(iv)
https://fickleears.blogspot.com/2023/07/beckerthe-denial-of-death-iv.html
McLuhan's New Sciences
(Cameron McEwen)
Exploring ignorance (9) – The Concept of Dread
"the first sentence of Take Today...: “The art and science of this century reveal and exploit the resonating bond in all things.” (3) But McLuhan goes on to note in the same place that:
To naïve classifiers a gap is merely empty (…) With medieval dread they abhor vacuums.
Where gaps are (held to be) no “resonating bond”, but only “empty (…) vacuums”, merger becomes the order of the day: “All boundaries now gone” (Take Today 209)...
"For “classifiers” such complex forms are infected by a vacuous and dreadful emptiness at the axis of their purported connections and “bonds”. Indeed, difference and coherence are held by them (knowingly and unknowingly) to be mutually exclusive in a fundamental sense: the im-possibility of the conjunction of fundamentally different relata dominates their experience “in all things”.
"...once fin-itude were deeply acknowledged, “evitability” might relaunch.
"But the fin-itude of human being could not be, cannot be, re-cognized on account of an intervening curtain of dread...
"The boundaries which constitute fin-itude are taken to be “empty (…) vacuums” and this emptiness, as Pascal already saw, excites a repulsive horror and a general state of “anxiety”:
when you put the nervous system outside [and equate it with all there is], fear is no longer the problem. Anxiety is the problem. Fear is specific, anxiety is total. (…) You don’t know now precisely what you’re dreading, rather it’s a pervasive state. The condition of man is what you dread. You no longer dread that animal, that famine, and so on, but this condition. (‘Prospect’ 366)"