McKeon on Mann on Freud (Philosophy, Science, Passion & Philosophy, Science, Art)

[alice wellintown]

Most of the irony of which McKeon speaks is lost on us now, now when
Science/Technic have come to dominate the others so completely that
the novelist, such as Pynchon, who, like Mann, as decribed in McKeon's
little address, works in an art that is constantly deconstructing,
shifting focus and form, now the will to meaning, from the philosphers
Mann studied, now the meaning made conspiracy nostalgically
projectiong a world under erasure in zones that, like a Hericlitian
river under the feet of a man in flux, fade away but from the memory,
the memory of the people now made art against oppressive claims to
history.

And Science/ Technic, the Little Man, now free from the Pragmatists
and Pluralists, the post-Bomb sanity that Dewey and McKeon, the
Chicago School advanced, must stand up and speak for Philosophy and
Art, for it has silenced both, and will, with unbridled hubris, push
the button on us all.

Norbert Weiner said that the big men of old science are marginalized
by the Little Man who loves his technology and funding, who applies
his favorite formula to the scatterbrained beauties of Nature, and
yearns to live in Space outside of Time.

  http://www.richardmckeon.org/content/e-Publications/b-OnIndividuals/McK-ThomasMann.pdf