pomo

[Terrance]

Otto Sell wrote:
> >
> "Soziale Utopien und Naturrecht haben ein sich ergänzendes Anliegen im
> gleichen humanen Raum; getrennt marschierend, leider nicht vereint
> schlagend."
> (Ernst Bloch, *Naturrecht und menschliche Würde", 1961, 1972, p. 13)
> 
> Dunno if it's "true" in the sense of exactly, but "roughly" - well, it would
> be hard to deny (and prove this without quoting Greek letters) that
> philosophically Enlightenment and Humanism have the same foundations.

Let's take one argument at a time, OK? 

 If you are suggesting that the "enlightenment" and
"humanism" have their foundations in the Ancient Greek
cultures, don't you think, if only because you are dealing
with over 2000 years of the history of ideas, saying that
the two are "roughly" or  "basically" the same is at the
very least reductionism. Neither "enlightenment" nor
"humanism" can be defined as roughly or basically the same
thing. It's almost like saying that Democracy and
Christianity are roughly the same and then supporting that
argument by claiming that both have their foundations in the
Ancient Greek cultures. To define either one is a great
challenge. You could fill a library with books on how the
enlightenment and humanism are not roughly the same. But I
don't want to define either here, my concern is not only
that enlightenment and humanism are not, even basically or
roughly,  the same thing, but that the political argument
seeks to accuse, arraign, and hang humanism from a false
premise. 


Here it is again: 

> > Thus modern societies rely on continually establishing a
> > binary opposition between
> > "order" and "disorder," so that they can assert the
> > superiority of "order." But to do
> > this, they have to have things that represent
> > "disorder"--modern societies thus
> > continually have to create/construct "disorder." In western
> > culture, this disorder
> > becomes "the other"--defined in relation to other binary
> > oppositions. Thus anything
> > non-white, non-male, non-heterosexual, non-hygienic,
> > non-rational, (etc.) becomes
> > part of "disorder," and has to be eliminated from the
> > ordered, rational modern
> > society.

The political argument here is not false because facts of
history do not support the claim that powerful cultures
expanded at odds and at the expense, exploitation, demise,
end, even elimination of, other ideas, peoples, cultures. 

BTW, I posted the essay by Leslie Fiedler: "The New
Mutants," an classic, to provide a little glance at the
historical context for from which these political ideas
(ideas in V.)  are being corrupted.