Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.
On such matters of evidence, the Lombard commentators already show the characteristic medieval tendency to generalize much more than the Roman lawyers and to inquire into abstract principles. How can a law legislate against those who plot against the king’s life, when only God can know anyone’s thought? “[The question] is solved in this way: it is known through indications, for example if someone is discovered in the king’s chambers after hours having a naked sword under his cloak, or with a knife in his sleeve, or if the cupbearer of the king while near him is seen to prepare poison.”
My most recently completed book.
Despite having lost its original theoretical basis, an outmoded mechanical worldview still prevails.
He had this in common with the kids; he wears a Nixon mask.
N.B. The "he" is Nixon.
Unless we treat politics as a zero-sum game in which the whole field is to be won and held by one side, recognition of an enduring left-right divide across the field reflects, in rough terms, an acceptance of politics as unending argument amid diversity. It reflects acceptance, in short, of a core element in liberal democracy: the acknowledgement of unsettleable social conflict, fought over politically by the right and the left.
N.B. This is what U.S. politics has lost, at least for those who have adopted the Trumpist line, which now seems a majority of the (what retains the brand) of the Republican Party.
And this speaking in analogies, in metaphorical language, according to Kant, is the only way through which speculative reason, which we here call thinking, can manifest itself. The metaphor provides the “abstract,” imageless thought with an intuition drawn from the world of appearances whose function it is “to establish the reality of our concepts” and thus undo, as it were, the withdrawal from the world of appearances that is the precondition of mental activities.
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