“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Saturday, March 30, 2013

Overwinding

Thanks Cliff Gerrish. This chap has tuned into the ethical and political (not to say the psychological) problem of hyperobjects. There's just one problem. It's not like overwinding a watch, to the extent that it's perfectly possible to think these things; terribly easy in fact, in some sense. The problem is that you can't unthink them. And you shouldn't: unfortunately your ethics is now duty bound to bear them in mind. So if we are watches we are definitely broken.

It's interesting to me, as a student of the modernity versus premodernity story, which is a story about how we went from a watch or clock like social state (Levi-Strauss) to an engine like one. Yep. This guy has tuned into the problem, for sure.

No comments: