William James' image of riding a horse at night, but not knowing whether it is white or black. Compare Hegel, decades earlier, not able to make out the colors of cows in the gloaming. Or trying to time the flight of Minerva's owl--it never occurring to him that the sense of one flight-path might be Hesperus and the sense of the other, Phosphorus. Trying to keep an eye on the livestock has done much for philosophy. Acts of care, not sentiment.
Notion: The more a political system is understood as a political system, the greater the attenuation between the intentions of the people and the policies of the government. As each aspect of the process is increasingly understood, the testimony of the people, whether the direct democracy of the base level, or the votes of republican assemblies, becomes a discrete and objective phenomenon, and this operates in a zero-sum manner with its sanctity, which is to say the degree to which its own purpose constitutes the understanding and use of these testimonial acts.
Take, for example, a Tom-Sawyer speech by a major American politician in Europe. Since the speaker is speaking from first principles within a very complex system of political systems, the effects can be anomalous with respect to the principles of the speech. The currency of first principles, applied at each discrete level of politics, can imbalance things to the degree that these mechanisms have already been defined and understood. Contrastingly, within a naive system, say a nation still effectively governed by family tribes and with only a basic governance, the currency of first principles can be applied with equal (a scientist would say nominal) effect with respect to every aspect of the mechanism.
As the recent political discourse in the US demonstrates, when the people think they've severally discovered "what's really going on," in these mechanisms, the music becomes discordant.
One can't afford to be sentimental about one's circumstances. If things are going well, it keeps you from using that working space to get something done. If things become perilous, the melodramatic underscoring of the mind can pose real dangers. Detachment.
(And I say this having worked on late 19th c. melodrama at one of the better-positioned rooms in NYC to do such things.)
Interesting goings-on in the sovereign district. Wondering if the principled neophyte might have missed a clue in the communications from the Sublime Porte of Lafayette. There was more than one national sovereignty involved in the res. Curiouser and curiouser. #notexpert #nothingtodowithme #ijustreadbooks
Really, anyone with a serious mind in this world is the spiritual equivalent of the protagonists of Godot, no matter whether you're eating roots from the field and trying to survive each day on the roadside, or ensconced in a comfortable house or apartment with a well-remunerated daily sequence of obligations. None of us should believe, or even take seriously the things around us. We can't, or we become dishonest and join the dishonest.
One can be in the world without believing in the world. I learned that through long years of working day jobs.
At the end of the day, if you turn right after leaving the office, you go to an apartment to which you have a key. If you turn left, you will have to find something. Life is precisely that turn in the other direction, to a path in which something will have to come up. You will be in that condition before the end, if only at the end. Tolstoy attempted to teach himself this in the end, and died in a village railway station.
In the museum in Cleveland, just across from the famous water lilies, there is a green landscape by Pissarro. Looking closer, or to be precise, looking more precisely (in the manner encouraged by detailed American landscape painting and discouraged by the clouds of Turner), you see a figure asleep on the green hill.
In the last country I was in, the famous 19th c. philosopher had a theory of the spiritual condition of his nation's culture. He saw it as a green hillside by a village, this location bringing out the conditions of life most conducive to beholding the mystery.
Watching a production of Hamlet at the Hungarian theatre in Cluj, I was struck with the thought that the play didn't begin until the skull in Hamlet's hand became Yorick. (Who was based on Richard Tarleton, a character actor with a quick wit, who would dance jigs with inprovised wordplay with the audience after the show.) Until then, we are holding props and speaking lines. All we have is this existence, this natural form, and so much of the present existence is about concealing this from us.
So. Uniting the thoughts. We are on the hillside. It is the only way that reveals who we are, and we are among those who are convinced that the world of most people's preoccupations is false. So we are left in this place, and the one gift it has for us is that last item in Pandora's case, that thing that made the old Russian writer hobble away from his house to parts unknown.
But, finally, in knowledge, we must hold the mystery.
