If you are in a dire situation should you science the shit out of the problem or...
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...or should you surrender to the abyss and let it undo you?
This is a great fork. On the one hand, “science the shit out of it”—a line made iconic by The Martian—represents the technoscientific Promethean impulse: to solve, to survive, to reassert order through method, ingenuity, and optimism. It’s a wager on meaning, rational structure, and the power of the human mind to overcome circumstance.
On the other hand, there’s the inverse impulse: let the dire situation speak, undo your constructs, disorganize your defenses. Let it hollow you out. Sometimes the problem is the assumption that every situation demands a solution.
Both responses are valid, depending on what’s being asked of you—survival, transformation, or witnessing. Maybe the better question is: what kind of dire situation is it? Is it one in which something essential must be preserved—or one in which something false must be allowed to fall apart?
Would you say you're more often drawn to metaphysical surrender, existential resistance, or technological improvisation when things get bleak?
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That’s a subtle and powerful framing. You’re pointing to a synthesis where science isn’t an ideology or an idol, but a method—a provisional, adaptable toolset that can be wielded within broader existential and metaphysical orientations. In that sense, “scienceing the shit out of it” doesn’t preclude surrender or resistance—it can serve them. It’s not always Promethean mastery; sometimes it’s monastic attention, sometimes tragic defiance.
The beauty in your view is the refusal to treat these as mutually exclusive stances. Scientific improvisation becomes a gesture, not just a function—a way to orient oneself in disorientation. You’re not saying “science will save us,” but rather: science might help us stay with the trouble, articulate the collapse, or even navigate a dignified refusal.
Reminds me a little of Camus’s plague doctor—do the work, even if it’s futile, even if salvation isn’t coming.
Would you be interested in exploring how this hybrid orientation plays out in crisis ethics, science as a metaphysical act, or Camus and technē?
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Yes, much of Achille Mbembe’s work can be read as a profound form of existential resistance—but it’s existential in a very specific register: one shaped by the afterlives of colonialism, the necropolitical regulation of life and death, and the psychic and material residues of racialized violence.
In Necropolitics, for instance, Mbembe isn’t just critiquing power structures in a Foucauldian sense—he's also grappling with what it means to live, endure, or even think under conditions where sovereignty expresses itself through the capacity to dictate death, abandonment, or zombification. This isn’t resistance in a straightforward activist sense. It’s resistance as survival, as dwelling in the ruins, as enduring the unendurable without allowing one's interior to be fully colonized.
In that sense, Mbembe’s work resonates with existential resistance in a Frantz Fanon or Glissant register: not simply about asserting meaning in the face of absurdity (as with Camus), but about refusing imposed ontologies—refusing to be made into a thing, or to internalize the logics of erasure. It's an ontological resistance to being rendered fungible, to being trapped in categories that preclude becoming.
Also worth noting: Mbembe writes with history, affect, poetics, and philosophy—all of which contribute to his refusal to separate the existential from the political. That’s crucial: for Mbembe, the problem isn’t just "how to live"—but how to remain human when humanity itself has been structurally denied or hollowed out.
Would you want to go deeper into Mbembe's idea of necropolitics, his relation to Fanon and decolonial thought, or his reflections on futurity and planetary entanglement?
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In crisis ethics, the hybrid orientation you’re gesturing toward—where “scienceing the shit out of it” and existential surrender are not opposites but mutually informing—plays out in complex, sometimes paradoxical ways.
1. Intervention vs. Witnessing
In moments of acute crisis (e.g., ecological collapse, war, pandemic, or personal breakdown), there’s often a dominant moral impulse to act, solve, fix. But what if the ethical task isn’t always solutionist? Sometimes bearing witness—refusing to look away, or even just enduring without capitulating—is the more profound ethical response. This is the space where existential resistance refuses to collapse into either despair or heroism. It holds open a tension: to care without fixing, to act without mastery.
2. Scientific Improvisation as Care, Not Control
In this view, science isn't instrumentalized as domination over the situation but as a form of attentiveness. Think of the doctors in Camus’s The Plague or medical workers in collapsing systems—they deploy science, but not in triumphalist mode. They know the situation is overwhelming. Their scientific engagement is a gesture of fidelity: a way of saying, “I will meet this with all I have, even if it’s not enough.” Crisis ethics here is about remaining faithful to the act of care even when outcomes are not guaranteed.
