But seriously… @Marklar
I do agree.
We explored the pure reason line of idealism back at its height in the 15th through, oh…arguably through to around the 18th c CE (as seen via things like Sherlock, one could argue 19th c CE, but it had started to dwindle a bit as evident in the rise of Spiritualism and divination).
Descartes really pushed it to the extreme, and you can see European culture grip the deterministic non-emotional idealism in its music of Baroque, its obsession and design of cities around ever more grand clocks that acted out whole city life in their chimes, and in the feverish obsession with automata - a quite literal attempt to summarize living things purely through mechanical means (with quite a stunning level of success).
We saw emotion as base and vile, while logic, composure, and reason as divine. It’s a reasonable deduction given the reference frame and observations.
In this period, somewhat erroneously, but not then known to be, the orbits of the planets were shown to be calculated using music, and Kepler effectively opened up the guts of the cosmic clock and showed how planets work through a remarkably simple set of equations that were (and still are) very rigid and mechanistic.
Animals seemed to behave somewhat autonomously, impulsively without reason. They were like clocks and automata. Humans were nearly captured in automata, and indeed some thought the lowest of society were hardly better than animals and automata - nearly on an impulsive autopilot.
So emotion was seen as kin to the base mechanics, what made things not much different than clocks. Acting according to a limited design.
Reason was how humans were eventually seen to elevate beyond merely being autonomous machines.
Give this long enough and you end up with ethics suppressing emotion.
But then WW1 happened and absolutely shattered any such ideas. It violently forced emotion to the forefront and showed science and reason without emotion returned a very cruel and painful bedfellow.
We began to change this view. WW2 cemented that shift. Here, unemotional science was taken (horribly mistakingly) to the extreme and the ideal human (developed over centuries and finalizing in Nietzsche…and then taken horribly wrong) was pushed to its peak separation from the most extreme view of automatous humans who became seen, instead of as tools, now as pollutants.
It’s no wonder that Jazz exploded following WW1, and Rock following WW2.
Massive explorations into feeling and being an emotional human.
This continued through into the 60’s. Aside from the obvious, you had things like Arthur Lipsett making films like 21-87. Pure cinema explorations into how humans are more than simply substance and reason; not simply machines of society, and that attempting to do so leads to a lust for sensation and wonder. Feeling.
It’s no wonder films like Logan’s Run and THX-1131 arrive a bit after this period and explore exactly this idea (not to mention a host of similar ilk like Soilent Green, Planet of the Apes, Westworld, etc…).
We grew this into its height, the emotinal human as the ideal, in Robocop where we literally watch the emotion of a man overtake his mechanistic programming of pure logic.
Now the idea has entirely flipped.
The base and unrealized life of a human is one doing things because it’s reasonable alone, and see that as more inhumane in behavior. We make our most terrifying villains cold and calculated instead where they once were psychotically crazed humans of emotional hysteria.
We now see Spock as there for Bones to show humantiy through by contrast. Something only possible in our modern era. That same setup during Descatres’ time would see Bones as there for Spock to show human divinity through by contrast.
We cannot any longer fathom an ethic of Thomas More - a perfectly reasonable and emotionlessly calculated society as ideal.
That to us today is seen as satire, but I doubt More would agree.
To us, what was utopic to More is now Orwell’s dystopia.
We are now expressed in our ethics, and to be otherwise, to be utilitarian to the extreme, is a considerable challenge to argue for in ethics.
The phrase, “Have you no humanity?!”, means so much differently today than if you had said such to Descartes.
Cheers,
Jayson
