If horses had Gods, they would look like horses. Xenophanes
Modern man prides himself on his rationality without realizing it is won at the expense of his vitality. Carl Jung
It is the duty of the natural scientist to attempt a natural explanation before he contents himself with drawing upon factors extraneous to nature. Konrad Lorenz
The chief intellectual characteristic of this history has been man's ability to increasingly remove himself from the concrete experience of the phenomenological 'here and now' and place himself in an abstracted world of concepts and logic. Thomas & Chess
What's the game here . . . ? Dueling quotes? ;-)
I agree with the second and fourth - Weber talks about this in terms of
rationalization. The third depends a lot on how "natural" is defined - and if I remember Lorentz was an animal behaviorist who talked about "imprinting" ... I looked at Wikipedia and found some interesting information, like Heidegger he was involved with the Nazi Party:
Politics[edit]
Lorenz joined the
Nazi Party in 1938 and accepted a university chair under the
Nazi regime. In his application for membership to the Nazi-party
NSDAP he wrote in 1938: "I'm able to say that my whole scientific work is devoted to the ideas of the
National Socialists." His publications during that time led in later years to allegations that his scientific work had been contaminated by Nazi sympathies: his published writing during the Nazi period included support for Nazi ideas of "
racial hygiene" couched in pseudoscientific metaphors.
[6][7][8] After the war Lorenz long denied having been a party member until his membership request turned up, and he also denied having known about the extent of the genocide in spite of having held a post as a psychologist in the
Office of Racial Policy.
[9] He also denied having ever held anti-semitic views, but was later shown to have used frequent antisemitic language in a series of letters to his mentor Heinroth.
[10]
In his biography he wrote:
"I was frightened—as I still am—by the thought that analogous genetical processes of deterioration may be at work with civilized humanity. Moved by this fear, I did a very ill-advised thing soon after the Germans had invaded Austria: I wrote about the dangers of domestication and, in order to be understood, I couched my writing in the worst of nazi terminology. I do not want to extenuate this action. I did, indeed, believe that some good might come of the new rulers. The precedent narrow-minded catholic regime in Austria induced better and more intelligent men than I was to cherish this naive hope. Practically all my friends and teachers did so, including my own father who certainly was a kindly and humane man. None of us as much as suspected that the word "selection", when used by these rulers, meant murder. I regret those writings not so much for the undeniable discredit they reflect on my person as for their effect of hampering the future recognition of the dangers of domestication."[11]
During the final years of his life Lorenz supported the fledgling
Austrian Green Party and in 1984 became the figurehead of the Konrad Lorenz
Volksbegehren, a grass-roots movement that was formed to prevent the building of a power plant at the
Danube near
Hainburg an der Donau and thus the destruction of the surrounding woodland.
-----------------
of particular interest:
"All the advantages that man has gained from his ever-deepening understanding of the natural world that surrounds him, his technological, chemical and medical progress, all of which should seem to alleviate human suffering... tends instead to favor humanity's destruction"
[17
Lorenz's vision of the challenges facing humanity[edit]
Lorenz also predicted the relationship between market economics and the threat of ecological catastrophe. In his 1973 book,
Civilized Man's Eight Deadly Sins, Konrad Lorenz addresses the following paradox:
"All the advantages that man has gained from his ever-deepening understanding of the natural world that surrounds him, his technological, chemical and medical progress, all of which should seem to alleviate human suffering... tends instead to favor humanity's destruction"
[17]
Lorenz adopts an ecological model to attempt to grasp the mechanisms behind this contradiction. Thus "all species... are adapted to their environment... including not only inorganic components... but all the other living beings that inhabit the locality." p31.
Fundamental to Lorenz's theory of ecology is the function of
feedback mechanisms, especially
negative ones which, in hierarchical fashion, dampen impulses that occur beneath a certain threshold. The thresholds themselves are the product of the interaction of contrasting mechanisms. Thus pain and pleasure act as checks on each other:
"To gain a desired prey, a dog or wolf will do things that, in other contexts, they would shy away from: run through thorn bushes, jump into cold water and expose themselves to risks which would normally frighten them. All these inhibitory mechanisms... act as a counterweight to the effects of learning mechanisms... The organism cannot allow itself to pay a price which is not worth paying". p53.
