I absolutely love Jurgen Habermas, a German philosopher-socialist upstart, especially for the things he has to say about technological influences on a communication-based and oriented society. I am fascinated by the role science plays in society, and frustrated with how little skill the institution of science has in communicating with the public. This quote from Aldous Huxley, featured in some Habermas I was reading, from his treatise, "Literature and Science" was so beautiful and succinct I had to write it down somewhere.
"The world in which literature deals is the world in which human beings are born and live and finally die; the world in which they love and hate, in which they experience triumph and humiliation, hope and despair; the world of sufferings and enjoyments, of madness and common sense, of silliness, cunning and wisdom; the world of social pressures and individual impulses, of reason against passion, of instincts and conventions, of shared language and unsharable feelings and sensations...
...As a professional chemist, say, a professional physicist or physiologist, the scientist is the inhabitant of a radically different universe - not the universe of given appearances, but the world of inferred fine structures, not the experienced world of unique events and diverse qualities, but the world of quantified regularities."
A little bit further on:
"Knowledge is power and, by seeming paradox, it is through knowledge of what happens in this inexperienced world of abstractions and inferences that scientists have acquired their enormous and growing power to control, direct, and modify the world of manifold appearances in which human beings are privileged and condemned to live."
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