Category: Philosophy
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Organ projection
Kapp’s arguments also represent an important forerunner in theories of media and culture. In the 20th century, German sociological discourse was shaped by two canonical arguments about the prosthesis, one posed by Sigmund Freud, the other by Arnold Gehlen. Freud’s definition of man as a prosthetic god appears in his 1930 Civilization and Its Discontents.…
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Event horizon
The modern world, cultural theorists tell us, has been characterized by the disenchantment of the natural world. In fact, this disenchantment was accompanied by a Romantic enchantment of the social word. Mimesis gave way to poiesis. We can see this more readily when we recognize, following Charles Taylor for example, that enchantment is a matter of meaning as much as it…
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Self-fulfilling mythology
It is not chaos, but our fear and visceral disgust toward the idea of chaos undermining civilization—often stemming from a lack of familiarity with what we fear—that drives us to build prisons, wage wars, and develop weapons that are the embodiment of all-consuming fire. Because we do not conceptualize the earth and its natural cycles…
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Urbanism 101
“… I have constructed in my mind a model city from which all possible cities can be deduced,” Kublai said. “It contains everything corresponding to the norm. Since the cities that exist diverge in varying degree from the norm, I need only foresee the exceptions to the norm and calculate the most probable combinations.” “I…
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Distort some central part of the present condition
Some wisdom from Uncle Warren: TCJ: I talked to a sci-fi editor at Tor in late 2016 about dystopias and their popularity in eras fraught with political disaster, and he said something that stuck out to me: “I think one of the underrated reasons that people read science fiction in particular is that it’s a…