Thus, at times when it seems as if people of color or women will become equal to white men, oligarchs are able to court white male voters by insisting that universal equality will, in fact, reduce white men to subservience. Both slaveholders in the 1850s and Movement Conservatives a century later convinced white American men that equality for people of color and women would destroy their freedom.
The business of history proper is to do with action, not natural event.
Postmodernists can be prone to narcissism, value relativism, a return to magical or mythical thinking, and intense forms of antimodernism that threaten to undermine the social foundations upon which postmodern culture itself ultimately depends.
There is never much point, whether in aesthetic or philosophic criticism, in arguing for coherent patterns of thought in the life’s work of a thinker or a poet. The history of all thought is broken up into new starts, blind alleys, reactionary retreats, fake advances, whether in one person’s work or in a collective movement. Yet in a life, as in an epoch, we search out form and direction. A biography is an attempt to place a life against a moral horizon, to frame it with its recognisable landmarks and pathways. One such framing was for Collingwood the long journey to make philosophy and history synonymous.
Pythagoras seems to have interposed numbers between the One and the Many, formulating for seemingly the first time the One-Few-Many which Empedocles would transpose into his theory of elements and Plato would expand into his Theory of Ideas. This doctrine is expressed in a range of ways which embody the transition from mythology to philosophy. There is a more imagistic mythological mode of expression, in which the idea of the Cosmic Person is used, perhaps under Orphic influence, and a more abstract structuralist mode, in which mathematics takes the place of myth.
And if the above wasn't deep enough for you, here's Hannah Arendt for the deeper dive, but I'm happy to report, quite succinct today:
Popular language, as it expresses preliminary understanding, thus starts the process of true understanding.
