Thread by @Athens_Stranger

🧵 on the Great books:

The significance of an education in the great books is that we sit atop the shoulders of giants.

Accordingly, if we merely presume to see further than they could without ourselves knowing them, then our vision is really a kind of blindness that…

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…is entirely ignorant of its own premises. In other words, that we can see further in some respects is meaningless if we lack the proper sight of ourselves — self-knowledge.

The temptation is always to believe that what is latest is greatest because we live under…

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…the tyranny of a few hundred years old *mere* belief in “progress.” This mere belief is fundamentally grounded in the successes of Modern science. But you always have to ask yourself: Has our science made us better than our predecessors in knowledge as such? That is…

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…precisely *the* question in philosophy that ushered in “late” Modernity beginning with Rousseau and Kant’s response to Rousseau. Specifically, the question was whether or not the promise of the early Modern political project had delivered in its promise of improving…

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…the life of man morally and spiritually through what its newfound science did provide. Comfortability in this life and an even longer life does not necessarily mean a satisfied life. There are many things in life worse than death, and it’s those things our souls …

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… long for the most: a sense of contact with the beautiful and/or the divine — that is, greatness which transcends one’s own mortal life.

Modern science, for all its power, was providing only longer life in a world it was filling with smaller men: bourgeois man…

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…and bourgeois man is the man who can only see himself through the eyes of how others see him while simultaneously only being able to see others for what they can do for him.

Accordingly, *the* philosophical question becomes not simply the question of technology but…

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…making sure that technology is recognized *as* a question — hence the title of Heidegger’s famous essay.

But is that emphasis upon the questionable nature of technology new simply because Modern science and its fruits are new? The answer to that can very easily…

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…be seen from simply recognizing how the pre-Moderns understood the life of mass man, or “middle-class” man (precisely the man produced through the success of Modern science, ie the Industrial Revolution).

Specifically, the pre-Moderns looked down upon such a life of…

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…wagery — wage labor — precisely because of its consequences upon the role of greatness in man’s everyday life, ie the experience of the beautiful in daily life. You see this especially in Aristotle’s use of qualifying leisure with the word “noble.” Specifically …

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…it was understood that it was not enough to have leisure, one needed “noble leisure” (the Greek word for “noble” also being the word for “beautiful”). And so you see that the Enlightenment itself with its ideals is fundamentally a confrontation with *the* alternative…

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…of hierarchy one finds in the pre-Modern world. Alternatively, the question of the Enlightenment *is* the question of technology. And it is none other than Nietzsche himself who understood, and very explicitly so (I detail this textually in my Zarathustra series on…

(12/19)

…my website, Athens Corner). Heidegger, of course, learned that from Nietzsche, and it’s exactly for *that* reason that Heidegger emphasizes technology as NOT merely the application of science but, in fact, a manner of man’s very being, how man understands himself in…

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…how he understands and confronts the world around himself in which he has found himself thrown by his own historical circumstances.

However, and to repeat, this is absolutely NOT new as a philosophical question within our tradition. You find, for example, very…

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…powerful teachings about this aspect of man’s very being in:

— the biblical book of Genesis
— Homer
— Thucydides
— Plato
— Aristotle
…etc

And what makes them especially invaluable is that they do not approach that very same question of technology in a way that…

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…is freighted with all of our Modern and Postmodern premises that almost too a man misunderstand or flatly fail to understand their own premises about what Modern science fundamentally is. Not so in the Pre-moderns! It’s for *that* reason that the great books are far…

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…more valuable than the vast majority of “scribblings” (Nietzsche’s word) about technology and its history that have gained popularity today. If we want to understand the *true* alternatives to our current problems with technology *as a problem* then we simply must do…

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…the difficult work of reading the great books prior to simply thinking that whatever is latest on the subject is greatest merely because it’s closer to us in time. Rather, our time is so problematic because we have become oblivious to the great books, foolishly …

(18/19)

…thinking that because of our science we now know more than our predecessors could have imagined. Indeed, our greatest predecessors warned us very strongly against the very problems that tyrannize over us today *as* this thing we call “technology.”

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