Posted by DSCH on September 26, 2003, at 12:25:28
In reply to Re: And now some Lao Tzu? :-), posted by noa on September 26, 2003, at 9:21:38
I believe Wittgenstein may have understood earlier than most that the promising pathways in linear development already had or were about to be exhausted by the "progress" of western culture (doesn't the word progress itself seem to imply linearity?).
I think back to how people in the 1950s and 1960s thought of the future (2001, classic Star Trek, etc.). They certainly would have been dissapointed to find people a bit fed up with air travel and clogged highways and endless ugly urban sprawl while the race into space seems stalled (and NASA an arthritic bureaucracy, as with much of the rest of government). But wouldn't they be bewildered by the exponential development of computers, the web, and the potential opened up by the human genome project? The future turned out to be non-linear.
Taoists and Zen Buddhists would probably point to our widespread anxiety, dissastisfaction, and depression as signs that all our striving has either not really addressed the basic human condition or rather made things worse.
Western culture is ripe for a transfusion of notions from the East (as it has indeed been since the mid-19thC as you can see in a warped sense with Schopenhauer and then in writers like Hermann Hesse). It had a boom-bust cycle in the late 1960s, but you can see it crossing over into pop culture again in the form of movies like The Matrix.
poster:DSCH
thread:261277
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20030913/msgs/263500.html