hxn on Nostr: "It was the threat of an infinite loss, namely the loss of their individual persons, ...
"It was the threat of an infinite loss, namely the loss of their individual persons, which drove the revolutionary Existentialists of the 19th century to their attack. They realized that a process was going on in which people were transformed into things, into pieces of reality which pure science can calculate and technical science can control.
"The idealistic wing of bourgeois thinking made of the person a vessel in which universals find a more or less adequate place. The naturalistic wing of bourgeois thinking made of the person an empty field into which sense impressions enter and prevail according to the degree of their intensity. In both cases the individual self is an empty space and the bearer of something which is not himself, something strange by which the self is estranged from itself.
"Idealism and naturalism are alike in their attitude to the existing person; both of them eliminate his infinite significance and make him a space through which something else passes. Both philosophies are expressions of a society which was devised for the liberation of man but which fell under the bondage of objects it itself had created.
"The safety which is guaranteed by well-functioning mechanisms for the technical control of nature, by the refined psychological control of the person, by the rapidly increasing organizational control of society – this safety is bought at a high price:
"Man, for whom all this was invented as a means, becomes a means himself in the service of means."
"The idealistic wing of bourgeois thinking made of the person a vessel in which universals find a more or less adequate place. The naturalistic wing of bourgeois thinking made of the person an empty field into which sense impressions enter and prevail according to the degree of their intensity. In both cases the individual self is an empty space and the bearer of something which is not himself, something strange by which the self is estranged from itself.
"Idealism and naturalism are alike in their attitude to the existing person; both of them eliminate his infinite significance and make him a space through which something else passes. Both philosophies are expressions of a society which was devised for the liberation of man but which fell under the bondage of objects it itself had created.
"The safety which is guaranteed by well-functioning mechanisms for the technical control of nature, by the refined psychological control of the person, by the rapidly increasing organizational control of society – this safety is bought at a high price:
"Man, for whom all this was invented as a means, becomes a means himself in the service of means."