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| Ol' Nic: Machiavelli |
Niccolò Machiavelli:
Wise men say, and not without reason, that whoever wishes to foresee the future must consult the past; for human events ever resemble those of preceding times. This arises from the fact that they are produced by men who have ever been, and ever will be, animated by the same passions, and thus they necessarily have the same results.
Current deficiencies of character, both as an idea and in behavior, result from epistemology, the study of how we know. If the character of the knower is irrelevant to knowing, or even interferes with truest knowing, then character does not belong within philosophy’s purview. Then knowledge and the methods of gaining knowledge can proceed unhampered by the character of the knower and by issues of value that are inescapably implied by the idea of character. Result: knowledge without value; valueless knowledge, which is euphemistically dubbed “objectivity.”
When philosophy ignores the relevance of character for the value of knowledge, moral decline follows, and moral resurrection depends on philosophical correction. The righteous and the right who complain of moral decline in society look to “the family” for cause and cure. They should perform their postmortems more incisively. Then they would take their laments to philosophy and cut the overburdened, guilt-plagued families some slack.
The epistemological fault, in brief, is this. To know the world “out there,” philosophy constructed a knowing subject “in here.” As the world was conceived to be, ultimately, a characterless abstraction of space, time, and motion, so the knower had to be equally transcendent and objectified, that is, shorn of characteristics. The method of knowing the world had to be purified; otherwise our human observations would be all-too-human, qualified by individual subjectivity, merely anecdotal, therefore unreliable, therefore untrue. The ideal human as knower of truth must be a vacant mirror of purified consciousness. Some thinkers would discard “consciousness” altogether. They call it the ghost in the machine; they assert that the relation between consciousness and brain is an insoluble problem, or that the problem results from the wrong question. They are right—so long as consciousness is undefiled by qualities, a sheer abstraction. To conceive of consciousness as energy aware of itself makes matters worse. It defines the one abstraction by means of three others: energy, awareness, and self.
If you want to make a convincing argument for just about anything, the best tactic usually relies on triggering visceral and emotional details rather than employing logic and abstract reasoning. In other words, I’m much more likely to capture your attention if I start a chapter of my book with an anecdote about a minefield in India or someone swimming with sharks than with a drab academic summary of neurological vocabulary.
Man controls his physical environment by means of his physical powers. He controls his inner world by means of his mental powers—‘intentions’. His future evolution depends upon increased ability to use ‘intentions’, these mental pseudopodia that determine his thoughts, moods, ideas, emotions, insights. The intentions do not create ideas or insights; they only uncover meaning. They could be compared to the blind man’s fingers that wander over Braille. But this image fails to bring out the most important aspect of the intentions: their power to penetrate into meaning.
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