“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


Friday, September 12, 2014

This Will Happen, Far North

...in Kirkenes, Norway, Thursday October 9:

My friend Douglas Kahn recently invented the phrase Earth magnitude. When we scale up to Earth magnitude, very interesting things happen to thinking. Far from making supposed universalistic generalizations, as many still assume ecological statements to be, thought at Earth magnitude is highly accurate and specific. Yet it is also deeply entwined with paradox in such a way that it reveals something basic to the structure of thought: a loop form, which I take to be the structure of being anything at all: a logical system, a solar ray, an electromagnetic shield, an aurora, an oil refinery.

Moreover, Earth magnitude is the correct scale on which to think something seemingly near to us, yet in fact more distant than Sagittarius A: human being as such.

1 comment:

Nick Guetti said...

How does one know that one really is scaling up ones thought to earth magnitude? I mean rather than imagining doing so?