If the New Deal was, as the historian Ira Katznelson has suggested, a project comparable only to the French Revolution in its enduring political significance, then [FDR's] the Four Freedoms address was its Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen.
[John Kenneth] Galbraith’s portrait [in his 1958 The Affluent Society] of the cheerful but discontent overconsumer was a portrait not of America but of white America . And even white Americans still struggled on the farm, where 40 percent of families remained impoverished. Yet [Gunnar] Myrdal’s critique only underscored Galbraith’s broader point about democracy, markets, and mathematics. The economic system could run at full capacity—or at least at what politicians accepted as full capacity—while still leaving out a tremendous swath of society.
There’s even an online engine enabling you to find your very own bogus correlation at whatever statistical significance you’d like, such as that between mozzarella-cheese consumption and civil engineering doctorates.
Thinking, willing, and judging are the three basic mental activities; they cannot be derived from each other and though they have certain common characteristics they cannot be reduced to a common denominator.
No mental act, and least of all the act of thinking, is content with its object as it is given to it. It always transcends the sheer givenness of whatever may have aroused its attention and transforms it into what Petrus Johannis Olivi, the thirteenth-century Franciscan philosopher of the Will, called an experimentum suitatis, an experiment of the self with itself. Since plurality is one of the basic existential conditions of human life on earth—so that inter homines esse, to be among men, was to the Romans the sign of being alive, aware of the realness of world and self, and inter homines esse desinere, to cease to be among men, a synonym for dying—to be by myself and to have intercourse with myself is the outstanding characteristic of the life of the mind. The mind can be said to have a life of its own only to the extent that it actualizes this intercourse in which, existentially speaking, plurality is reduced to the duality already implied in the fact and the word “consciousness,” or syneidenai—to know with myself.
What then the conjunction of philosophical and historical argument reveals is that either one must follow through the aspirations and the collapse of the different versions of the Enlightenment project until there remains only the Nietzschean diagnosis and the Nietzschean problematic or one must hold that the Enlightenment project was not only mistaken, but should never have been commenced in the first place. There is no third alternative and more particularly there is no alternative provided by those thinkers at the heart of the contemporary conventional curriculum in moral philosophy, Hume, Kant and Mill. It is no wonder that the teaching of ethics is so often destructive and skeptical in its effects upon the minds of those taught.
