Template Thinking: The ever narrowing border of human reason

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'Enlightnement is man's release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man's inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. Self-incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of reason but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another. Sapere Aude! 'Have courage to use your own reason!' - that is the motto of the enlightenment. - Immanuel Kant in 'What is the enlightenment'  Kant, who Rudolf  Steiner described as 'the guardian of the threshold', is not one among the philosophers of ancient thought, and reducing him to the same is a grievous error. While we might analyse a number of philosophers up to Descartes, and perhaps even Leibniz as corollaries for ancient wisdom, for a Nyaya-type or a Madhyamika-type philosopher, Kant, and all of Kant, and not just the COPR, are in my reading of modern times the last stand against the darkness of human thought.  But we have forgotten Ka...
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Foucault on Matter Out of Place

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 'that there is a worse kind of disorder than that of the incongruous, the linking together of things that are inappropriate; I mean the disorder in which a large number of possible orders glitter separately, in the lawless and uncharted dimension of the heteroclite; and that word should be taken in its most literal etymological sense; in such a state, things are "laid," "placed," "arranged" in sites so very different from one another that it is impossible to find a common place beneath them all. Utopias afford consolation: although they have no real locality there is nevertheless a fantastic, untroubled region in which they are able to unfold; they open up cities with vast avenues, superbly planted gardens, countries where life is easy, even though the road to them is chimerical. Heterotopias are disturbing, probably because they secretly undermine language, because they make it impossible to name this and that, because they shatter or tangle common names, because they destroy syntax in advance, and ,not only the syntax wit which we construct sentences but also that less apparent syntax which causes words and things (next to but also opposite one another) to "hang together." This is why utopias permit fables and discourse: They run with the very grain of language and are part of the fundamental dimension of the fabula; heterotopias ... dessicate speech, stop words in their tracks, contest the very possibility of language at its source; they dissolve our myths and sterilize the lyricism of our sentences'. 

The Order of Things- Pg 48

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