In nature, these mechanisms tend towards a 'stable state' among the living beings of an ecology:
"A closer examination shows that these beings... not only do not damage each other, but often constitute a community of interests. It is obvious that the predator is strongly interested in the survival of that species, animal or vegetable, which constitutes its prey. ... It is not uncommon that the prey species derives specific benefits from its interaction with the predator species..." pp31–33.
Lorenz states that humanity is the one species not bound by these mechanisms, being the only one that has defined its own environment:
"[The pace of human ecology] is determined by the progress of man's technology (p35)... human ecology (economy) is governed by mechanisms of POSITIVE feedback, defined as a mechanism which tends to encourage behavior rather than to attenuate it (p43). Positive feedback always involves the danger of an 'avalanche' effect... One particular kind of positive feedback occurs when individuals OF THE SAME SPECIES enter into competition among themselves... For many animal species, environmental factors keep... intraspecies selection from [leading to] disaster... But there is no force which exercises this type of healthy regulatory effect on humanity's cultural development; unfortunately for itself, humanity has learned to overcome all those environmental forces which are external to itself" p44.
Lorenz does not see human independence from natural ecological processes as necessarily bad. Indeed, he states that:
"A completely new [ecology] which corresponds in every way to [humanity's] desires... could, theoretically, prove as durable as that which would have existed without his intervention (36).
However, the principle of competition, typical of Western societies, destroys any chance of this:
"The competition between human beings destroys with cold and diabolic brutality... Under the pressure of this competitive fury we have not only forgotten what is useful to humanity as a whole, but even that which is good and advantageous to the individual. [...] One asks, which is more damaging to modern humanity: the thirst for money or consuming haste... in either case, fear plays a very important role: the fear of being overtaken by one's competitors, the fear of becoming poor, the fear of making wrong decisions or the fear of not being up to snuff..." pp45–47.
In this book, Lorenz proposes that the best hope for mankind lies in our looking for mates based on the kindness of their hearts rather than good looks or wealth. He illustrates this with a Jewish story, explicitly described as such.
Lorenz was one of the early scientists who recognised the significance of
overpopulation. The number one deadly sin of civilized man in his book is overpopulation, which is what leads to aggression.
@Soupie says
If horses had Gods, they would look like horses. Xenophanes
Well, I'm not so sure ... horses strike me as particularly
unimaginative creatures
- and I suspect that gods for any animal on the planet these days would look awfully human. The Sandkings from the new series of
The Outer Limits is a good ficitional presentation of this idea.
But
if the point is that the gods are just an anthropomorphization of forces beyond human control - which is the context I've generally seen this quote, then I would refer you to the idea of the "godhead" as found in the orthodox theology (and mystical literature) of any of the major religions - apophatic language is frequently used.
Godhead in Judaism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The leading Jewish Neoplatonic writer was Solomon ibn Gabirol. In his Fons Vitae, Gabirol's position is that everything that exists may be reduced to three categories: the first substance (God), matter and form (the world), with the will as intermediary. Gabirol derives matter and form from absolute being. In the Godhead he seems to differentiate essentia (being) from proprietas (attribute), designating by proprietas the will, wisdom, creative word ("voluntas, sapientia, verbum agens"). He thinks of the Godhead as being and as will or wisdom, regarding the will as identical with the divine nature. This position is implicit in the doctrine of Gabirol, who teaches that God's existence is knowable, but not His being or constitution, no attribute being predicable of God save that of existence.
God in Hinduism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The
later Vedic religion produced
a series of profound philosophical reflections in which Brahman is now considered to be the one Absolute Reality behind changing appearances; the
universal substrate from which material things originate and to which they return after their dissolution. The sages of the
Upanishads made their pronouncements on the basis of personal experience (revelation or
sruti) as an essential component of their philosophical reflection.
Sounds much like modern day metaphysical speculation!
End of digression, back to Tononi . . .
