Temporary but Unrepentant Umbilical to Furthur Thought-Insanity, Part XVII

Carlos-O(1): “ We both refer to a past which plagues the present. For you, the past is represented in the figure of Plato. For me, it is in mythic thinking. What’s different is that for you, the past already contains the present: your Plato is a computer programmer. He’s modern, he’s a computer scientist, a technician in the modern sense of the word. For me, it is the past which is in the present, for I see contemporary thought inhabited and animated by the mythic, the ancient, pre-modern. In other words, you put the present into the past while I put the past into the present.”

Orla-O(1): “Yes, that is so.”

Carlos-O(1): “ We both reject the division between the ancient and the modern. At least any hard and fast, harsh, strong division between the two.”

Orla-O(1): “ Yes, that is so.”

Carlos-O(1): “ One really wonders what could possibly interest us to mention the Enlightenment, let alone have a conversation about it. If Plato was a computer programmer in ancient Athens, nothing new emerged from the Enlightenment, and if mythic thinking continues today as insurmountable in cognitive structures,nothing was overcome in the Enlightenment,either.”

Orla-O(1): “Yes, that is so.”

Carlos-O(1): “ Do you think what we’re really 'interested' in is the prestige of philosophy and philosophers, of scholars, during this time?”

Orla-O(1): “ Yes, that is so.”

Carlos-O(1) a bit agitated, elbowing Orla-O(1)too sharply, but whispering: “No, boob, that question can’t be answered ‘yes, that is so’.”

Orla-O(1): “ Well, I don’t think we should be hard on ourselves. We aren’t moderns and we ain’t ancients…attitudes to the historical Enlightenment seem to be a way of testing who we are. If we can’t satisfactorily place the significance of the Enlightenment, (whatever the problems of modernity, my opinion is the Enlightenment had a satisfactory placement in thought during it), it means we’ve changed. It’s evidence we’re in a new place.”