At 19:56 03/06/2003 -0400, you wrote:
Why not consider starting from the side that opens opportunities for a creative human personal and social world, rather than from the side that closes down all opportunities?
As Heraclitus said some 2500 years ago:
So great is the extent of soul, that you will not find its boundary anywhere.
Of course, the Greek word for "soul" is psyche and this was also their word for butterfly.
I don't think Heraclitus was talking here about butterflies.
Although I do think one of his aphorisms has more "concrete" relevance. Heraclitus said that a dry soul is best -- and he died of diarrhea.
> It's a wonderfully intuitive statement but I'm not
sure that it takes us very far. Mind you, the Greeks were not so flippety-jippety as this jaunty philosophical statement might indicate. They were also inventing steam engines in those days . . . and flame throwers, so help us. Aristotle was even cottoning on to the possibility of automation: “masters would not need slaves” . . . “each [inanimate] instrument could do its own work . . . as if a shuttle should weave of itself.” (Aristotle: /Politics/)
If only the Greeks had consulted with Confucius and his social-engineering pals who were just round the corner, then much of history might have been short-circuited, the Chinese being a great deal more systematic at civilisation than the Greeks.
Interesting. Would that Alexander *had* reached to The Celestial City in The Middle Kingdom (Peiking)! Would that a Xerox copy of all the documents in The Alexandrian Library had arrived with him!
*However*, long before Bernard Lewis asked "What went wrong?" anent Islam, Joseph Needham spent a long lifetime asking: "What went wrong?" (OK -- more accurately: "What failed to get started?") in China.
Needham's conclusion, which he did not like, was that Europe "took off" into modernity whereas China stagnated because Europe had capitalism and China didn't.
The question also arises why the Hellenistic world did not become modern?
I think Elizabeth Eisenstein makes a compelling case for the key role of "The Printing Press as an Agent of Change" (although the Chinese proved of print technology what the NRA says of guns: People make progress with printing presses, not printing presses make progress).
But, who knows? Might a synergy between China and Hellas have enabled *progress* in the modern sense to "take off" -- even without uniform printed editions? Or might a Sino-Hellenic Gutenberg have appeared ca. 50 BCE, and have set the classical world on the road to Universalizing culture? (Might one fringe benefit of this have been to pre-clude, i.e., cut off before it got started --- the cancerous growth of Christianity?)
I have copied a sad but to me evocative quote from Ivan Morris's _The World of the Shining Prince_ (Genji):
http://www.users.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/essays.html#genji
Alas, it didn't happen. (And persons finding "precursors" who had no lasting effects won't change anything substantive, e.g., the Chinese discovered the New World before Columbus, etc. -- more "red herrings" to distract from substantive issues, as if people weren't more than thoroughly distracted already....)
Why didn't China "take off"? (Maybe they had too much leisure?)
\brad mccormick
> The Greeks are good at
starting things like the Olympic Games but not following-through. Mind you, Alexander the Great tried to get to China but, like the Americans, got stuck in Afghanistan. Compared with the latter, though, Alexander was a great deal more constructive and built a few new cities while he was there. He and his soldiers are still fondly remembered (unlike you-know-who will be) especially by some of those young cherubinic-looking Afghanis who insist on retaining genes for blue eyes. However, today, after the recent American visitation which changed the shape of a few of its mountains but little else, the women still wear their veils and are as subjugated as ever, Kabul university is still in ruins, the warlords are far richer than ever before ('cos more poppies are grown for an ever-efficient drugs market in the west) and the only security in the country is within a moving circle of about 500 yards radius around the president and his American security guards.[snip]
I have read that Iraqi women are worried that the demise of Saddam Hussein's regime may mean they will be oppressed far worse than before -- like women in other MidEast countries. (What other MidEast country has a Lady Germwarfare?, e.g.)
\brad mccormick
--
Let your light so shine before men,
that they may see your good works.... (Matt 5:16)Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)
<![%THINK;[SGML+APL]]> Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] ----------------------------------------------------------------- Visit my website ==> http://www.users.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
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