Say the order of your time feels unjust and unsustainable and yet massively entrenched, but also falling apart before your eyes. The obvious contradictions in this list might yet still describe the feeling of your time quite accurately, if we are not mistaken. Or put it this way; it feels that way to us. But a little contemplation of history will reveal that this feeling too will not last for long. Unless of course the feeling of things falling apart is itself massively entrenched, to the point of being the eternal or eternally recurrent individual human’s reaction to history. Which may just mean the reinscription of the biological onto the historical, for we are all definitely always falling apart, and not massively entrenched in anything at all.
Wherever there is the possibility of transcendence, there is, by the very same token, the possibility of repression. The higher might not just transcend and include, it might transcend and repress, exclude, alienate, dissociate.
There came upon me by degrees, after this, a sense of being burdened with a task whose nature I could not define except by saying, ‘I must think.’ What I was to think about I did not know; and when, obeying this command, I fell silent and absent-minded in company, or sought solitude in order to think without interruption, I could not have said, and still cannot say, what it was that I actually thought.
The somewhat comprehensive socialization of investment Keynes had described in The General Theory might be described as the commonsense regulation of inflation and employment, rather than the nefarious planning that Hayek excoriated. Glass-Steagall’s government-mandated breakup of the American investment houses was just a responsible antitrust action to restore competitive banking. Social Security and public works spending were inoffensive elements of the basic social guarantee.
As to the certainty or otherwise of their methods, the Empirics, though apparently not admitting the fallibility in principle of induction from what has been seen “very many times,” did admit to making mistakes because their experience was limited. They hastened to add, of course, that the Dogmatists did too, without admitting it. Dogmatism, they said, could at best only reach the level of plausibility and likelihood.
Humanitas is never acquired in solitude and never by giving one’s work to the public. It can be achieved only by one who has thrown his life and his person into the “venture into the public realm”—in the course of which he risks revealing something which is not “subjective” and which for that very reason he can neither recognize nor control. Thus the “venture into the public realm,” in which humanitas is acquired, becomes a gift to mankind.
