skip to main |
skip to sidebar
'The knowledge we deal with today is the result of history, of course. It
is, more precisely, also the result of a historical superposition of
globalization processes in which second-order
knowledge, in particular in the form of images of knowledge shaping its
societal role, has continued to accumulate in such a way that later
layers interfered with earlier ones, without, however, eradicating them
completely. Considering that bodies and images of knowledge are
intertwined in a virtually endless historical chain of processes of
reflection, local universalism has thus to be replaced by a global contextualism as a perspective from which to understand the globalization of knowledge in history.'
'All too often, when we look back in time, we discover that much of
what we thought science turned out to be myth after all. To use the word
with something like neutrality, we could say that a myth is a
structured world of perception and experience which can be observed
externally; it is an inhabited world of meaning, a system of
representations, however loosely organized. In which case, we might well
be inhabiting a myth ourselves, but because our myth appears to us to
be no more than a transparency onto the fabric of reality, we perceive
it as science rather than myth. We cannot then see it externally; our
structure of thought and the realities it perceives are connected by a
transparent filament, invisible to our own eyes. Once such a
transparency is superseded, once we can see how seemingly neutral
scientific perception was in fact implicated in a set of cultural
assumptions, structured if not necessarily contaminated by the fictions
of the time,
Instead of the group being primary, whether a family, caste or
community, the individual becomes a microcosm of the society as a
whole, with individual rights and duties. He or she becomes a legal,
political, religious and economic entity in his or her own right, not
merely insofar as he or she is a member of a wider group. This atomistic system is one where wider ties of blood and territory
are weak and integration is through money, citizenship, paper, law and
sentiment. People, in Marx’s ironic words, have been ‘set free’, not
only in relation to the market, but also in relation to God and the
State.
The formula in the political mind is simple:
creativity/wellbeing/happiness = economic success = votes. There’s a certain plodding, uncreative logic to this. False, almost Lewis
Carrollian logic, though, because there’s no evidence for any of it.
...a speaker expound the Buddha’s well-known reflection on the so-called
“second arrow.” A student had come to him with questions about pain,
meditation, suffering. The Buddha replied with a question of his own:
“When someone is struck by an arrow, is it painful?” “Yes,” said the
student. Then another question: “When this someone is struck by a second
arrow, is it painful?” “Of course it is,” said the student. Then the
Buddha said, “There is nothing you can do about the first arrow. You are
bound to encounter pain. However the second arrow is your choice. You
can choose to decline the second arrow.”
The chief difficulty Alice found at first was in managing her
flamingo: she succeeded in getting its body tucked away,
comfortably enough, under her arm, with its legs hanging down,
but generally, just as she had got its neck nicely straightened
out, and was going to give the hedgehog a blow with its head, it
WOULD twist itself round and look up in her face, with such a
puzzled expression that she could not help bursting out laughing:
and when she had got its head down, and was going to begin again,
it was very provoking to find that the hedgehog had unrolled
itself, and was in the act of crawling away: besides all this,
Historically, however, the record of philosophers as ‘public
intellectuals’ has not been a happy one, as a quick survey of the
history of philosophy might show, from the days of Plato and Aristotle
in antiquity to at least some of the public interventions of the likes
of Heidegger, Sartre and Russell nearer to our own time. For whatever
reason, historically there seems to have been no clear correlation
between philosophic wisdom and practical wisdom, nor does philosophy in
itself afford any reliable credentials for entry into public debate.
‘Another great pleasure of the people is the ringing of bells, and it is
a source of great delight to them whenever an opportunity of doing this
presents itself. I do not suppose there is a country where bell-ringing
is brought to such an art as it is here, where bells are always in
chime and in harmony…. A good bell-ringer can ring out more than a
thousand different peals and chimes … and the people are so fond of this
amusement that they form societies among themselves for carrying it
out.’
