Thoughts for the Day: Thursday 28 January 2021

 

Impeachment

Cass R. Sunstein

Madison pleaded that it was “indispensable that some provision should be made for defending the Community [against] the incapacity, negligence or perfidy of the chief Magistrate. The limitation of the period of his service, was not a sufficient safeguard.” (There’s a lot there: incapacity, negligence, or perfidy.) He feared that the president “might lose his capacity after his appointment.” Madison was especially concerned that the president “might pervert his administration into a scheme of peculation or oppression. He might betray his trust to foreign powers.” And if the president were either corrupt or incapacitated, the situation might be “fatal to the republic” unless impeachment were available.

The Price of Peace

Zachary D. Carter

For Keynes, the soft underbelly of the classical theory was Say’s Law, which he summarized as the maxim that “supply creates its own demand.” Postulated by Jean-Baptiste Say, a French contemporary of Adam Smith, it linked together three problems Keynes saw in the classical story: the outdated focus on scarcity, the notion that markets self-correct, and the idea that involuntary unemployment is impossible.

Cf. The quoted reference to von Mises in yesterday's post.

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Hannah Arendt

“Imagine only that these occurrences would become known to the other side and exploited by them. Most likely such propaganda would have no effect only because people who hear and read about it simply would not be ready to believe it.”

A Secret History of Consciousness

Gary Lachman

[Colin] Wilson argues that Pamela and the other novels that emerged in its wake were like a new kind of drug, but one without the horrific side effects of gin. The story kept readers interested—like all good novelists, Richardson instilled that itch to “see what happens.” But aside from the mild titillation of sex, what really attracted Richardson's readers was the sense of having stepped out of the confines of their lives.

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

Conservatives took society to be harmonious. They respected power and accepted customary authority. They did not believe in progress or in equality. Respect in their eyes was due not to everyone regardless but to merit and excellence.

Collingwood's the Idea of History

Peter Johnson

Collingwood argues that most theories of knowledge – knowledge as acquisition, description or correspondence – make history impossible because they neglect the work of the imagination in the way the world comes to be known.

Thoughts for the Day: Thursday 17 December 2020

 

Lost Knowledge of the Imagination

Gary Lachman

The true artist is ‘original’, not by being shockingly novel, but by reaching to the ‘origin’, the Urphänomen, from which all ‘copies’ arise. It is to awaken our recollection of these that poetry and the other arts exist. They hold before us images that tell us of our lost home. And we know we are recalling it. The assurance of this is the haunting sense of the familiar that overcomes us in its presence. True beauty is nothing strange or alien but achingly familiar, like the taste of Proust’s madeleine, which reminds us of what we already know but have forgotten. All knowledge, Plato tells us, is such remembrance.

The Ingenuity Gap

Thomas Homer-Dixon

In his illuminating book, Governing with the News, Timothy Cook, a political scientist at Williams College, argues that the goals of American journalists fundamentally diverge from those of the country’s politicians. Whereas journalists want their stories to have concreteness, plot line, color, real people, terseness, and above all “an endless series of conflicts and momentary resolutions,” politicians want to preserve nuance and room to maneuver and compromise. Info-glut exacerbates this divergence.

The Ingenuity Gap

Thomas Homer-Dixon

Langdon Winner, a wonderfully insightful theorist of politics and technology, argues that the world has changed in some fundamental ways to provoke these concerns. “If there is a unique quality to the modern era,” Winner writes, “it is that the conditions of existence have changed to such a degree that something explicitly recognized as ‘complexity’ now continually forces itself into our awareness.”

Plato's Revenge

William Ophuls

Albert Einstein pointed out, “Ethical axioms are found and tested not very differently from the axioms of science. Truth is what stands the test of experience.”

Plato's Revenge

William Ophuls

Both in theory and practice, they [liberal polities] depend on reason and self-restraint—that is, on citizens who know the difference between liberty and license and who govern themselves accordingly. But the intrinsic amorality of liberalism first erodes, then corrodes, and finally dissolves these faculties.

The Inevitability of Tragedy

Barry Gewen

Marx’s genius could neither be denied nor his insights into modern economics ignored (here, as on so many other occasions, what Arendt offered to the political right with one hand she took back with the other). But Marx’s influence, whatever his virtues, had been “pernicious” in the long run; he and the disciples who acted in his name were prepared to sacrifice the highest goods, individual freedom and unencumbered thought, for the dead weight of materialism and the stultifying dogma of the dialectic.

