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6:41

(In »Irreducible multiplicity – syntheism as a process religion«)

From a relationalist perspective, Brassier however makes three mistakes in his reasoning. First of all, there is nothing that says that ethics must be governed by, or in any way be connected with, how nature works. If that were the case, in principle one would never have needed to question 19th century social Darwinism, and the concept of civilisation would be uninteresting in this context. Brassier’s ethics really don’t deviate on any important point from social Darwinism’s bizarre quest to reduce the human being to a creature whose only task it is to put Darwinian evolution on the right track, so to speak, as if history – paradoxically enough thus both deterministic and indeterministic at the same time – just like evolution for some obscure reason would need speeding up and to be guided towards its own, explicitly inevitable fulfilment. Brassier is here guilty of a kind of naturalist masochism, an existential resignation in the face of the human being’s possibilities of finding her own identity-creating ethics that is independent of her environment’s presumed historical direction. Therefore, his ethics comes down to an ambition to given in to and copy what nature is presupposed to tell us through its blind fickleness, and an edict to perceive these ruthless and highly arbitrary culling processes as commendable.