rigid pillar in a flood of light or splashes of green…
I can feel
it as movement: the flowing veins
around the sturdy, striving core, the sucking of the roots, the breathing of
the leaves, the infinite commerce with earth and air –and growing itself in its
darkness.
Or I can
assign it to a species and observe it as an instance, with an eye to its
construction and its way of life.
I can
overcome its uniqueness and form so rigorously that I recognize it only as an
expression of the law—those laws according to which a constant opposition of
forces is continually adjusted, or those laws according to which the elements
mix and separate. I can dissolve it
into a number, into a pure relation between numbers, and eternalize it. Throughout all of this the tree remains my
object and its place and its time span, its kind and condition. But it can also happen, if will and grace are joined, that as I contemplate the tree I am drawn into a relation, and the tree ceases to be an It…..
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