Super Consiousness

Colin Wilson

It is vitally important to realize that 'ordinary consciousness' is incomplete. In fact, to put it more emphatically, everyday consciousness is a liar.

Thoughts for the Day: Friday 11 December 2020

 

What is political imagination? If we say the other fellow’s point of view, the emphasis is first on point, on something spatial. Difference between understanding and imagination: I understand something or somebody directly, if I understand something, I always understand it within a wider horizon of things which I take for granted. I isolate the thing I understand and put myself into a direct relationship to it.

If I understand somebody, I understand him in a direct relationship, within the framework of the world, but still him directly isolated from all others. If I want to understand him, I first must know from which point of view he sees things, and that means where he is located in the world. I must imagine the world from his point of location. Example: the table between us.

Imagination is the prerequisite of understanding: You should imagine how the world looks from the different point of view where these people are located. The assumption is: It is the common world of us all and that what is between you and this other location like the table separates you and bind you to him at the same time. That is the meaning of ONE world.

--Hannah Arendt (lecture notes from a 1955 class she taught courtesy of Samantha Rose Hill @ her Illuminations site here (a must for any student of Arendt's work).

Commanding Hope

Thomas Homer-Dixon

The French philosopher Gabriel Marcel put it magnificently: “Hope is for the soul what breathing is for the living organism.”

A Room of One's Own

Virginia Woolf

Money dignifies what is frivolous if unpaid for.

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Hannah Arendt

The American Republic is the only political body based on the great eighteenth-century revolutions that has survived 150 years of industrialization and capitalist development, that has been able to cope with the rise of the bourgeoisie, and that has withstood all temptations, despite strong and ugly racial prejudices in its society, to play the game of nationalist and imperialist politics.

Thoughts of the Day: 9 December 2020

 

The Principles of Art

R. G. Collingwood

The activity of consciousness, we have seen, converts impression into idea, that is, crude sensation into imagination. Regarded as names for a certain kind or level of experience, the words consciousness and imagination are synonymous: they stand for the same thing, namely, the level of experience at which this conversion occurs. But within a single experience of this kind there is a distinction between that which effects the conversion and that which has undergone it. Consciousness is the first of these, imagination is the second. Imagination is thus the new form which feeling takes when transformed by the activity of consciousness. This makes good the suggestion t. . . that imagination is a distinct level of experience intermediate between sensation and intellect, the point at which the life of thought makes contact with the life of purely psychical experience. As we should now restate that suggestion: it is not sensa as such that provide the data for intellect, it is sensa transformed into ideas of imagination by the work of consciousness.

Commanding Hope

Thomas Homer-Dixon

TMT [Terror Management Theory] proposes that fear of death is a primordial feature of the human mind. As early humans evolved their extraordinary intelligence, they started to use symbols in their minds to represent abstract ideas, like the ideas of the self and the future. Then . . . they combined these two symbols in particular to imagine the self in the future. This recursive self-awareness— consciousness of one’s consciousness through time— was a source of both awe and dread: awe, because it helped give these early humans a sense of agency and, with it, feelings of power and possibility; and dread, because it made them aware that their selves were subject to the inexorable degradation of time. “The most fateful consequence of mental time travel,” the psychologist Michael Corballis writes, “may be the understanding that we will all die.”

The Age of the Crisis of Man

Mark Greif

An empty discourse is one that behaves as if it wishes to be filled with a single inductive or deductive answer-a definitive argument meant to persuade all hearers and end inquiry through complete satisfaction-but in fact generates the continuation of attempts, or tacitly admits to unanswerability.

The Life of the Mind

Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy

First, Socrates is a gadfly: he knows how to sting the citizens who, without him, will “sleep on undisturbed for the rest of their lives” unless somebody comes along to arouse them. And what does he arouse them to? To thinking and examination, an activity without which life, in his view, was not only not worth much but was not fully alive.

The Ingenuity Gap

Thomas Homer-Dixon

But what, exactly did he mean? What are “institutions”? Experts have suggested dozens of definitions, but I have always found the one offered by Douglass North, a Nobel prize–winning economic historian, most useful. Institutions, he says, are “the rules of the game in a society or, more formally, the humanly devised constraints that shape human interaction.”