You don't realize how completely filled with nonsense the American news is until you step away for a bit. It's clearly an entertainment mechanism, made real by claiming to describe some sort of reality supervenient over day-to-day life (and in that it perhaps has some predecessors). But like all forms of entertainment, it serves the function of legein, preserving the possibility of discourse, a range of things to be talked about and held in the mind, or perhaps combined and sifted through like some sort of Baconian cipher. Heid suggested that newspapers were the modern form of legein. Occasionally, they're rather up-front about it: "here's what to know/talk about."
A genuinely phenomenological description of what the news is might be interesting. It's a rather stark claim. "The things that I will read to you over the next thirty minutes (taking the 6PM news as a paradigm case) describe the fundamental condition of the world." Or perhaps only the recent changes.
And yet, once the actual impact is attenuated, if I'm certain that nothing said (outside the weather report) will predict anything that will happen to me in the near future, describing the changes without describing the general condition seems a stretch. I would learn more by reading a history book than listening to five minutes of nuanced discussion about current events.
So, like many forms of entertainment, perhaps it's not about knowing things. Or even speaking about them.
Basically, it's a colossal power grab, but in a mode of being that the current politics isn't calibrated against. In the story of the world that DC politics tells, the computers are just those machines that the interns waste time on, and that make the filing system go more quickly. Even in NYC business, simple passwords generally known among the office staff are a power move.
"But there is more than one history of the world." (John Crowley)
It's like that short space of time before word floats up to the C-suite that the brash outside consultants brought in by the new CEO have been spending their time making copies of virtually every database and system in the business.
(Translation: only a business where the CEO absolutely ruled both the board and the business would even think about risking something like this.)
As for the arts-related moves, taking over the KC board is likely a simple status move. Those board seats in NYC can't be bought with millions of dollars in contributions.
There are people who make every effort to pay at little as possible to go to the opera, and there are people who make every effort to pay as much as possible to go to the opera.
This is not a minor issue: an authentic rule of law is verified precisely in the dignified treatment that all people deserve, especially the poorest and most marginalized. The true common good is promoted when society and government, with creativity and strict respect for the rights of all — as I have affirmed on numerous occasions — welcomes, protects, promotes and integrates the most fragile, unprotected and vulnerable. This does not impede the development of a policy that regulates orderly and legal migration. However, this development cannot come about through the privilege of some and the sacrifice of others. What is built on the basis of force, and not on the truth about the equal dignity of every human being, begins badly and will end badly.
.....
The human person is a subject with dignity who, through the constitutive relationship with all, especially with the poorest, can gradually mature in his identity and vocation.
(bold: identical ES/EN/IT)
https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/letters/2025/documents/20250210-lettera-vescovi-usa.html
I only joke about going completely mad because it seems the completely rational thing to do before going completely mad.
The clean air in February (rare in the Balkans) and the quiet kitchen are the two positive aspects of the current place. Slogging through, showering and laundering after each journey to the grocery, etc. But the quiet kitchen table is not to be wasted. If you don't run while you have the light, there's not really a point to pressing on.
I suppose if I had gone into this visit as a sort of voyage into the badlands, I might have bought some khakis and wandered the city, but having made an initial exploration or two, and observing how much work there is to be done, the wiser course seems to be following the scent of the lamp.
I did explore a bit, and I'll likely explore a bit more, but the work that is to be done at the table is the prevailing consideration.
Strongly dislike working on the Winbook model. I had a good system with the Chromebooks, which are very secure, and can be configured for decent privacy, but then had to make the shift (which actually involved a time of saving up during a low-revenue stretch) to the fenestrated models for extrinsic reasons.
It's no exaggeration to call it a panopticon; in default configurations, any marketer with sufficient interest could determine the average person's recent reading, precise location, long-range work, and social network. And that's before even thinking about the black-hat hacking.
