Articles

Abstract:

«The machine image objectivizes at a stroke whatever it touches by emphasizing its inherent otherness from man, its non-communicability. In the magical world-view of the Old Gnosis, all things - animal, plant, mineral - radiate meanings; they are intelligible beings - or the natural faces such beings put on for us in the physical world. But for Newton, the celestial spheres comprise a machine; for Descartes animals become machines; for Hobbes, society is a machine; for La Mettrie, the human body is a machine; eventually for Pavlov and Watson, human behaviour is machine like. So steadily, the natural world dies as it hardens into mechanistic imagery.» [...]