Philosophical Intimations

James Hillman

Counter-education interiorizes and individualizes, as Ficino said, the uniformities of education. Individualizing education, i.e., lodging learning within someone’s soul, requires eros, not because individualizing favors one student over another, the so-called “teacher’s pet,” but because eros kindles each person’s particular style of desire.

Thoughts of the Day: Thursday 12 November 2020

 

Lost Knowledge of the Imagination

Gary Lachman

What is wrong with Scientism is not that it is ‘material’ but that it is too abstract, too much in love with the hunt for the simplest formula, which today takes the form of a ‘theory of everything’. To be effective science must limit the part of reality that it deals with to what is relevant for its purposes. Because of this, as [Jacques] Barzun tells us, ‘the realm of abstraction, useful and far from unreal, is thinner and barer and poorer than the world it is drawn from’.

To abstract means to ‘extract’ or ‘remove’ something, whether it is an ‘abstract’ of a scientific paper you are interested in – that is, a brief description of it – or your idea of ‘tree’ from all the many, different ‘real’ trees you have encountered. One of the great sleights of hand that Scientism has pulled off is to convince the unthinking public that the thin, bare, poor world that it abstracts from – i.e. ‘pulls out of’ – our thick, luxuriant, rich world is the ‘really real’ world, the one that ‘objectively exists’, while the one we encounter and love and struggle with is a kind of subjective illusion, housed within our individual island consciousness. It manages this trick solely because of the practical effectiveness it provides.

My review of Lost Knowledge of the Imagination. Compare what Lachman says here with what Iain McGilchrist writes below:

The Master and His Emissary

Iain McGilchrist

As things become dulled and inauthentic, they become conceptualised rather than experienced; they are taken out of their living context, a bit like ripping the heart out of a living body. Heidegger called this process that of Gestell, or framing, a term which suggests the detachment of seeing things as if through a window (as in a famous image of Descartes's), or as re-presented in a picture, or, nowadays, framed by the TV or computer screen. Inherent in it is the notion of an arbitrarily abrupted set of potential relationships, with the context – which ultimately means the totality of Being, all that is – neatly severed at the edges of the frame. Because reality is infinitely ramified and interconnected, because its nature is to hide, and to recede from the approach of logical analysis, language is a constantly limiting, potentially misdirecting and distorting medium. Yet it is necessary to Heidegger as a philosopher. In its tendency to linearity it resists the reticulated web of Heidegger's thought, and his writing espouses images and metaphors of paths that are circuitous and indirect . . . suggesting threading one's way through woods and fields. It is interesting that Descartes's philosophy was half-baked while he slept in a Bavarian oven, the metaphor of stasis and self-enclosure revealing, philosophy and the body being one, the nature of the philosophy; whereas Heidegger was, according to Steiner, ‘an indefatigable walker in unlit places’: solvitur ambulando. Truth is process, not object.

My review of The Master and His Emissary, an extraordinary work.

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Hannah Arendt

Understanding, as distinguished from having correct information and scientific knowledge, is a complicated process which never produces unequivocal results. It is an unending activity by which, in constant change and variation, we come to terms with and reconcile ourselves to reality, that is, try to be at home in the world.

I'm writing a piece about Arendt's ideas concerning understanding, thinking, and how these concepts differ from knowledge, and how her ideas compare in some ways to those of R.G. Collingwood. (But it's not done yet; this is space exploration for the mind!)

The Ingenuity Gap

Thomas Homer-Dixon

“Many of these complex systems are governed by feedbacks, and if stressed too much they can move to radically new equilibria. The feedbacks often allow Earth’s biosphere to operate as a control, as a thermostat if you like, on interactions between the atmosphere, land, and oceans.”

We can't learn and think too much about the environment. This is Mother Nature, Mother Earth we're talking about. Father Sky can stand down for a while. P.S. My review of this book is on deck.

Thoughts for the Day: Sunday 8 November 2020

 

A Guide to the Good Life

William B. Irvine

These examples suggest that Epictetus is wrong to include our impulses, desires, and aversions in the category of things over which we have complete control. They belong instead in the category of things over which we have some but not complete control, or, in some instances, in the category of things over which we have no control at all. But having said this, I should add that it is possible that something important has been lost in translation—that in speaking of impulses, desires, and aversions, Epictetus had in mind something different than we do.

