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| First published in 1961 |
Thinking, as Arendt experiences it, is an inner silent dialogue, which may reach conditional conclusions but whose real result is a proliferation of distinctions made by conversing with a thinking partner. To be conscious of thought as a conversation is rare, due both to its silence and its lightning-like speed, but to Arendt the dialogic character of the activity of thinking is what human consciousness (con-scientia) is.
--Jerome Kohn, "Introduction"
All modern scientific work rests on the absolute presupposition that nature is one and that science is one: that the different realms of nature are in part governed by one and the same code of absolutely identical laws, the laws of mathematics, and in part by special codes which do not differ radically among themselves but are so linked together by analogies and similarities that they may be regarded as so many local variants of laws which in spite of these variations can still be called ‘laws of nature’; while the various sciences that investigate the various realms of nature are not independent sciences but only modifications of one and the same thing, a single thing which we call by the single name of natural science.
Walter Benjamin wrote, the self-alienation of humankind ‘has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order’.
A nonplussed Hayek told an interviewer, “Milton [Friedman's] monetarism and Keynesianism have more in common with each other than I have with either.” For Hayek, who believed that depressions simply had to burn themselves out, even monetary therapy was dangerous.
I say to some extent, because although (theoretical physicist John Archibald] Wheeler and the scientists who follow his lead use the term ‘participation’ they do not share [Owen] Barfield’s, [Colin] Wilson’s and others’ belief that our own volition – our will – can increase our participation. Theirs is a ‘participatory universe’ but, like earlier scientific models, it is a passive one. That our consciousness participates in the universe is for them as much a ‘law’ as is gravity. For people like Barfield, the idea is to consciously increase our participation, and hence freedom. And by consciously increasing our participation, we do not then gain greater control over the things that make up our world, but of our picture of that world, just as while I cannot control what takes place in a television programme I am watching, I can control the quality of the picture on the screen; i.e., increase or decrease the focus, clarity, and so on.
