The soul’s “imaginary sight” may see more than the empirical ever can. As Shakespeare famously elsewhere put it: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” From a first possibly distorted sense of something, the imagination may show a truth that is gradually revealed over time. It led Shakespeare to present the imagination as an intermediate zone. It’s somewhere between the subjective and the objective. It hovers at an edge, on a threshold. It’s the domain we enter into when we hear a play, a poem, a parable. It’s a region of revelation.
N.B. My review of this book is here.
MUCH OF this volume is devoted to examining how this national state got fashioned. This task leads to Congress, the fulcrum of the book. One cannot understand the New Deal without appreciating the activist lawmaking that resulted from many bouts of arguing, bargaining, and voting in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. These policy achievements demonstrably challenged the period’s common claim that national legislatures had become incapable and obsolete.
There is much here that accords with later theories of probability: the various grades of probability, the high degree of probability that provides a good criterion for action, the increase in probability through the coherence of different pieces of evidence. What is unique about Carneades’ theory is that his probability is a property of perception rather than of propositions or beliefs and is genuinely equated with appearance of truth or likeness to truth.
A catastrophe divides us all up into three groups: the prematurely dead, the lucky survivors, and the permanently wounded or traumatized. A catastrophe also separates the fragile from the resilient and the antifragile—Nassim Taleb’s wonderful word to describe something that gains strength under stress. (Remember Nietzsche: “What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.”) Some cities, corporations, states, and empires collapse under the force of the shock. Others survive, though weakened. But a third, Nietzschean category emerges stronger.
First, Socrates is a gadfly: he knows how to sting the citizens who, without him, will “sleep on undisturbed for the rest of their lives” unless somebody comes along to arouse them. And what does he arouse them to? To thinking and examination, an activity without which life, in his view, was not only not worth much but was not fully alive.
To bring the matter down to earth, a system of education that prepares people for “careers” rather than for life in all its dimensions, especially its tragic dimension, will readily lead its graduates into Thoreau’s trap of “improved means to an unimproved end.”
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