(a joke continued from here, this is not a full post)
I
CXXIV. [... ] For we are founding a real model of the world in the understanding, such as it is found to be, not such as man’s reason has distorted. Now this cannot be done without dissecting and anatomizing the world most diligently; but we declare it necessary to destroy completely the vain, little and, as it were, apish imitations of the world, which have been formed in various systems of philosophy by men’s fancies. Let men learn (as we have said above) the difference that exists between the idols of the human mind and the ideas of the divine mind. The former are mere arbitrary abstractions; the latter the true marks of the Creator on his creatures, as they are imprinted on, and defined in matter, by true and exquisite touches. Truth, therefore, and utility, are here perfectly identical, and the effects are of more value as pledges of truth than from the benefit they confer on men.
–Novum Organum, Francis Bacon
The important point here, I believe, is that truth isn’t outside power, or deprived of power[…] (contrary to a myth whose history and functions would repay further study, it isn’t the reward of free spirits,the child of prolonged solitudes, or the privilege of those who have been able to liberate themselves). Truth is of the world: it is produced by virtue of multiple constraints. And it induces the regular effects of power. Each society has its regime of truth, its ‘general politics’ of truth; that is, the types of discourse it harbours and causes to function as true…
–The Political Function of the Intellectual, Michel Foucault
How gauche.
sam[ ]zdat 