Early seventeenth-century Western thought declared that man now commandeers the world

Evidence

If Scheler—along with Bacon, Vico, Nietzsche, Foucault, and the Frankfurt School thinkers, among others—is right that the modern system of Western knowledge is programmatically geared to the service of power, discipline, domination, and transformation of the world, then to know, stricto sensu, is to engage in power and in transforming the world. It was not a coincidence that in the early seventeenth century a host of discourses emerged in different languages and forms but with the identical message to the effect that man now commandeers the world. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 187

Categorization

• XREF: Ties to the reader’s existing notes on Foucault and power/knowledge and to the bias-of-communication theme of Western present-mindedness driving mastery. — connects to: Mersenne converted the world-soul into the mechanism of the world to avoid heresy — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 771