Thoughts of the Day: Saturday 21 November 2020

 

The Master and His Emissary

Iain McGilchrist

So Wordsworth describes at the opening of Book XII of The Prelude how inspiration requires both the effort by which the mind ‘aspires, grasps, struggles, wishes, craves’ and the stillness of the mind which ‘fits him to receive it, when unsought’ – despite the effort, it still only comes unsought.

Compare the above with Hannah Arendt's descriptions of "thinking," such as undertaken by Socrates.

The Shape of Ancient Thought

Thomas McEvilley

Plotinus’s level of Soul is in turn divided into two sublevels, one rapt in upward contemplation, the other dynamically involved below. The tradition of this distinction in Greek philosophy goes back from Plotinus through Middle Platonist and Neopythagorean sources to Aristotle’s distinction between active and passive intellect, and ultimately to Plato’s conception of the World Soul in the Timaeus.

Made to Stick

Chip Heath, Dan Heath

As we pored over hundreds of sticky ideas, we saw, over and over, the same six principles at work. PRINCIPLE 1: SIMPLICITY How do we find the essential core of our ideas? A successful defense lawyer says, “If you argue ten points, even if each is a good point, when they get back to the jury room they won’t remember any.” To strip an idea down to its core, we must be masters of exclusion. We must relentlessly prioritize.

And for a deeper dive today:

The ‘corrupting influence of power’ is a commonplace. Power means the exercise of force; it corrupts by undermining a man’s will and reducing him to the level of his own slaves. [Collingwood is writing in the context of Greco-Roman political thought.] A slave-driver, getting out of the habit of explaining to his slaves what he means them to do, gets out of the habit of formulating his intentions even to himself. He can retain that habit only by discussing them on equal terms with his equals.

Plato knew this. He has left us a psychological study of the political slave-driver (in Greek ‘tyrant’) and a psychological study of the slave, the ‘tyrant’s’ subject. The results are the same. The lack of free will, the inability to resist the pressure of emotional forces, which makes the slave a slave, is also what makes the ‘tyrant’ a ‘tyrant’.

To narrate the genesis and career of the ‘tyrant’ (for us to-day, as it was for Plato or the Hellenistic period, an absorbing task) is not exactly the business of political science, because the field of activity in which the ‘tyrant’ distinguishes himself is not, strictly speaking, political. For the time being, let us call it pseudo-political. Collingwood, R. G.. The New Leviathan. Read Books Ltd.. Kindle Edition.