3. Collapse as a Site of New Orientation
In moments where systems break down—technological, social, ecological—existential resistance doesn’t mean passivity. It might mean relinquishing false securities (like the idea that we’re in control) while still staying attentive. Science can become a poetics of repair, not restoration. You see this in Indigenous technoscientific responses to climate change, or in mutual aid work during disasters: responses that don’t seek to “return to normal,” but to live otherwise through situated, humble, provisional means.
4. Refusal of the “Triage Ethic”
Much of contemporary crisis ethics is infected by a militarized or utilitarian logic: Who do we save? Who gets left behind? Existential resistance can offer an interruption to that logic. It doesn’t pretend everyone can be saved, but it refuses the flattening calculus that makes some deaths bearable. In that sense, it’s also a critique of necropolitics. Here, science may help us understand systemic risks, but ethics resists reducing persons to numbers or probabilities.
In short: crisis ethics through this hybrid lens is neither surrender nor solutionism, but an uneasy, attentive holding of the tension between them. It allows for response without control, knowledge without hubris, care without redemption.
Would you like to explore this further in relation to disaster medicine and triage, Camus and ethical absurdism, or climate grief and political refusal?
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Achille Mbembe’s reflections on futurity and planetary entanglement open up a deeply complex reworking of what it means to imagine a future—especially a future not predicated on domination, extraction, and racial capitalism. His thought pulls us into a space where futurity is no longer about linear progress or techno-solutionism, but about a re-weaving of life across difference, time, and wounded geographies.
1. Futurity Without Redemption
Mbembe critiques colonial modernity not only for its brutal past, but for how it continues to structure the future. That is, modernity promises a future as compensation for a brutal present or past. But for many—especially those shaped by the afterlives of slavery, colonial extraction, and necropolitics—this futurity has always been a lie or a delay. Mbembe thus calls for a different kind of future, one not driven by teleological progress, but by the possibility of reinhabiting the world in common.
This aligns with thinkers like Saidiya Hartman and Christina Sharpe, who also refuse to let futurity be colonized by promises that obscure ongoing violence. In this view, futurity isn’t a goal, it’s a struggle of orientation—a struggle to imagine and enact life beyond imposed temporalities of productivity, debt, or salvation.
2. Planetary Entanglement
Mbembe calls for a “planetary” consciousness—not in the neoliberal sense of globalization, but in the sense of being entangled in vulnerability, shared finitude, and mutual becoming. He opposes the logic of separation and enclosure: of nations hoarding vaccines, of borders that decide who lives or dies, of an Anthropocene that actually masks the racialized distribution of suffering.
In his planetary thinking, the Earth is not a resource to be managed or a stage for human ambition. It’s a wounded, living matrix that demands ethical attention. He echoes Édouard Glissant’s “right to opacity”: not all life must be made legible or governed. Planetary entanglement here means recognizing radical interdependence without collapsing it into sameness or control.
3. Technics, Refusal, and World-Making
Mbembe is also attentive to technology—not to romanticize it, but to explore how it shapes both the destruction and the potential for new solidarities. He warns against techno-futures that reinforce surveillance, abandonment, or racial sorting. At the same time, he is not anti-technology: he sees in it a possibility—if detached from capitalist capture—to support a world where life is reaffirmed, shared, and metabolized differently.
Futurity, then, is not something we inherit; it’s something we risk. Something we refuse to leave in the hands of empire.
To be in Mbembe’s planetary frame is to accept that the Earth’s future must no longer be premised on the aftershocks of slavery, extraction, and enclosure. The question becomes: How do we imagine a future that doesn’t simply absorb the ruins into a new managerial schema? What does a non-totalizing, wounded, yet entangled planetary ethics look like?
Want to dive further into how this intersects with Glissant’s opacity and relation, Saidiya Hartman’s critical fabulation, or non-redemptive futurity in Black studies?
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Science as a metaphysical act—now that’s a dangerous and fascinating proposition. It resists both scientism (the belief that science is the sole arbiter of truth) and the naive view that science is merely a neutral tool. Instead, it frames science as a gesture of metaphysical commitment: an orientation toward the real, a structured gamble on intelligibility, regularity, and meaning.
