A tiny question.

[Stefan Schuber]

>thus HAG:
>)vBraun is using the authority of science in order to
>)propagate some non-scientific opinion. You may think this not serious,
>)or merely poetic license, but it is more than that
>
to which LG replied:
>indeed...one might characterize most of National Socialist scientific life
>this way.  "Making metaphors" and analogical "thinking" marks the work of
>all the great NS "brains"---even Speer found true power finally in an area
>where he was an amateur.  Werner felt ok about science carried out over the
>dead bodies of Dora camp slaves---perhaps because NS "science" had already
>shown them to be untermenschen.  This is certainly more than poetic license...

At the risk of beating a dead metaphor I'd like to suggest that because
humans live (and die) by their metaphors, the failure to differentiate
between the logical and the analogical -- between propositions subject to
some species of normative corroboration and propositions that by their very
nature defy trial-n-error -- is essential for fascist "science."

I'm thinking of the official Stalinist approach to agriculture: Sorry, I
don't have the references at hand, but a few years ago the popular press
delighted and edified its readers with stories of Stalin's fond belief that
Marxist-Leninist doctrine was more important in plant genetics than was
Mendelian inheritance. Problem is, of course, that Russian agriculture
fared very poorly, no matter how politically correct its practitioners.

By extrapolation, v. Braun's confusion of thermodynamics and immortality of
the soul is, as HAG points out, a conflation of logical types. It's also
the sort of mental state that motivates people to go off and commit war,
murder, and mayhem in the name of "higher ideals," "racial purity," or "the
Fatherland" (or "our intrests in The Gulf," but I digress). V. Braun knew
his thermo, but I question his theological credentials and thus take the
epigraph as a bit of logodaedaly.

Where it becomes confusing is that as humans we make tools and then assign
them a teleology and feel justified in doing so because we created the
rockets and discovered the equations, after all, and thus *must* be correct
in our applications because they have a poetic plenitude that satisfies our
creative & tool-making faculties.

Or something like that.

ss