Future elegant riff on trees, leviathans, Weber, and gold

This semester I’m teaching Weber’s essay on objectivity and social policy. It has been years since I read it — I can tell because all of my marginal notes are littered with references to Habermas, Horkheimer and Adorno. One passage stood out to me:

“The fate of an epoch that has eaten from teh tree of knowledge is that it must know that we cannot learn the _meaning_ of the world from the resutls of its analysis, be it ever so perfect; it must rather be in a position to create this meaning itself”

How much better a quote to use to discuss modernity than the one from Habermas’s lectures in _Philosophical Discourse of Modernity_. Better not only because it comes from a classical figure (and less likely to raise the hackles of someone who refuses to accept my definition of modernity because, for instance, they disagree with his use of Kohlberg or something) but also because of the invocation of the image of the tree of knowledge, which dovetails with not only my own interest in using the image of the Leviathan as it stretches back in times before Hobbes but also — and I somehow missed this earlier — because it also inadvertently references Ipili myths of the end of the world/start of gold mining, which begins when “birds from all over the world will come to eat the fruit of the tree at Warukari”.

I’ll have to be sure to riff that one out nicely in my book.