(December 4, 2014 at 8:42 pm)ManMachine Wrote: Illusion to delusion to superiority to anthropocentrism. I've been banging this particular drum for years (it now feels like decades).
Language has become a cage that has locked us behind bars of ideology from which we can no longer break free. Our anthropocentrism has driven us to believe in something we call progress, measured by how far we can get away from the stink of our own shit. We are impoverished in our search for meaningful intellectual enlightenment by our hubris, we are blinded from seeing our true, animal-nature by our belief in 'progress', we are deluded in our belief we are somehow different to all other species that we share this tiny rock with.
MM
Well, to be frank, I don't agree that the belief in progress is really an illusory belief. In some ways I think we did make some progress over the course of human civilization. Maybe some people just overestimate how much they will progress, but I don't think you can use my original post to argue that progress itself is an illusion.
I guess the main message of my post is that there are inherent and substantive limitations in self-knowledge. There is only so much that we can understand about ourselves. It is certainly possible that some our self-assessments are indeed pretty much on target. However, the truth slowly starts to become more and more indefinite the more we go deeper into ourselves. And this idea, as I've come to believe, suggests that we shouldn't be too confident in what we think about ourselves.