Future ages will likely understand that we made these machines in order for humans to do what they do more effectively. They might be at a loss, though, wondering why we thought that was necessarily a good thing.
Perhaps the problem of the idealist understanding of the corporate form (on the model of Hegel's philosophy of law -- an idealist rather than rather than a social-science empirical study) is presented when a society exists primarily to preserve the industrial forms, along with the involvement of a healthy preponderance of the population (and the prosperity of this healthy preponderance). This is a different form of social organization, compared to the types of societies that prevailed when basic questions about the form of civilization in the West were answered. At minimum, these questions would need new answers, if the practice of thinking about what we do is to continue to guide life. (Or perhaps be returned after a century or two of pragmatic exile.)
Is the corporate form a modification of the old sovereignty based on the common good? Historically, this goes from the monopolies to the franchises, to the corporate structures that ruled entire colonial states. Perhaps. But the theory of deputed powers by the chartering sovereign appears to have been rejected over the last several decades. "Any lawful purpose" has become a bit of a fig leaf for spontaneously-arising forms of collaboration accomplishing much of the work of the society.
The reason for a Hegelian reading is on the analogy of his explanation of the building of a cloister, in the PR. One explanation could come from an empirical explanation, that a certain society needed a place of repose; another comes from the ideas, that there is something in the human spirit which seeks this form of existence. Over the last two centuries industries have transformed the planet, multiplied the population, and solved many problems. The philosophers in the West adopted a pragmatic approach, suggesting that the event would reveal the truth, and largely, this allowed industrial forms to flourish. (The East had a more sociologically-inflected form of industrialization.)
But now, having accomplished much at great cost, both human and environmental, perhaps it's time to explain what it was that arose in humans during this time. If only not to worship the work of our hands.
Perhaps.
The excitable young sidekick and his team of engineers have gained access to the government computer systems. The new leader attends a glitzy sports event and casts shade on the reigning pop diva, whose heartland, blue-collar team loses the game. It does feel a bit like ten minutes into a Bond film.
Executive branch announces that they intend to stop minting the Lincoln effigies. Interesting. Coinage is the quintessential act of the sovereign; practically the only interesting aspect of the UK privy council minutes. Haven't looked at it, but I can't imagine that the president would have that authority. So perhaps the interesting thing is that it's a logical point, like not printing the period on the end of the NYT motto, but one that would clearly contravene basic constitutional principles.
Also a bit off that the news is being dominated by these half-baked notions. Half-baked bread can be unhealthy. If they actually did the time-and-motion studies and thought about them for a bit, some interesting change might be possible.
Peculiar aside in Wilfrid Sellars' fourth Dewey lecture: discussing distributive form of an abstract entity as simply a collection of the relevant tokens (descriptors?) exhibited by the objects within that class. Offhand, perhaps joking, mention that there is a "Middle Eastern" version that can't be uttered.
In this way of thinking about it (my parsing here, not Sellars), the name of the abstract entity that breathed o'er Eden would then be a novel expression standing for a certain set of tokens or descriptors common to everything in existence? #notexpert #musing
Interesting piece on St. Francis of Assisi in the TLS. Takes the intuitive view that deliberate poverty is in essence anticapitalist. But these orders became the institutional correlates of reformation. And this naturalistic individualism which was taken to greater extents to the north became one of the bases of reformation and the first stirrings of private industry. Even in the late middle ages, the OP and the OFM were associated with the global church as against the church of the native place. The OP tended to adopt saintly patrons associated with global trade and the episcopy, while the OFM would sometimes advocate the cults of the (then) new order of indigenous saints, furthering the sense of naturalistic individualism, as against the longstanding cults of the place, the latter frequently with ancient pagan overtones.
Characteristic of one of the Weekly Readers to use the present superficial divisions to explain all things, and thereby introduce the world to more things, but, having been introduced to more things, these superficial divisions seem less and less tenable. At a certain point, perhaps contra naturalistic individualism, it is error to think as a child thinks.