Key Arguments

• Contemplation is rendered meaningless in the context of modern life-process dominance.
• Thought as 'reckoning with consequences' becomes a brain function better fulfilled by electronic instruments than by humans.
• Action is understood almost exclusively as making/fabricating; yet making, because of its worldliness and indifference to life, is reinterpreted as a more complex variant of laboring.

Source Quotes

If we compare the modern world with that of the past, the loss or human experience involved in this development is extraordinarily striking. It is not only and not even primarily contemplation which has become an entirely meaningless experience. Thought itself, when it became “reckoning with consequences,” became a function of the brain, with the result that electronic instruments are found to fulfil these functions much better than we ever could.

It is not only and not even primarily contemplation which has become an entirely meaningless experience. Thought itself, when it became “reckoning with consequences,” became a function of the brain, with the result that electronic instruments are found to fulfil these functions much better than we ever could. Action was soon and still is almost exclusively understood in terms of making and fabricating, only that making, because of its worldliness and inherent indifference to life, was now regarded as but another form of laboring, a more complicated but not a more mysterious function of the life process.

Thought itself, when it became “reckoning with consequences,” became a function of the brain, with the result that electronic instruments are found to fulfil these functions much better than we ever could. Action was soon and still is almost exclusively understood in terms of making and fabricating, only that making, because of its worldliness and inherent indifference to life, was now regarded as but another form of laboring, a more complicated but not a more mysterious function of the life process. Meanwhile, we have proved ingenious enough to find ways to ease the toil and trouble of living to the point where an elimination of laboring from the range of human activities can no longer be regarded as utopian.

Key Concepts

• It is not only and not even primarily contemplation which has become an entirely meaningless experience.
• Thought itself, when it became “reckoning with consequences,” became a function of the brain, with the result that electronic instruments are found to fulfil these functions much better than we ever could.
• Action was soon and still is almost exclusively understood in terms of making and fabricating, only that making, because of its worldliness and inherent indifference to life, was now regarded as but another form of laboring

Context

Section 45 (lines 6281–6385); consequences of the life-process paradigm for thinking, contemplation, and action.