[lit-ideas] Re: Mike and Schopenhauer
- From: "Andy Amago" <aamago@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "lit-ideas" <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 22 May 2006 17:34:13 -0400
> [Original Message]
> From: Eric Yost <eyost1132@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Date: 5/22/2006 2:21:02 PM
> Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: Mike and Schopenhauer
>
> Andy: Plants and animals are survival machines too, but
> without the pretensions that humans have.
>
> It's life, not a machine, in my opinion.
>
>
That's what Dawkins calls life on Earth. Survival machines are what carry the
selfish genes. I'm slowly making my way through the book. It's easy to read and
I like it, I just don't have time to read much of it. Even without Dawkins,
however, it's evident that plants and animals are simply biochemical machines.
They can be nothing else. My cynical Schopenhauer-admiring self tells me that
the argument below is a distraction, a decoy away from the illustration of
Schopenhauer's philosophical position as advanced on this list and which I
second heartily, that life on Earth is so bleak that even optimism occurs in
the form of rejoicing at someone else's destruction.
> Machines are (1) designed, (2) assembled from parts, and (3)
> used.
>
> Plants and animals grow, live, and die.
>
>
> A machine paradigm of life reflects pessimism. It is a
> "nothing but ..." view of the world. It's a philosophical
> way of masking great disappointment with life. "Oh, we are
> nothing but...."
>
> Curiously, I think a machine paradigm can also lead to
> belief in creationism, as in Intelligent Design. Somebody
> has to design or make the machines, don't they? The earth
> then is seen as an artifact itself, a staging ground for
> countless lesser artifacts that pursue their machine-like
> functions, and like machines, are easily discarded when they
> fail their function, are disassembled to their parts.
>
> The biological paradigm is more hopeful. The earth is a
> being. We grow here like apples on an apple tree. No outside
> Intelligent Designer is required to design and build apples
> on an apple tree. The flowers bud, germinate, and grow into
> apples. Whereas machines are assembled from parts, entities
> like apples grow from within, their parts (if they are parts
> for they cannot be separated) change as the entity grows.
>
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