If a spectacular emergency, like war or hurricane or flood, throws off the Market spectacularly, why do not the thousand accumulating accidents of life throw it off subtly yet persistently at all times? The answer is, plainly, that they do. Death, sickness, luck, accidents of all sorts, the manifold interventions of human perversity, make it impossible to correlate success with quality or virtue. Yet both [Woodrow] Wilson and [Herbert] Hoover were on record as desiring, after the war, to restore this inefficient system in the name of efficiency. They did not see—Americans will not see—the truth that has always surrounded them.
The psychological need to deny this truth is very great. Inefficiency is a charge that should be fatal to Market thinking, deep as that is in the whole American language of business and politics and education.
Jonathan Swift, “On the Difficulty of Knowing One’s Self,” says you must have a reflective mirror to achieve self-knowledge: “A Man can no more know his own Heart than he can know his own Face, any other Way than by Reflection.” For Swift this reflection comes from the regard of others.
His [St. Paul's] thorn in the flesh became a means of grace. As he was crucified with Christ, as opposed to leaning on Christ’s crucifixion and praying for his own agonies to go, he found God dwelling within him. He had learnt what Mary had on the morning of the resurrection: not cling to Jesus but to be free to live his life in the Spirit (John 16:7 and 20:17). This was the truly sweeping realization, his central enlightenment. It is a secret conception of freedom. Today, for example, the working assumption is that freedom means liberty from restraint in order to pursue what’s desired. Spiritual freedom, though, is the liberty to realize what is truest in us, to see the “human form divine,” to use William Blake’s phrase – the twoness, which Blake said enables “double vision.” It is the freedom to move from an involuntary, often conflicted embroilment with the powers and principalities of original participation to a conscious, active union with God under reciprocal participation.
Epicurus, like the Buddha of the Nikayas, stressed inductively derived concepts of causality which eliminate supernatural forces from the account. In both cases it was believed that a knowledge of natural causation would eliminate groundless fears and superstitions, as well as make clear the way to alter one’s own behavior patterns.
But no substitute has water’s exact range of biological and ecological properties. If water is scarce, our options for dealing with the scarcity are restricted; we can’t drink anything else or grow our plants with anything else.
Collingwood’s great discovery is that history must be understood as sui generis.
Plurality is the condition of human action because we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live.
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