/lit/ - Literature

>Horkheimer and Adorno point to the basis of the disease: "Even the deductive form of science reflects hierarchy and coercion...the whole logical order, dependency, progression, and union of [its] concepts is grounded in the corresponding conditions of social reality--that is, the division of labor.

>Husserl concluded that modern, mathematical science prevents us from knowing life as it is. And the rise of science has fueled ever more specialized knowledge, that stunning and imprisoning progression so well-known by now.

>The complete objectification of time, so much with us today, was achieved by Issac Newton, who mapped the workings of the Galilean-Cartesian clockwork universe. Product of the severely repressed Puritan outlook, which focused on sublimating sexual energy into brutalizing labor, Newton spoke of absolute time, "flowing equably without regard to anything external." Born in 1642, the year of Galileo's death, Newton capped the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century by developing a complete mathematical formulation of nature as a perfect machine, a perfect clock.

>The goal of establishing logic on mathematical grounds was related to an even more ambitious effort by the end of the nineteenth century, that of establishing the foundations of math itself. As capitalism proceeded to redefine reality in its own image and became desirous of securing its foundations, the "logic" stage of math in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, fresh from new triumphs, sought the same. David Hilberts theory of formalism, one such attempt to banish contradiction or error, explicitly aimed at safeguarding "the state power of mathematics for all time from all 'rebellions.'"

>Heidegger felt that there is an inherent tendency for Western thinking to merge into the mathematical sciences, and saw science as "incapable of awakening, and in fact emasculating, the spirit of genuine inquiry." We find ourselves, in an age when the fruits of science threaten to end human life altogether, when a dying capitalism seems capable of taking everything with it, more apt to want to discover the ultimate origins of the nightmare.

>When the world and its thought (Levi-Strauss and Chomsky come immediately to mind) reach a condition that is increasingly mathematized and empty (where computers are widely touted as capable of feelings and even of life itself), the beginnings of this bleak journey, including the origins of the number concept, demand comprehension. It may be that this inquiry is essential to save us and our humanness.

I hope you guys don't study math and continue to ruin the world.