Page 190 - Contribution To Phenomenology

PHILOSOPHY AND ECOLOGICAL CRISIS 183

This whole over-productive, over-active, aggressively growing system of
total mobilization and acceleration which, according to the German
physicist Peter Kafka, seems to follow the cancer-principle of the "ever
more of the same ever quicker'*^ leads to chaotic instability. The
anonymous mechanisms of this system are pitiless against the losers in
and the victims of the global monopoly-game. There is something totally
irrational about this seemingly highly efficient and productive enterprise
of the increase of scientific knowledge, technological power and economic
productivity. It is the irrationality of the means that are developed at
the price of their ends. It is the irrationality of the tools which become
their own ends independent of the needs and aims of the owner of the
tools, even worse the owner has to serve the reproduction of the tools.
These metaphors, however, can seriously mislead us. The global
industrial capitalist system is not something like a tool which can be put
to good or bad use by a sovereign subject. It is not a machine which
unfortunately has gotten out of control and over which the collective
human intellect and will have simply to reaffirm their mastery. The
abdication of this mastery belongs rather to the essence of this modern
form of social reproduction. The historical process has been handed over
to the mutually reinforcing logic of what used to be culturally constrained
subsystems of society.
So far we have concentrated on the modern industrial capitalist system
and its exterministic logic. But, of course, the question can be raised
whether human history has just recently taken such a destructive turn.
According to Lewis Mumford in his important work The Myth of the
Machine,'' civilization as such has been the way of the machine, of
centralized power and steering, of uniformization and standardization, of
a hierarchical and pyramidical structuring of society, of mihtary might and
police force which together with a bureaucratic machinery implement the
will of the king through all the layers of society down to the smallest
communities. The way of civilization, of large-scale, centralized organiza-
tions leads to an enormous enlargement of the collective possibilities and
of the collective power of humankind. But a horrific price was to be paid
for this increase of centralized power which made possible the stunning
feats of humankind, from the pyramids to the space-flights. The history

^ Peter Kafka, Das Grundgesetz vom Aufstieg. Vielfalt, Gemdchlichkeit, Selbst-
organisation; Wege mm wirklichen Fortschritt (C. Hanser Verlag: Munchen/Wien,
1989), 65.