Here’s how that idea unfolds:
1. Science as a Faith in Order
At its core, science presupposes that the world is coherent enough to be investigated—that phenomena are not arbitrary, but governed by discoverable structures. This is not an empirical claim; it’s a metaphysical wager. To practice science is to assume (even implicitly) that:
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There is something stable “out there.”
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The observer can, through method, uncover it.
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Language and measurement can mediate this relation.
That’s a metaphysical framework—a kind of belief structure, even if secular. Even the choice of what counts as a valid question or a good explanation is guided by metaphysical assumptions about causality, time, identity, and even the knowability of reality.
2. Science and the Refusal of Chaos
In a dire situation (as you posed earlier), to “science the shit out of it” is not just to solve—it’s to reassert the world’s legibility against the threat of collapse. In this light, science becomes a ritual of resistance to ontological chaos. It doesn’t just explain; it wards off dissolution. Like metaphysics, science offers a way of saying: the world is not without structure, and I will meet it on terms I can name.
3. Technē and the Sacred
In ancient Greek, technē wasn’t the opposite of the sacred—it was one mode of relating to being. To create, to know, to intervene—these were deeply ontological acts. Modern science still inherits this lineage. Think of Einstein’s awe before the rational intelligibility of the cosmos; or Heisenberg’s idea that atoms are not things, but tendencies—flashes of potential.
So when we do science, we’re not just manipulating phenomena. We’re participating in a world-picture. We’re enacting a stance toward being.
4. Science in the Abyss
When science is practiced amidst collapse—e.g., climate breakdown, mass death, epistemic failure—it becomes something else. Not merely an act of control, but of defiance or faith. It’s the doctor who documents war crimes. The field biologist tracking extinction events. The statistician who reveals hidden genocides. In such cases, science becomes a witnessing practice, a metaphysical insistence that reality must be spoken, even when speech feels futile.
5. Against Flattening: The Ethical Stakes
Framing science as a metaphysical act resists both:
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the technocratic flattening of science into data management
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the post-truth suspicion that all knowledge is narrative or power-play
Instead, it holds that science is situated, provisional, and entangled with ethics. Its metaphysical power lies not in certainty, but in its commitment to articulating the world as shared, unfinished, and real.
So: to do science is to stake something. It is not neutral. It is not apolitical. It is a metaphysical mode of being-in-the-world—sometimes a violent one, sometimes a redemptive one, often both.
Would you like to explore Einstein and metaphysical awe, science as witnessing under necropolitics, or technē as a mode of relation to being?
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Camus and technē—this is a rich and underexplored seam. Camus rarely engages technē head-on in his major works, but his entire ethical vision can be read as a deep meditation on its limits, temptations, and tragic necessity. Let’s trace how this unfolds.
1. The Absurd and the Limits of Technē
In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus defines the absurd as the confrontation between human longing for order and the indifferent silence of the universe. Technē—understood broadly as technique, applied knowledge, instrumental reason—promises to bridge that gap: to master the chaos, to turn the mute into the intelligible.
But for Camus, this promise is always a seduction. Technē becomes dangerous when it tries to resolve the absurd rather than live with it. It becomes a metaphysical escape hatch. Think of Camus’ critique of philosophical suicide: those who appeal to abstract reason or systems (like Hegel or Kierkegaard) to transcend absurdity instead of remaining faithful to it.
Technē, in this sense, often plays the role of the betrayer. It feeds the delusion that meaning can be engineered.
2. Rebellion and the Responsible Use of Technē
In The Rebel, Camus offers a more ambivalent stance. He critiques totalizing revolutions and technological utopianism—systems that sacrifice the present in the name of a radiant future. These are expressions of what he calls nihilistic logic: when technique becomes total, it serves death, not life.
But Camus is not anti-technical. He believes in measured rebellion—in action grounded in limits, dignity, and proportion. In this mode, technē becomes possible again: not as domination, but as craft, restraint, and care. This is where he edges closer to an ancient Greek conception of technē: a skillful, situated responsiveness to the world.
His rebels do not reject tools—but they refuse instrumental logic as destiny.
3. Dr. Rieux: The Human Technician of the Absurd
The clearest expression of Camus' relationship to technē is in The Plague. Dr. Rieux is the exemplary figure here: he uses medical knowledge, scientific reasoning, and empirical method to fight the plague—not because he believes he can win, but because it is what decency demands.
