“Practical men,” supposedly said John Maynard Keynes, this century’s most influential economist, “are usually slaves of some defunct economist.”
It is not the past as such that is the object of historical knowledge, but the past in the form of present evidence.
I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions.
Wilson’s Outsiders are individuals who occasionally worked well, with the result that they perceived the self-evident meaningfulness of existence. The problem was—is—that they didn’t know how to perceive it at will.
The reality of time, novelty, and change; the persistence of particularity; the intrinsic, constitutive nature of relationships; the perspectival nature of experience—taken together, these several presuppositions that ground the Daoist worldview and provide Daoism with its interpretative context set the terms for optimizing our experience.
