When Hamlet said his "machine" (his body) was "to him" he meant also that he had within him "that which passeth show" (his soul).
Mechanical advantage belongs to God (or Nature, if you will). Our machines belongs to us (or Culture).
all the usage in the world
Change my life? How easy for a headless
piece of marble to be cut and chiseled!
Why don't you come over here and say it
to my face, Apollo? Ready? Find your feet.
Philosophers who try to change our minds by telling us how they think are like poets who try to break our hearts by telling us how they feel.
Note: how not what they think and feel. They present themselves as paragons of thought and feeling, showing us how it's done. But why would we think and feel like them? For the sake of some philosophical truth? For the poetic justice of it? Is life not hard enough? Can they not just let us get on with it?
Perhaps they are not trying to change our minds, after all, nor to break our hearts. Perhaps they are only trying to help: to suffer more precisely, to get through it cleanly.
Some would reduce the whole of epistemology and ontology to science. What is, they say, is what can be known scientifically. I will grant their point, but only if they will grant mine — that ethics and ethnopathy remain, unreduced. Let philosophy provide the logos of what is; we will still need a poetry to absorb the pathos of who is to come.
Caesar non supra grammaticos.
Anon.
I am a grammarian.
We will or we will not cry together.
Gertrude Stein