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| The best entryway into Ophuls work |
Ecological scarcity is not a problem that can be solved within the old framework but a predicament or dilemma that can be resolved only by a new way of thinking. The ultimate outcome of this new philosophy will be a new political order.
What we complacently identify as a lack of political will is often, in reality, a lack of social will: we are all part of the problem, and our societies as a whole, not just our leaders, are ineffective in providing solutions to the challenges we face.
N.B. This was written about 20 years before COVID--and yet so pertinent.
Why am I so concerned about haze? To me, it signifies something more general than just pollution or atmospheric processes. As haze cuts us off from vivid skies and landscapes, it attenuates our ties to the wider, external reality in which we are embedded. It is just one of the many ways we are constructing—inside that wider reality—an artificial and self-referential world.
N.B. Is there anywhere in the U.S. not currently experiencing haze as a result of the great fires in the West. We have it here in Colorado, even without any great fires locally.
The main aspect of this conception is that the Idea, no longer recognized as an independent entity, finds its realization in the movement of history as such. Since then, all modern political theories which lead to totalitarianism present an immersion of an absolute principle into reality in the form of a historical movement; and it is this absoluteness, which they pretend to embody, which gives them their “right” of priority over the individual conscience. It is only logical that the rise and the functioning of all one-party systems follow the basic pattern of “movements.”
Biography’s limits are established by natural process. Thus, a biography must include events in its subject’s life some of which do not embody thought – sensations, desires, feelings – together with the ‘the accidents of animal existence’ referred to earlier, some of which do embody thought, but are included because they may entertain, instruct or divert the reader.
N.B. Collingwood effectively wrote his own biography in his Autobiography. And notwithstanding his critique, biographies have been and are being written about him. He does set a high bar for them.
The hard right is not fascist or, save on the fringes, protofascist. Fascism was nourished by the themes and anger of the unreconciled right in the 1880s and 1890s but was itself historically specific. Although of the right, fascism is not on the right, being outside the left-right spectrum of the liberal-democratic world. It sprang up in Italy in the 1920s, after a ruinous world war without European winners. It relied not only on a cult of the charismatic leader and a totalizing vision of society, but also on a unifying Bolshevik enemy and a single, mass party.
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