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| An outstanding consideration of Keynes & his legacy |
Keynes was also convinced that the economic problem of the twentieth century was not scarcity but mismanagement. Depressions were caused not by production shortfalls but by financial instability and uncertainty. The British general strike of 1926 and the rise of Hitler had been driven by desperate people seeking radical solutions to intractable domestic misery.
Isn't the second sentence the key to understanding some of the despair of the Great Depression and others before & since? Nothing happened, such as a war or natural disaster, to cause such to cause the disaster. I was simply a failure of a purely human (as opposed to natural) system.
"Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, magic, and power in it. Begin it now." [Emerson]
So now I just do it. Because it’s on this structure I call a calendar.
How do I distinguish between waiting (listening inside for inspiration) and procrastination?
Since Bergson, the use of the sight metaphor in philosophy has kept dwindling, not unsurprisingly, as emphasis and interest have shifted entirely from contemplation to speech, from nous to logos. With this shift, the criterion for truth has shifted from the agreement of knowledge with its object—the adequatio rei et intellectus, understood as analogous to the agreement of vision with the seen object—to the mere form of thinking, whose basic rule is the axiom of non-contradiction, of consistency with itself, that is, to what Kant still understood as the merely “negative touchstone of truth.”
It has been common to see, in consequence of the (true) ellipse theory and the (false) Platonic solids theory, two Keplers, or at least two opposing aspects of Kepler’s thought—one, rationalist and looking forward to modern scientific method, with its curve fitting and hypothesis testing; the other backward looking and “mystical,” misled by all manner of unlikely Pythagorean speculations. Kepler’s works reveal no such split. The difference between the two theories is simply that the ellipse theory turned out to be right, the solids theory wrong. Kepler’s manner of thinking, and of argument, is the same in both cases and is the one that lies at the bottom of the success of modern mathematical science. It involves finding the harmonies of the world, to use Kepler’s words, or in the language of a more pedestrian century, argument from concomitant variation.
The point is not that . . . slogans, ideals, programs, and declarations do not influence action. Under certain circumstances they undoubtedly do, and tremendously. But they are not and cannot be part of logical or rational action.
