Sublime

vom Standpunkt der ökologischen Stabilität, aber auch aus der Perspektive der größtmöglichen Fülle gesehen, die das Ziel des Lebens mindestens seit dem Urknall ist.

Hans Jonas teaches that mortality is the gift the living give to the future. The wonder of life, awesome and terrible, is that it renews itself constantly, by sloughing off the old and embracing the new. Jonas calls that natality, the way life is renewed through the birth of new, young individuals and a series of new generations.

as Bacon, Hobbes, Descartes, and now Heidegger have made especially clear, the Enlightenment project was one of science in the service of technology.

Life goes wrong when the control of space, the acquisition of things of space, becomes our sole concern.

a modern society in which the natural sciences and bureaucratic rationality had conspired to undermine confidence in religious values and traditional sources of meaning.

In the days of Epicurus such talk was blasphemous. In the days of Bentham and Mill it was radical subversion. But in the early twenty-first century this is scientific orthodoxy.

The philosopher Joanna Macy describes the appearance of this new story as the ‘Great Turning’ – a profound shift in our perception of who we are, and a reawakening to the fact that we are not separate from the Earth as a complex of living systems.

autonomous reason