"The active intellect [Left Hemisphere of the brain] … cannot entertain two images together, it has first one and then the other. [But] … if God prompts you to a good deed … whatever good you can do takes shape and presents itself to you together in a flash [RH=right hemisphere], concentrated in a single point." [Quoting Meister Eckhart.]
To be specific, goodness is the essence of the moral dimension of human experience, truth defines the focus of the rational domain, and beauty can be broadly defined as the capstone quality of the aesthetic dimension of value.
We’ve all seen the map of election results depicted according to this red-blue color scheme. This simplistic bipolar framing is understandable given that our national politics continue to be dominated by a two-party system. But this historically engrained conception of left and right, which is habitually used to characterize our contemporary political condition as a two-way contest taking place along a horizontal continuum, is woefully inadequate to our present situation. America’s political dysfunction is not simply the result of an exacerbated divide between the Democratic and Republican parties. Rather, we are now engaged in a three-way struggle between America’s three major cultural worldviews: the modernist worldview, the traditional worldview, and what can best be described as the “progressive postmodern worldview.”
George Packer adds a fourth group, but the point remains the same.
It was the Green New Deal that had squarely addressed the urgency of huge environmental challenges and linked it to questions of extreme social inequality.
Whatever one may think of any particular program in the Green New Deal, the need to realistically address both climate change & extreme inequality is real, and getting two birds with one stone is a very attractive potential.
No European mind since Newton had impressed himself so profoundly on both the political and intellectual development of the world. When the Times wrote Keynes’ obituary, it declared him “the greatest economist since Adam Smith.” But even praise so high as this sold Keynes short, for Keynes was to Smith as Copernicus was to Ptolemy—a thinker who replaced one paradigm with another. In his economic work he fused psychology, history, political theory, and observed financial experience like no economist before or since.
Let's all keep Keynes in mind for this new year!
Let us begin by asserting what is unquestionable: only human beings are historical beings. All other living beings have their own evolution and their life span. But we are the only living beings who know that we live while we live—who know, and not only instinctively feel, that we were born and that we are going to die.
Despite my assessment that Lukacs misreads Collingwood in some ways, in this quote--that humans are "historical beings" --Lukacs echos a key Collingwood theme.
We can't control outcomes in any sphere of life. All you can do – and therefore the only responsibility you have – is to put in the time and effort: into relationships, parenting, finding happiness, whatever. The actual result, in a profound sense, is none of your business.
Sounds to me very much like Krishna's counsel to Arjuna.
If those who escaped from the totalitarian hell have brought back nothing from their experience but the very truisms, moral or otherwise, from which they escaped twenty or thirty years ago—escaped for the very good reason that they had found them no longer sufficient either to explain the world we live in or to offer a guide for action within it—then we may, morally speaking, indeed be caught between pious banalities which have lost their meaning and in which nobody believes any longer and the vulgar banality of homo homini lupus ["man is wolf to man"], which as a guide for human action is also utterly meaningless even though quite a number of people do believe in it as they have always believed in it.
Doubts have a purpose, and by means of them we step backwards to take a better jump.
The most practical and realistic of the Founders were Franklin and Washington—and of the two, Washington had the more important role, military and civilian, in the new government. He had the most hands-on experience of the possibilities and difficulties of the people he was dealing with—in the day-to-day efforts of the war, in the resistance to greater central authority, in the pitfalls of setting up a new government and keeping it on course, in the problem of freeing slaves in his will and providing for their support long after he died.
Kant reflected the two traditions, one upon the other. Kant was a scientist, but the schools derivative from Kant have had but slight effect on the mentality of the scientific world. It should be the task of the philosophical schools of this century to bring together the two streams into an expression of the world-picture derived from science, and thereby end the divorce of science from the affirmations of our aesthetic and ethical experiences.
“The general idea with most memory techniques is to change whatever boring thing is being inputted into your memory into something that is so colorful, so exciting, and so different from anything you’ve seen before that you can’t possibly forget it,”
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