``I'm just not sure it's had a significant effect on diminishing institutionalized violence in the short, medium and long run let alone the belief systems that give rise to it. I shudder to think how many US citizens are interpreting current events through 'lens' of Lahaye & Jenkins. If the larger context is theism-secularism, I'm not sure there's been any progress.''
I wasn't addressing the impact of taking on the role of an artist or intellectual, merely pointing out some of its contours. Of course from my view, assuming that role carries with it some moral (yes, I said the word) obligation to use those skills for the public good (yes, another one of those words).
``I don't think we can homogenize pomo; if anything it's about the play-struggle-agony of differentiation, which is not the same as transcendence.''
No real argument, except that Derrida and several others (Heidegger and phenomenological traditions following Hegel) did write that they were attempting to rescue metaphysics. So in this somewhat technical sense they were re-constructing modes of transcendence.
``And here I thought Sartre was saying there is no escape from the human condition of antagonism, cruelty, domination and it's connection to the body. Silly me.''
In Sartre's genre, the impositions of cruelty and domination were primarily considered modes of objectification---the for-it-self rendering the other as in-its-self, treating other people as objects and denying them the primacy of their own subjectivity. Relationships may be doomed to objectification, hell, but that condition must be resisted.
``As for the last sentence, there is no escape, as yet, from biology. The 'laws' of physics do not preclude non-biological modes of subjectivity. However, even if AI or A-Life were achievable it doesn't follow that all those behaviors we claim to deplore would be transcended.
Technically, biology views human culture as a supra-material or collective community behavior/communication/language that can change its state quasi-independent of the material constraints of directly inherited characteristics. This can be interpreted as a form of transcendence.
``Our species has been inventing ways of trying to understand itself for a long time. Our inability to transcend/eliminate violence is a manifest failure at the institutional scale. We either [a] already have a belief system that is sufficiently universalizable to end our warmaking ways or [b] such a belief system has yet to be invented or [c] no such belief system is possible. Any takers on which of those choices, if any, is the correct one?'' Ian
Well a) and b) of the above. The larger problem is dealing with the State along the lines that Gordon Fitch uses. I don't know. Gotta go back to the salt mines.
Chuck Grimes