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| Greeks ancient to contemporary & Paddy Leigh Fermor |
Instead of bowing down to saints and miracles, the Greeks worshipped problem solvers and hard how-to. They understood the difference between heroism and impulse, and they devised an easy, two-step test for telling them apart: 1. Would you do it again? 2. And could you?
Just as the original sense of the word ‘cause’ is what I have called the historical sense, according to which that which is caused is the act of a conscious and responsible agent, so the original sense of the word ‘necessary’ is an historical sense, according to which it is necessary for a person to act in a certain way: deciding so to act and acting therefore freely and responsibly, yet (in a sense which in no wise derogates from his responsibility) ‘necessitated’ to act in that way by certain ‘causes’, in sense I [#1] of the word ‘cause’.
The decision the will arrives at can never be derived from the mechanics of desire or the deliberations of the intellect that may precede it. The will is either an organ of free spontaneity that interrupts all causal chains of motivation that would bind it or it is nothing but an illusion.
As the accompanying graph shows, the only fats that could be found in any American kitchen up until about 1910 were those that came exclusively from animals: lard (the fat from pigs), suet (the fat from around an animal’s kidneys), tallow (a harder fat from sheep and cattle), butter, and cream.
He [Walter Lippmann] further identified the rupture between past and present—in the democracies as well as the dictatorships—with two revolutionary developments in modern politics he believed to be “wholly without precedent in history.” First was the active and self-conscious participation in government by “the masses of men,” making of “modern government in our Western World, even under the dictatorships,” something of “a daily plebiscite.” The legitimacy of any government thus had come to depend on its ability to solve problems and formulate policies to which the governed would offer consent, both active and passive.
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