These examples suggest that Epictetus is wrong to include our impulses, desires, and aversions in the category of things over which we have complete control. They belong instead in the category of things over which we have some but not complete control, or, in some instances, in the category of things over which we have no control at all. But having said this, I should add that it is possible that something important has been lost in translation—that in speaking of impulses, desires, and aversions, Epictetus had in mind something different than we do.
Today’s conventional growth can end voluntarily, if we deliberately move the global economy onto a new path through economic and social innovation (of which more later); or it can end involuntarily— probably with social catastrophe in its wake. But either way, it will end.
[T]o achieve its simplicity and elegance, the theory [of neo-classical economics] focuses on the behavior of independent individuals operating in a market—individuals who are atomized, rational, similar in preferences, and stripped of any social attributes. But this makes the theory largely asocial and ahistorical: there’s generally no place in it for large-scale historical, cultural, and political forces that sometimes have a huge impact on our economies—forces like the emancipation of women, rising environmental consciousness, or democratization in poor countries.
[Modern Man] feels guilty because he has made his life its own end and has not obeyed the commandment, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God . . . and thy neighbor as thyself.” While modern secularism speaks naively about the sociological source of conscience, the most effective opponents of tyrannical government are today, as they have been in the past, men who can say, “We must obey God rather than man.” Their resolution is possible because they have a vantage point from which they can discount the pretensions of demonic Caesars and from which they can defy malignant power as embodied in a given government.
By about 1920 this was my first principle of a philosophy of history: that the past which an historian studies is not a dead past, but a past which in some sense is still living in the present.
All externality is imaginary; for externality—a mutual outsideness in the abstract sense of the denial of a mutual insideness—is as such abstraction, and abstraction is always intuition or imagination.
If inference encourages Collingwood’s view of history towards science then imagination moves it towards art.
