Submitted by thelivingphilosophy t3_yd3q1b in philosophy
Reply to comment by oneiroplanes in The philosophy of Martin Heidegger who argued that the Technological mindset has destroyed our relationship to the world so that Nature is seen as so many resources to exploit. He presents an alternative: a poetic relationship to the world by thelivingphilosophy
Yes, the amount we have is quite the point. Because if you want to go back to a world where everyone lives hunter gatherer lifestyles where they and a small kin groups control large areas of land in which to hunt and gather and otherwise live an indigenous lifestyle; the population of the world we can support is going to be a fraction of what it is today. How do you propose we get the population back down to hunter-gatherer levels?
I'm not proposing we do such a thing. We're going to have to figure it out, and part of that is getting better in touch with nature. We can't afford the kind of blunders that will lead to ecosystem collapse (I can just spray pesticides for years without any consequences!), so we'd better get keen at noticing and understanding what's happens in ecosystems -- and some "romanticism" would be damn helpful in that pursuit!
That's just completely wrong. The thing that will be helpful in avoiding ecosystem collapse isn't going to be romanticism, it's going to be technology. Take your example of pesticides: we don't spray them because we hate the poetry of nature, we spray them because we need to be able to make sure that the food we're growing is going to be eaten by humans and not insects. The solution isn't to be better in touch with nature, it's to understand the technologies that can prevent the crops from being lost without spraying them with chemicals. It's a classic case of enlightenment values versus romantic values; we're not going to romance our way out of this, we're going to enlighten our way out of this.
>The thing that will be helpful in avoiding ecosystem collapse isn't going to be romanticism, it's going to be technology.
Technology, in addition to the good it has done humans, has done plenty of bad; it 100% created these problems. It is not going to solve them unless it is thoughtfully and mindfully designed, with a multivalent view of natural forces that does not reduce nature's enormous complexity to "problem->technosolution."
This is just mind-bogglingly naive thinking in 2022.
Tech is not our lord and savior. Tech people now understand that the ethics of tech involve mindful design and that the way that tech has been designed has frankly screwed us over.
>Take your example of pesticides: we don't spray them because we hate thepoetry of nature, we spray them because we need to be able to make surethat the food we're growing is going to be eaten by humans and notinsects.
And yet, if we'd had a more capacious and accurate and appreciative view of the complexity of nature's ecology, maybe we would have realized that dumping some of these very simple pesticides onto the land was going to have far-reaching consequences way into the future, like oh reducing insect biomass by orders of magnitude and destroying the pollinators we need to grow crops.
We do need better technology for our survival - technology guided by a love of nature, and that uses a desire for better human-nature relations as a point of inspiration.
>. It's a classic case of enlightenment values versus romantic values;we're not going to romance our way out of this, we're going to enlightenour way out of this.
If you actually knew what the Enlightenment actually thought about this -- and full disclosure, I do, I study the transition between the Enlightenment and Romanticism and have read hundreds of source texts from both eras -- you'd understand that the two movements were not binary but that the people who understood the limits of reason and technology best were often the Enlightenment thinkers themselves. Within their own time period, the most sophisticated thinkers among them were starting to understand that thinking of rationality and technology in salvationary terms was unbelievably simpleminded. They had their own version of a very laudatory view of Nature, having to do with natural harmony and natural law, and were (by the way!) very prone to glorifying Native Americans and using their lack of money, low tech, and closeness to nature as a means by which to self-critique European culture itself, but Romanticism actually sprung right out of their own critiques of reason and tech and the direction our relationship with nature was going, with the added layer of urgency the clear and present downsides of the Industrial Revolution provided. So yeah. Sorry. The Enlightenment provided the very critiques that the Romantic movement used as a launching point.
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