How Did We Get Here?: Ghost in the Machine
October 17 @ 6:30 pm - 8:00 pm
Free
What We’ll Explore
Until roughly the 16th century, nearly everyone in Western Europe — from common farmers and laborers, to highly educated scholars and clerics — took for granted that they lived in a cosmos teeming with a wide range of spiritual beings: living yet discarnate powers who occupied various intermediate positions between God and human beings, and who were a good and necessary part of the smooth operations of the world. These beings were known as ghosts or spirits (terms which were interchangeable in this period: the English word ghost, German geist, and Latin spiritus were all used to translate one another), or by various more specific names for their different kinds. In its broad outlines this was, as anthropologist Marshall Sahlins notes, a view Europeans shared with “most of humanity.”
Then, the story goes, everything changed, as the Scientific Revolution cast out all these intermediary spirits, leaving a cosmos that resembles a collection of inanimate machines, rather than an ecology teeming with living agents: a process which the pioneering sociologist Max Weber famously termed “the disenchantment of the world.”
And yet.
Even within Europe and its diaspora, large numbers of people still believe in — and interact with — angels, demons, and other ghosts and spirits. And this doesn’t have to be a “religious thing” — as indeed, for most of European history, it was not a religious thing. Just consider the popularity of “ghost hunting,” or how many of us name our automobiles, and talk to them to encourage them in challenging conditions. Maybe the Revolution was not quite so total as we’ve been told, and some vestiges of these spirits live on amidst the mechanized cosmos: ghosts in the machine, as it were.
In this evening’s program, we’ll consider this process of disenchantment within its historical context, and its consequences for ourselves and our modern Western worldview. We’ll examine the older, pre-Revolutionary world-picture, which historian C.S. Lewis has famously termed “the discarded image,” as it appears in history, literature, and the “natural philosophy” that would be supplanted by the modern physical sciences. We’ll consider the context in which the intellectual battles of the Scientific Revolution were fought, including the political and theological polemics of the Protestant Reformation and its aftermath, as well as the craze for witch-burnings that swept Europe and the Americas during this period. And we’ll observe some of the impacts of the disenchanted, mechanistic worldview in the development of the new social sciences, especially sociology and anthropology.
Finally, we’ll reflect on the consequences of the mechanistic worldview, however fully or partially it has been adopted: What has all of this done, to the ways that we’re able to interact with the wider world and its inhabitants? What has it done to our own self-understanding, both as individuals and as societies? And what does it mean, that the ghosts in the machine seem to live on, however awkwardly and uncomfortably, in everyday life and discourse?
When
Thursday, October 17th from 6:30pm-8pm
Where
Reeder’s Alley Conference Center
RSVP
Cost
FREE (Donations appreciated)
Other
Hot tea & lights snacks provided. BYOB.
Event Facilitator
David Nowakowski is a philosopher and educator in the Helena area whose professional work is dedicated to helping people of all ages and backgrounds access, understand, and apply the traditions of ancient philosophy to their own lives. David began studying ancient philosophies and classical languages in 2001 and has continued ever since. A scholar of the philosophical traditions of the ancient Mediterranean (Greece, Rome, and North Africa) and of the Indian subcontinent, reading Sanskrit, Latin, and classical Greek, he earned his Ph.D. in philosophy from Princeton University in 2014. His work has appeared in a variety of scholarly journals, including Philosophy East & West, Asian Philosophy, and the Journal of Indian Philosophy, as well as in presentations to academic audiences at Harvard, Columbia University, the University of Toronto, Yale-NUS College in Singapore, and elsewhere.
After half a decade teaching at liberal arts colleges in the northeast, David chose to leave the academy in order to focus his energies on the transformative value of these ancient philosophical and spiritual traditions in his own life and practice, and on building new systems of education and community learning that will make this rich heritage alive and available to others.
A hermit by nature and by committed choice, he balances contemplative solitude with his active work in teaching, counseling, and the healing arts. David can be reached at [email protected] or via his personal website.
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