ABSTRACT
What I have tried to show so far is that the core problem of the culture of modernity is that in its quest for total rational mastery over the world it privileges the discourse of techno-science over all other discourses. Consequently, the main forms of our natural and human sciences are committed to explaining away not only consciousness, but life itself, as nothing but physical and chemical processes, supporting a debased view of humanity and life that legitimates greed as the driving force of the economy and of the evolution of nature, imposing thereby a fundamentally fl awed model of reality on humanity. Philosophers, as physicians of culture, should be challenging and working to overcome this defective civilization, but philosophy is dominated by schools of thought that have blocked such work, locking in place this defective model of reality. While acting on the basis of this model, now incorporated into peoples’ habituses, is creating, as Mike Davis put it in the title of his book, A Planet of Slums (2007), and is destroying the global ecosystem, there is no place for acknowledging the possibility of human subjects able to create a diff erent future and no place for valuing life as such. Implicitly, mainstream reductionist scientists, with the support of their apologists amond analytic philosophers, are committed to reducing everything, including humans, into predictable instruments of the global economic machine, or to eliminating them, and they believe that they have been and will continue to be successful at this. And if this machine destroys the ecological conditions for humanity, not only can nothing can be done about it, but there is no reason for doing anything about it, unless this aff ects one personally. Modernity has never been dominated by this model of reality so completely. This reductionist world-view is incorporated and reproduced in our dominant institutions, and supported and maintained by the new globalized managerial ruling class, the corporatocracy, in alliance with a technocratic elite.