Rieux doesn’t romanticize science. He doesn’t believe in salvation. But he continues to work, to diagnose, to document. His practice is not technocratic; it is existential. He is faithful to a task—not because it guarantees meaning, but because it testifies to a kind of human solidarity in the face of meaninglessness.
Here, technē becomes a modest, tragic, and ethical stance. It’s what one does in full awareness of futility, without falling into either despair or delusion.
4. Camus vs the Machine of History
Technē, in Camus’ historical critique, becomes monstrous when it fuses with ideology: when the revolution becomes a bureaucracy, when human life becomes data, when the future is engineered by sacrificing the present. He feared the “machine of history” more than death itself.
This is where Camus anticipates critiques later made by Ivan Illich, Hannah Arendt, and even Bernard Stiegler: when technē loses its tether to ethics, it becomes deworlding. It builds efficient systems that strip us of the very conditions that make meaning or care possible.
Final Thought
For Camus, technē is not rejected—but it must be bounded by the tragic. It must remain human-sized. It must know its limits, and serve life without pretending to redeem it. In this way, technē becomes a companion to revolt: not a solution to absurdity, but a means of living honorably within it.
Want to dig deeper into Dr. Rieux as a model of ethical action, Camus’ critique of totalizing systems, or technē as tragic craft in Greek thought?
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Technē as tragic craft in Greek thought is a potent lens—because in ancient Greece, technē wasn’t just "technology" or "technique" in the modern, instrumental sense. It was a form of skillful disclosure, an art of working with the world’s conditions, not imposing on them. And crucially, it was bound up with finitude, fallibility, and risk—which makes it inherently tragic.
Let’s break this down.
1. Technē as Situated Knowledge
In Homeric and classical Greek thinking, technē referred to the craft of making or doing—like shipbuilding, medicine, poetry, governance, even sophistry. It’s not opposed to thought; it's a kind of knowing, but one deeply situated in the world, embodied, and responsive.
Unlike epistēmē (abstract, timeless knowledge), technē is contextual, time-bound, and always entangled with uncertainty. A skilled navigator or physician acts under conditions of partial information, imperfection, unpredictability. In this way, technē demands judgment, phrónēsis (practical wisdom), and often a reckoning with consequences beyond one’s control.
That’s where tragedy enters.
2. The Tragic Dimension of Technē
Greek tragedy is filled with craftsmen, seers, and rulers who misuse technē or trust it too much. Think of:
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Prometheus, the Titan who gave fire (technē) to humanity. He’s a figure of civilizational advancement and cosmic punishment—chained for his defiant use of craft.
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Oedipus, who defeats the Sphinx through his intellect (technē as riddle-solving), but is later destroyed by the very knowledge he sought.
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Daedalus, the brilliant inventor, whose labyrinth traps, and whose wings bring Icarus to ruin.
In each case, technē is double-edged: it elevates, but it also blinds. The tragic arc emerges when humans mistake technē for omnipotence or disavow their dependence on fate, the gods, or the limits of perception. As Heidegger later put it, technē can “enframe” being—conceal it even as it reveals.
3. Technē and Hubris
Hubris isn’t just arrogance in Greek tragedy—it’s the refusal to respect limits, to acknowledge finitude. When technē becomes a tool of hubris, it loses its tragic wisdom. This is the danger dramatized in tragedy: the craftsman becomes the overreacher.
Tragedy doesn’t reject technē—it warns that its powers must be accompanied by humility, attunement, and a readiness to face consequences one can’t foresee.
4. Healing, Weaving, Building: Technē as Care
On the other hand, many Greek metaphors of technē are maternal or reparative:
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Penelope’s weaving and unweaving of the shroud (craft as timekeeping and resistance).
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The physician’s care (craft as judgment in the face of death).
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Shipwrights, architects, and poets—figures of world-making, but always under pressure from moira (fate) and tyche (chance).
Here, technē is a fragile affirmation of life—a gesture toward coherence, never mastery. Like Camus’ Dr. Rieux, the Greek craftsman acts not because it guarantees safety, but because not acting would be a betrayal of one's role in the world.
Final Thought
To recover technē as tragic craft is to reclaim the idea that making, healing, speaking, and governing are all acts that must live alongside fallibility. They don’t redeem the world, but they keep it from collapsing into chaos.
Technē, in this tragic mode, is a gesture of resigned fidelity—I will act skillfully, knowing it might not be enough.
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