Ray E. Harrell wrote:
>
> Jay,
>
> Coming from a former resources rich state. The state of Oklahoma which had the
> richest lead and zinc deposits in the world as well as being the "Oil Capital of
> the World" all now depleted, I can share that your predictions are not only
> logical but probable.
[snip]
Perhaps this is as good a place as any to clarify something
about some of my postings that may not have been obvious due
to my having other "fish to fry": I think Jay's disgnoses and
progmoses of waht's likely to happen in our world are probably
mostly pretty probable. My disagreement with his postings
is when he gets into the man-is-an-animal *metaphysics*.
Perhaps, as Hannah Arendt said the classical Greeks believed,
some instances of the biological species "homo sapiens"
are indeed on the other side of that line which divides the human
from the less-than-human. But that does not mean that
some persons at some times have not crossed over the line.
I continue to urge everyone to study the work of Edmund
Husserl and his feoolw workers in "phenomenology". I am
currently reading a book which I cannot imagine would
not pique the curiosity of any scientifically minded
person: Enzo Paci's _The Function of the Sciences and the
Meaning of Man_ (Northestern Univ. Press, 1972). Will
phenomenology "save mankind"? Possible, but not likely.
Could it make the time which remains to us who still
are alive richer, more rewarding, and, if the end comes,
less terrible? *That* I believe is quite possible. My
disagreement with Jay's postings is simply with their
feeding into the ideology which makes persons think they are
less than they can be and thereby helps them to become
that less (if you don't like Husserl, Gregory Bateson,
one of the fathers of ecology, etc. said the same thing).
> But remember that fewer people worry about AIDs than do Eboli, even though it is
> all the way across the globe and isolated in the jungle, and no one wants to
> think that all of those cute little mice might make them spit up blood sooner
> either.
[snip]
This image is beautiful. I believe there has been
at least one incident of a person
being killed by mouse-bourne disease, on
Long Island (the home of Levittown and therefore
the strategic heart of America).
>
> Do you think we could come up with some kind of syndrome that connects all of
> these massive denials? How about it Brad?
You bet! Read Paci. Read Castoriadis. Read Frederisk Leboyer's _Birth
Without Violence_ (one can read this book in an hour, even if you read
slow...). Read Edward Hall. See the movie: "Mon Oncle d'Amerique".
The problem is simply that children are reared in pre-reflective
ethnicities, in which meaning-structures evolved non-meaningfully
(yup! Darwin in the soul!). What is necessary is to subject
*everything*, not once, but ever again, to critique in all the
dimensions of it was can ferret out, to transform the social
milieu into a genuinely (i.e., self-accountably) *human* world,
i.e., to transform "human hature" into humanity (period!).
This is nothing new. Nietzsche said: Man is a thing to be
overcome. Don't like that putative proto-Fascist? Then
try William Ellery Channing, the text of whose Baltimore
Sermon of 1819 was:
Prove all things; hold fast that which is good.
(1 Thes v:21)
A 12 step program maybe?
[snip]
Why not? (Ready for this politically incorrect
exhortation:) Ethnics anonymous! Let us all
learn to give up our ethnicities and identify
all and only with *Universal Culture* (self-
critical self-accountability in all things, and *especially*,
in childrearing and, second, in the workplace).
> >
> > What can be done to avoid the "crash"? Under Capitalism -- one dollar, one
> > vote -- nothing.
"Representative democracy", a Castoriadis says,
is a contradiction in terms: representation is
the construction of a representing class in
contradistinction to the represented class.
The reason the classical Greek polis was a
democracy is because there were no re-presentatives,
but rather everyone was present as a peer.
> >
> > Jay
What does it mean?
Creon (in Sophocles' Antigone):
All understood, too late.
On the other hand, I remember something
the psychoanalyst Silvano Arieti said to me while
(unknown to me) he was dying of leukemia:
While there is life there is hope.
\brad mccormick
--
Mankind is not the master of all the stuff that exists, but
Everyman (woman, child) is a judge of the world.
Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua, NY 10514-3403 USA
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