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