Wednesday, May 12, 2010

Balderdash in Arendt's The Human Condition

This is just a quote from Chapter VI of The Human Condition:
Since then, scientific and philosophic truth have parted company; scientific truth not only need not be eternal, it need not even be comprehensible or adequate to human reason. It took many generations of scientists before the human mind grew bold enough to fully face this implication of modernity. If nature and the universe are products of a divine maker, and if the human mind is incapable of understanding what man has not made himself, then man cannot possibly expect to learn anything about nature that he can understand. He may be able, through ingenuity, to find out and even to imitate the devices of natural processes, but that does not mean these devices will ever make sense to him — they do not have to be intelligible. As a matter of fact, no supposedly suprarational divine revelation and no supposedly abstruse philosophic truth has ever offended human reason so glaringly as certain results of modern science.
The conjunction of conditionals is false, so the rest may be neglected. Here is that conjunction in bold:
Since then, scientific and philosophic truth have parted company; scientific truth not only need not be eternal, it need not even be comprehensible or adequate to human reason. It took many generations of scientists before the human mind grew bold enough to fully face this implication of modernity. If nature and the universe are products of a divine maker, and if the human mind is incapable of understanding what man has not made himself, then man cannot possibly expect to learn anything about nature that he can understand. He may be able, through ingenuity, to find out and even to imitate the devices of natural processes, but that does not mean these devices will ever make sense to him — they do not have to be intelligible. As a matter of fact, no supposedly suprarational divine revelation and no supposedly abstruse philosophic truth has ever offended human reason so glaringly as certain results of modern science.
Placing such a falsehood in BOLDFACE may help a reader.  But it would also help to have links to those who supposed the age of the sun to be some scientific "unintelligibility" or the need for medical practitioners to wash their hands when going from anatomy or pathology lab to patient rounds (Semmelweis).

This alternative treatment of a text is rather easy using Curl as the web-content language.

For a philosophy course, it might mean that, for the first n days of an assignment period, an online text would be "plain" and then on days following would be annotated progressively as the maximum grade for a paper on that text also changed - in a downward direction from 100% to, say, 65%.  Think of it as a variant of "no student need be left completely behind."

Other variants are easily imagined for a philosophy course with a mixed group of undergrads and graduates.
Here is a variant with simple falsehoods in bold:
Since then, scientific and philosophic truth have parted company; scientific truth not only need not be eternal, it need not even be comprehensible or adequate to human reason. It took many generations of scientists before the human mind grew bold enough to fully face this implication of modernity. If nature and the universe are products of a divine maker, and if the human mind is incapable of understanding what man has not made himself, then man cannot possibly expect to learn anything about nature that he can understand. He may be able, through ingenuity, to find out and even to imitate the devices of natural processes, but that does not mean these devices will ever make sense to him — they do not have to be intelligible. As a matter of fact, no supposedly suprarational divine revelation and no supposedly abstruse philosophic truth has ever offended human reason so glaringly as certain results of modern science.
Obviously for some presentation tasks, BOLDFACE will not be adequate: a stripped-down text placed in parallel or simply converting some text to whitespace may better serve ones purpose.
High-lighting what little may be true in the Arendt text is sobering:
Since then, scientific and philosophic truth have parted company; scientific truth not only need not be eternal, it need not even be comprehensible or adequate to human reason. It took many generations of scientists before the human mind grew bold enough to fully face this implication of modernity. If nature and the universe are products of a divine maker, and if the human mind is incapable of understanding what man has not made himself, then man cannot possibly expect to learn anything about nature that he can understand. He may be able, through ingenuity, to find out and even to imitate the devices of natural processes, but that does not mean these devices will ever make sense to him — they do not have to be intelligible. As a matter of fact, no supposedly suprarational divine revelation and no supposedly abstruse philosophic truth has ever offended human reason so glaringly as certain results of modern science.
But such is the work of the famed author.

1 comment:

  1. And why did her editor let this split-infinitive pass back in 1957?

    to fully face

    Hmmm ...

    ReplyDelete