The Order-Disorder Paradox by Nathan Schwartz-Salant

Author:Nathan Schwartz-Salant
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781623171162
Publisher: North Atlantic Books
Published: 2017-01-29T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight

Pathways of Created Disorder

In the mainstream of collective life, our attitude toward creating and establishing order is based on rational-scientific consciousness; our science is ruled by causality and a belief in objectivity; our model of time is the ongoing events of historical life; our scientific mode of problem solving initiates and expands a horizon of future problems to be solved.

Through our dominant and particular structures (of consciousness, space, and time), we are caught on a treadmill of becoming, reaching for and thinking about the next thing to do. There is little room for being and reflecting; scientific methodology and the lens of causality is the ever-expanding template for all fields of knowledge. With present-day scientific and technological progress increasing at a near-unfathomable pace, we are at a stage, relative to any previous historical epoch, that dwarfs the possible unknown and dangerous consequences of denying our created disorder.

Writers and philosophers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, such as George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells, adopted the “materialist progressivism” of Beatrice and Sidney Webb, and extolled the virtues of technology and rational-scientific thinking. But more prescient types, notably Martin Heidegger, Søren Kierkegaard, and Friedrich Nietzsche foresaw and exposed the likely madness of this endeavor as it propels us away from the authentic ground of our existence.

In The Genealogy of Morals, written in 1887, Nietzsche declared:

Ever since Copernicus man has been rolling down an incline, faster and faster, away from the center—whither? Into the void? Into the piercing sense of his emptiness?… All science, natural as well as unnatural (by which I mean the self-scrutiny of the “knower”), is now determined to talk man out of his former respect for himself, as though that respect had been nothing but a bizarre presumption.1

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