The current generation stands before a gigantic irony of history - at least if human history is considered, as it has been since the 19th century, as a history of development.
What is the irony of history, today, given its widespread conception as a history of development? In a nutshell: it appears that development, at least as a movement to 'higher' levels of existence, has taken a nosedive.
Not everyone would agree with this, of course, particularly those among the human race who take technology exclusively as the criterion for development.
It requires but a little reflection to realize that technological development as such - or, for that matter, the human use of technology - does not equal development as betterment, as I attempted to show in my last post, which focused on the use of smartphones.
The ancient Greek tragedians and comedy-writers, such as Sophocles, Euripides, Aeschylus, Menander, and Aristophanes, their architects and sculptors like Phidias, and their philosophers - including mainly the pre-Socratics, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle - laid the foundation for the centuries-long development of Western philosophy.
His expectations, too, have been soundly refuted by the grossly irrational actions of the neo-fascist cabal, which have made a mockery of development in the sense of 'rational development.
' In contrast, they would restrict both 'development' and 'rational' to something well-known in philosophy, namely 'technical development' and 'technical rationality' - something that Habermas believes could be overcome by communicative action.
https://brownstone.org/articles/history-technology-and-a-balanced-attitude/
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