Daily Archives: December 1, 2017

Sleepwalkers

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Kepler combined metaphysical speculation with empirical science. One of the few instances where a delusion led to momentous and true scientific discovery.

Innovation is a threat to academic mediocrities. Professional academics have a vested interest in tradition.

Major mutations in the history of thought are dependent upon geniuses with the following characteristics:

1 – Skepticism carried to the point of iconoclasm

2 – An open mindedness that verges on naive credulity.

3 – Ability to see the familiar in a completely new light

Science and art change when a feeling emerges – that the ‘tradition’ is no longer in step with the mainstream. It becomes meaningless – divorced from reality, and isolated from the integral whole. This allows for thawing of dogma at which point creatives can plunge under the ice/surface and look around.

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Concepts of Justice

Screen Shot 2017-11-30 at 9.00.06 AMNatural Justice/Natural Law/Natural Rights… all begin in Rome jurisprudence.

Aristotle: Justice is a habit of conduct; Political Justice = partly natural and partly legal. Natural Law = Source of all legality vs. the idea of Legality of Positive Law in which justice is derived from the will of sovereign alone.

Plato’s Gorgias: It is better to suffer than do injustice

Socrates: Justice is concerned with inner life. The just person sets in order his or her inner life.

Spinoza: Justice = Obedience…  Laws are not formulated by reference to justice but to the interest of the State which has a right to its own preservation. As long as it has power, it can do as it likes.

vs.

Plato/The Republic – Wisdom= Virtue of Rulers, Justice = Organizing principle of Plato’s ideal state.

Thrasymachus says: Justice is the interest of the stronger. What is best for the protection of the State is justice. For the weak they can only do injustice. They can’t even experience it. Injustice means – disobeying rulers.

Thoreau, Gandhi, MLK Jr: Civil Disobedience toward unjust laws that violate a person’s conscience may have the force of the State behind them but they exert no authority over him or her. The just person is called upon to break them and to submit gladly to the consequences of break them by suffering whatever penalties may be attached to their breach (opposite of Good German).

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Radicals

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In chemistry: Free Radicals are atomic or molecular species with unpaired electrons on an otherwise open shell configuration – usually highly reactive.

The Federalist conceives the possibility of a revolutionary process which is at once peaceful and legal.

Locke: Anyone who uses force without right – as everyone does in society who does it without law, puts himself into a state of war with those against whom he so uses it; A king may be resisted when he exceeds his authority and uses power unlawfully.

It is not the people who rebel; rather it is they who put down the sedition of the tyrant. A right to resistance.

Declaration of Independence says we have the right to rebel. You can not overthrow the Constitution.

Revolution is abrupt. It can occur in either direction, against the tide as well as with it. Action and reason can be equal and opposite in physical motion so in social change revolution and counter-revolution can aim in opposite directions.

The revolutionist is a radical.

Marx: Political power is merely the organized power of one class for oppressing another.

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Empathic Civilization

Notes on Jeremy Rifkin book:

Empathy as  a driving force in the unfolding human history speaks to our deeply social nature.

Much of what is written about history revolves around the pathology of power.

The importance of reframing the human narrative.

Evolution of emphatic consciousness – which is the underlying story of human history – has not been given the attention it deserves.

Unlike sympathy – empathy is active.

The underlying dialectic of human history is the continuing feedback loop between expanding empathy and increasing entropy.

Misc: Oral cultures are steeped in mythological consciousness; Script cultures give rise to theological consciousness; print cultures are accompanied by ideological consciousness; Electricity cultures spawn psychological consciousness. (Source – Ilya Prigogine?)

 

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