The foundation of commanding hope is honest hope. It has the courage to fully acknowledge the dangers we face, so it’s informed by a thorough scientific understanding of those dangers and the likelihood of stark constraints in our future; yet it also welcomes the possibility of genuinely positive alternatives within those constraints.
They must believe that knowledge is knowable and facts are factual while also remembering that even the most obvious certainties might be wrong. They must commit themselves wholeheartedly to the Constitution of Knowledge while acknowledging its limits and the limits of those who uphold it.
So, what is left of you after you have left is character, the layered image that has been shaping your potentials and your limits from the beginning. Later years define this character more clearly as the repetitive stories and erotic fantasies, the nighttime vigils and the haunting searches through the halls of memory force the singularity of our character upon us.
Thought without speech is inconceivable; “thought and speech anticipate one another. They continually take one another’s place”...
Reason uses this discrepancy between intention and unintended results for the insidious realization of its own purposes; Hegel speaks here of “the cunning of Reason.” Half a century before Hegel the point had already been made most eloquently by Adam Ferguson: “Every step and every movement of the multitude, even in what are termed enlightened ages, are made with equal blindness to the future; and nations stumble upon establishments, which are indeed the result of human action, but not of human design. Cromwell said, That a man never mounts higher, than when he knows not whither he is going; it may with more reason be affirmed of communities, that they admit of the greatest revolutions where no change is intended, and that the most refined politicians do not always know whither they are leading the state by their projects.” See A. Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767; repr., Cambridge, 1995), 119.
What grounds are there for supposing that the resentment against a meritocracy, whose rule is exclusively based on “natural” gifts, that is, on brain power, will be no more dangerous, no more violent than the resentment of earlier oppressed groups who at least had the consolation that their condition was caused by no “fault” of their own? Is it not plausible to assume that this resentment will harbor all the murderous traits of a racial antagonism, as distinguished from mere class conflicts, inasmuch as it too will concern natural data which cannot be changed, hence a condition from which one could liberate oneself only by extermination of those who happen to have a higher I.Q.?
Cf. Arendt's thought here with those on the same topic from Michael Sandel & Daniel Markovits.
Nasal breathing alone can boost nitric oxide sixfold, which is one of the reasons we can absorb about 18 percent more oxygen than by just breathing through the mouth.
The argument for the free market is that it is free. But freedom becomes superfluous if an enemy is threatening the very basis of all freedoms.
If reason is based on intuitive inference, what, you may ask, are the intuitions about? The answer . . . is that intuitions involved in the use of reason are intuitions about reasons.
Those who can write can write about anything. Especially when the author’s approach lies in interpreting the object of his attention as a kind of monad, something whose very existence reveals nothing less than the entire state of the world—present, past, and future. Therein lies [Walter] Benjamin’s method and magic. His worldview is profoundly symbolic: for him each person, each artwork, each object is a sign to be deciphered. And each sign exists in dynamic interrelation with every other sign. And the truth-oriented interpretation of such a sign is directed precisely at demonstrating and intellectually elaborating its integration within the great, constantly changing ensemble of signs: philosophy.
In Richardson’s list of magnitude-6 deadly conflicts, six out of seven were civil wars: the Taiping Rebellion (1851–64), the American Civil War (1861–65), the Russian Civil War (1918–20), the Chinese Civil War (1927–36), the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), and the communal slaughter that accompanied Indian independence and partition (1946–48).
Kissinger never paused in the long journey of his spectacular career to work out his ideas about politics, democracy, and the American way of governance. He was a historian and a statesman, not a political thinker. One of his Harvard professors reported that he “was only average in his abilities as a political philosopher.” But there was philosophy contained in his policies, and there were others, much above average, who may be said to have done his thinking for him, who reflected on the condition of the German-Jewish émigré, with all its complex and inevitable ambivalences, and thought deeply about the problems of democracy and modern society. Two in particular had an impress on political thought that has been as lasting—and as controversial—as Henry Kissinger’s impact has been on international affairs.
Gewen's "two in particular" are Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss.
To be precise, the ‘condition’ which is thus ‘selected’ [as 'the cause' of an event] is in fact not ‘selected’ at all; for selection implies that the person selecting has before him a finite number of things from among which he takes his choice. But this does not happen. In the first place the conditions of any given event are quite possibly infinite in number, so that no one could thus marshal them for selection even if he tried. In the second place no one ever tries to enumerate them completely. Why should he? If I find that I can get a result by certain means I may be sure that I should not be getting it unless a great many conditions were fulfilled; but so long as I get it I do not mind what these conditions are. If owing to a change in one of them I fail to get it, I still do not want to know what they all are; I only want to know what the one is that has changed.
From this a principle follows which I shall call ‘the relativity of causes’.
Remember this statement when any starts talking about 'the cause' of an event.
[William Graham] Sumner’s defense of elites was not the defense of a class. Going one further than Rehberg, who thought some aristocrats unfit to rule, Sumner took the line earlier taken by the British liberal Lord Acton that every class was unfit to rule. All interests sought to capture government. The rich tended to rent-seeking, and tariffs were there to pamper uncompetitive industries. Sumner’s belief in the primacy of free markets was robustly stated but not always easy to live up to. When the Progressives took aim at the business and banking trusts in the name of competition, Sumner, a conservative anti-Progressive, sided with the trusts.
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