Commanding Hope

Thomas Homer-Dixon

Today’s conventional growth can end voluntarily, if we deliberately move the global economy onto a new path through economic and social innovation (of which more later); or it can end involuntarily— probably with social catastrophe in its wake. But either way, it will end.

The Ingenuity Gap

Thomas Homer-Dixon

[T]o achieve its simplicity and elegance, the theory [of neo-classical economics] focuses on the behavior of independent individuals operating in a market—individuals who are atomized, rational, similar in preferences, and stripped of any social attributes. But this makes the theory largely asocial and ahistorical: there’s generally no place in it for large-scale historical, cultural, and political forces that sometimes have a huge impact on our economies—forces like the emancipation of women, rising environmental consciousness, or democratization in poor countries.

The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness

Reinhold Niebuhr

[Modern Man] feels guilty because he has made his life its own end and has not obeyed the commandment, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God . . . and thy neighbor as thyself.” While modern secularism speaks naively about the sociological source of conscience, the most effective opponents of tyrannical government are today, as they have been in the past, men who can say, “We must obey God rather than man.” Their resolution is possible because they have a vantage point from which they can discount the pretensions of demonic Caesars and from which they can defy malignant power as embodied in a given government.

An Autobiography

R. G. Collingwood

By about 1920 this was my first principle of a philosophy of history: that the past which an historian studies is not a dead past, but a past which in some sense is still living in the present.

Speculum Mentis

R. G. Collingwood

All externality is imaginary; for externality—a mutual outsideness in the abstract sense of the denial of a mutual insideness—is as such abstraction, and abstraction is always intuition or imagination.

Collingwood's the Idea of History

Peter Johnson

If inference encourages Collingwood’s view of history towards science then imagination moves it towards art.

Thoughts of the Day: Wednesday 23 September 2020

Nota Bene: Today, I'll only quote from one piece of writing, the source of our "deeper dive" with Hannah Arendt. I'll be quoting again from Arendt's "Understanding & Politics," published in 1953 in Partisan Review. I'm jumping ahead a bit here, but in reviewing my notes, these remarks near the conclusion of the essay struck me as quite striking. I'll add some comments after the quotes: 

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Hannah Arendt

If we wish to translate the biblical language [King Solomon's prayer for an "understanding heart"] into terms that are closer to our speech (though hardly more accurate), we may call the faculty of imagination the gift of the “understanding heart.” In distinction from fantasy, which dreams something, imagination is concerned with the particular darkness of the human heart and the peculiar density which surrounds everything that is real. In distinction from fantasy, which dreams something, imagination is concerned with the particular darkness of the human heart and the peculiar density which surrounds everything that is real.

. . . .

True understanding does not tire of interminable dialogue and “vicious circles,” because it trusts that imagination eventually will catch at least a glimpse of the always frightening light of truth. To distinguish imagination from fancy and to mobilize its power does not mean that understanding of human affairs becomes “irrational.” On the contrary, imagination, as Wordsworth said, “is but another name for . . . clearest insight, amplitude of mind, / And Reason in her most exalted mood” (The Prelude, Book XIV, 190–92).

Imagination alone enables us to see things in their proper perspective, to be strong enough to put that which is too close at a certain distance so that we can see and understand it without bias and prejudice, to be generous enough to bridge abysses of remoteness until we can see and understand everything that is too far away from us as though it were our own affair.

. . . .

Without this kind of imagination, which actually is understanding, we would never be able to take our bearings in the world. It is the only inner compass we have. We are contemporaries only so far as our understanding reaches. If we want to be at home on this earth, even at the price of being at home in this century, we must try to take part in the interminable dialogue with the essence of totalitarianism.

Arendt, Hannah. Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954 (p. 322-323). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

SNG: What caught my eye is Arendt's emphasis on "imagination" as an essential faculty of mind is so widely shared by other significant thinkers. Upon reading this, one thinks of Kant, Coleridge (who shares Kant as a common ancestor with Arendt), Owen Barfield, R.G. Collingwood, and the thinkers and commentary in Gary Lachman's Lost Knowledge of the Imagination. And this is a shortlist. All of these thinkers--and many others--realize that we can't gain understanding without the use of imagination. And we need imagination and understanding more than ever--even more than knowledge--as much as we sorely need further knowledge to address our current challenges.