the unique individual

“But the man’s uniquely evil, isn’t he?”

---Tony Blair.

||

Repeat after me: we're all individuals now.

|||

From Wendell Berry:

To take great and present delight in the modest good that was at hand.

To be on the move, "mobile", is to be permanently searching for something, to be constantly dissatisfied with what one has, where one is. Local pleasures, local associations, actual experience-as opposed to a remote and abstract 'good'. [In academia you will always hear people talk about 'the good', 'the other' and so on].

An authentic economy would imply a different relation to nature, to one another, to time.

It is by imagination that knowledge is carried to the heart. The faculties of the mind-reason, memory, feeling, intuition, imagination, and the rest-are not distinct from one another...But the human mind in its wholeness, even in its instances of greatest genius, is irremediably limited. Its several faculties, when we try to use them separately or specialize them, are even more limited.

[See Macintyre on 'compartmentalization'. We're pulled in different directions. On the one hand we recognize the appeal of a liberal position that partitions the world into distinct realms, 'spheres of justice', each with their own set of norms, evaluative standards, appropriate motivations, ideas of excellence, etc. To think otherwise is to invite claims of totalitarianism. Under the latter all differences-between the private and the public, the sacred and the  mundane, the market and the state, are abolished. A single, over-arching principle guides all and that view sits uneasily with our idea of the human condition being fundamentally conflictual in nature as well as with our political ideals (Isaiah Berlin).

On the other hand, we are drawn to continuity and unity, to narratives and coherence, trying to find the thread to our lives through all the vacillations. We want to look back-but not just look back-and picture a good life. There is a sense in which too much fragmentation dissolves into meaninglessness. [a broken circle]].

Further, we reason with other people. There is no such thing as the single reasoner. We are, therefore...The commons of the mind [A. Baier].


We cannot know the whole truth but we can know what is true.

The stickers, who love the life they have made and the place they have made it in.

Of course, how many of us make a life for themselves today?

To have beautiful buildings people must obviously want them to be beautiful and know how to make them beautiful...and love the places in which they are built.

What is our sense of beauty today? To the extent that it is detachable, reproducible, what connection does it have to a specific place and time?

Knowledge without affection leads us astray every time...The factual knowledge, in which we seem more and more to be placing our trust, leads only to the hope of the discovery, endlessly deferrable, of an ultimate fact or smallest particle, that at last will explain everything.

The human mind takes apart with its analytical habits of reasoning but the human heart puts things together because it loves them.