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| 2018 publication |
The solution to the “economic problem” is not economic, it is social and political. Simply continuing to stoke the furnace of human greed is a dead end.
To be great, one must make great work, and making great work is incredibly hard. It must be our primary focus. We must set out, from the beginning, with complete and total commitment to the idea that our best chance of success starts during the creative process.
America, we like to think, has been specially “graced.” Set apart. The first child of the Enlightenment, it was “declared” to others as the harbinger of a new order. Yet this rationally founded nation was also deeply devotional, a redeemer nation. Reason and religion, which should have contended near our cradle, conspired instead. If we kept ourself isolated from others, it was to avoid contamination. If we engaged others, we did so from above, to bring light into their darkness. To deal with others as equals would betray our mission.
As we perform an act, make a choice, we believe there are options. Options, Personal Agency, Choices, Decisions—these are the catchwords Ego thrives on. But if we look up from the engagement for a moment and speculate, Necessity’s implacable smile says that whatever choice you make is exactly the one req uired by Necessity. It could not be otherwise. At the moment the decision falls, it is necessary. Before it is decided, all lies open. For this strange reason, Necessity guarantees only risk. All is at risk in each decision, even though what is finally decided upon at once becomes necessary.
For the ancient Greeks, hope was the personified spirit, or daemon, Elpis. She carried a bundle of positive and negative connotations, some like our modern understanding of hope but others resembling today’s expectation and foreboding. Classicists and other scholars have debated back and forth intensely whether the fact that Elpis stayed trapped in the jar was intended as a boon or bane for humanity, an eternal gift left behind to ease the pain of the escaped ills or, maybe, a perpetually taunting source of illusion and emotional trauma. My guess is that the parable is saying that hope is both: the ancient Greeks— or Hesiod, at least— understood that hope is ambiguous in its very essence.
It [the relationship of emotion & style] is a point to labour, as being the very purpose of writing a fully historical biography; one, that is, that manages to re-create how a life was lived and then takes its moral measure again, two generations later. The mind searches for a style (in Nietzsche’s usage), shaped and reshaped by certain passions, which it struggles to make congenial to thought, and applies this style to the comprehension of its experience and the knowledge it will yield. The great stylists of philosophy whom Collingwood briefly typifies in the book—“the classical elegance of Descartes, the lapidary phrases of Spinoza, the tortured metaphor-ridden periods of Hegel”—are stylish precisely because such are the accommodations these men found for their passions as these compelled and were harnessed by their thought.
The idea of separating a bubble from the water it floats in is nonsensical. The water around it defines the bubble. The bubble has no existence outside of the water. In the same way a human being is defined by its environment, and the idea of removing a human being from its environment is equally nonsensical. We do not exist outside of our environment.
