Hurrah!

Steve Bishop has very generously tagged me, despite the fact that it has been over a month since I last posted. Nevertheless, far more worthy of cheer is the fact that Kenn Herman has returned to his radix perspectives with a tantalizing piece on technology and abstraction, reviewing and taking a few steps further his previous analyses.

Kenn's take on abstraction in relation to traditional reformational work on "individuality structure" comes from the same mold as what Goudzwaard writes in "Religion and Labour". Under the heading "reduction of man to animal" he writes:

Essentially, we are dealing here with an animalistic view of life, a view which we meet almost everywhere. It is a view which tries to convince us that ultimately politics is nothing but a power struggle, that ultimately the wife-husband relationship is purely a matter of sex, and that ultimately work is only a means of making money. In such a vision the trade union as a mere power machine fits very well.

He then argues that what has happened here is that the qualifying functions of social structures have been stripped away leading to a reduction to the qualifying function. As Kenn notes this abstracts human artifacts from their normative framework.

I look forward to further radix reflections.