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| An American classic originally published in 1974 |
Any effort that has self-glorification as its final endpoint is bound to end in disaster.
Too bad that the recently defeated president didn't get this message; but then he'd have to read.
Maurras’s following in the monarchist “street” cared less for winning arguments than for making trouble. Maurras cared for both. He stirred up right-wing street fighters with violent prose in the newspaper he edited, Action Française, and then disclaimed responsibility for the damage they caused. In 1934, for example, right-wing rioters egged on by Action Française attempted to storm the parliament in Paris.
Seem familiar?
Where the new way of knowing required that the observer remain passive, so as not to taint what he was observing with his ‘subjectivity’ – Thomas Huxley, Darwin’s ‘bulldog’, advises us to ‘sit down before fact like a little child’ – Goethe, as we’ve seen, took a more active approach. Like Schwaller de Lubicz’s ‘intelligence of the heart’, Goethe wants to get inside phenomena, not behind them to some ‘really real’ world, whether of elementary particles or Kant’s ding-an-sich, the ‘thing-in-itself’ forever barred from our cognition by the ‘categories’ of thought.
Query: How does Goethe's intention to "get inside phenomena" compare with Barfield's idea of "participation?"
Science is a plant of slow growth. It will not grow (and for a plant the end of growth is the end of life) except where the scientist as the priest of truth is not only supported but revered as a priest-king by a people that shares his faith. When scientists are no longer kings, there will be (to adapt a famous saying of Plato’s) no end to the evils undergone by the society that has dethroned them until it perishes physically for sheer lack of sustenance.
Is this observation relevant to today? (To borrow a 60s cliche.)
The shorter our standard time-phase for an historical event, the more our history will consist of destructions, catastrophes, battle, murder, and sudden death. But destruction implies the existence of something to destroy; and as this type of history cannot describe how such a thing came into existence, for the process of its coming into existence was a process too long to be conceived as an event by this type of history, its existence must be presupposed as given, ready-made, miraculously established by some force outside history.
In other words, the profit motive, whose importance for imperialist policies was frequently overrated even in the past, has now completely disappeared; only very rich and very powerful countries can afford to take the huge losses involved in imperialism.
Since Dasein is ‘to be there’ in the world – the literal, actual, concrete, daily world – to be human at all is to be immersed in the earth, and the quotidian matter-of-factness of the world.
We call such institutions, which have opposite properties to those we call inclusive, extractive economic institutions-extractive because such institutions are designed to extract incomes and wealth from one subset of society to benefit a different subset.
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