By starting with the rationality of the subject, Aristotle establishes a point of departure for bringing rationalization to the production of the object. This reduction of social thought to political economy proceeded almost unabashedly into the late nineteenth century, clearly reflecting the debasement of all social ties to economic ones. Even before modern science denuded nature of all ethical content, the burgeoning market economy of the late Middle Ages had divested it of all sanctity. The division within the medieval guilds between wealthy members and poor ultimately dispelled all sense of solidarity that had united people beyond a commonality of craft.
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Technics does not exist in a vacuum, nor does it have an autonomous life of its own. Hellenic thought, which appropriately linked craft and art under the rubric of techné, also linked both with the value system and institutions of its society. From this standpoint, a given body of sensibilities, social relations, and political structures were no less the components of technics than the material intentions of the producer and the material needs of society.
In the abstract world of Cartesian, Lockean, and Kantian epistemology, this proposition is difficult to demonstrate. If it looks back at all to the history of mind, it does so within a context so overwhelmingly social and from historical levels so far-removed from the biological genesis of mind that it can never make contact with nature. Its very claim to “modernity” has been a systematic unravelling of the interface between nature and mind that Hellenic thought tried to establish. This interface has been replaced by an unbridgeable dualism between mentality and the external world. In Descartes, dualism occurs between soul and body; in Locke, between the perceiving senses and a perceived world; in Kant, between mind and external reality.
My efforts will succeed if they demonstrate how profoundly the curse of domination has infused almost every human endeavor since the decline of organic society. Hardly any achievement-be it institutional, technical, scientific, ideological, artistic, or the noble claims to rationality-has been spared https://hookupgenius.com/ this curse. In contrast to highly fashionable tendencies to root the origins of this curse in reason as such or in the “savage’s” attempts to “wrestle” with nature, I have sought them out in the sinister endeavor of emerging elites to place human beings and human nature in a condition of subjugation.
It lived not only on a mundane level of self-interest and material gain but also on an idealistic level of personal redemption and grace. One cannot explain the early crusades of the poor, on the one hand, and the extent to which many nobles converted to radical Anabaptist sects, on the other, without recognizing the enormous importance of the ethical sphere for people of the Middle Ages. From a theoretical viewpoint, freedom had acquired a scope and — particularly in its gnostic and late medieval forms — a degree of sophistication unprecedented in the history of ideas. The distinction between justice and freedom has yet to make its way through the maze of present-day radical ideologies; apart from a few individual theorists, the two ideals are still victims of considerable confusion. The dual functions of pleasure and asceticism — indeed, of desire and need — have yet to be clarified in contemporary radical thought. After two centuries of passive waiting, however, such miraculous notions of the Apocalypse had been worn to shreds.
This battleground was marked by several striking features that greatly influenced European struggles for freedom. Its paradisical gardens were located not only in time but also in place.[42] Consigned as they might be to the past, they nevertheless occupied a geographic area on earth. As such, they posed a constant subversive affront to the class and priestly emphasis on the supernatural with its afterlife rewards for obedience and virtue. This implicit opposition of nature to Supernature — of earthly rewards to heavenly — is crucial.
He furnished it not only with his own presence and his imaginative “license” but also with a fully equipped phalanstery and its luxurious bedrooms, arcades, greenhouses, and work places. His vehicle was not the picaresque novel of the Renaissance or the exotic dialogue of the Enlightenment, but the newspaper article, the treatise, the oral as well as written attack upon injustice, and the compelling pleas for freedom. To be sure, the contradictions in Fourier’s “Harmonian” future, which he contrasted with the degrading state of “Civilization,” are legion.
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In trying to remove the clergy from its function as humanity’s delegate to the spiritual kingdom, all the anticlerical movements of the time were striking a blow against the notion of representation itself and its denial of the individual’s competence to manage his or her spiritual affairs. That the Church’s wealth was an extraordinarily magnetic lodestone and its moral hypocrisy a source of popular fury are indubitable social facts that surfaced repeatedly. But the very lack of distinction between “freedom” and “domination” leaves organic society unguarded against hierarchy and class rule.
About 99% of the naturally occurring carbon on earth is carbon-12, and about 1% is carbon-13. Updating a home’s heating system with a Solar Assisted Heat Pump (SAHP) is another way of providing a home with hot water in a cost-effective and eco-friendly way. As these are powered by electricity, adding Solar panels to a property can help run a home’s hot water system on free, renewable energy. This tiny cabin was designed by Butler Armsden Architects and sits on a 400-acre farm in Yolo County. The main room of the cabin is elevated off the ground to enhance the view, and the cabin is supported on two large glulam beams, which means it can be moved to any location if desired. Designer Robin Falck created this Finnish micro house six years ago at the age of 18, and did it without a permit in Finland.
Heinous as my view may be to modern Freudians, it is not the discipline of work but the discipline of rule that demands the repression of internal nature. This repression then extends outward to external nature as a mere object of rule and later of exploitation. This mentality permeates our individual psyches in a cumulative form up to the present day — not merely as capitalism but as the vast history of hierarchical society from its inception. Unless we explore this history, which lives actively within us like earlier phases of our individual lives, we will never be free of its hold. We may eliminate classes and exploitation, but we will not be spared from the trammels of hierarchy and domination. We may exorcize the spirit of gain and accumulation from our psyches, but we will still be burdened by gnawing guilt, renunciation, and a subtle belief in the “vices” of sensuousness.
The Joachimite “financial” interpretation of brotherly love carried Christian eschatology beyond the confines of the Augustinian position into a distinctly secular social philosophy and movement. The social theories of Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Locke owe their secular quality to the assimilation of “other-worldliness” to “this-worldliness,” a process that begins with John of Salisbury and Joachim of Fiore. Christian social theory, particularly its radical wing, had overcome the duality between heaven and earth on which Pauline Christianity had been nourished. Once the split was transcended, heavenly questions were superseded by practical problems of law, power, authority, equality, and freedom. Once the Church itself became the plaything of the temporal powers and the papacy an instrument of Rome’s local patriciate, heaven too began to lose its hypnotic power over the human mind, and hope ceased to find refuge in the spiritual dispensation of an otherworldly King. When the Puritans of 1649 removed the head of Charles I in the name of a new religious credo, they effectively removed the head of their heavenly Father as well.
To be a free-wheeling monad is to lack, as Shepard might say, our very sense of “direction” as living beings, to be bereft of a “niche” or locus in nature and society. It leads to “freaking” society toward the market rather than adapting a generous distributive system to society. Given this orientation (or lack of it), the “realm of necessity” can indeed be rooted in stinginess-but not the “stinginess” of nature. Rather, it is rooted in the stinginess of people-more precisely, of the elites who establish social conventions. When one lives with the continual fear of being “shortchanged,” shared by all human monads, one begins to shortchange others routinely-ultimately, maliciously and with an active meanness of spirit. With this resplendent outlook, it is easy for a bourgeois monad to become a “partner” in the buyer-seller relationship and its embodiment as “contract.” A society composed of exiles is literally an exiled society-exiled from the roots of human consociation in care and nurture.
We are becoming deadened to the contradictions they pose, their relationship to each other in contemporary life and the history of ideas, and the harsh logic that must eventually assert itself when one element of these ambiguities asserts itself over the other. By contrast, the farmer earned not only the material independence requisite for a free man, but also the sense of security requisite for a free spirit. The classical mind read clientage into vocations that would surprise us today-for example, the dependence of wealthy usurers on their debtors, of traders on their buyers, of craftsmen on their customers, and of artists on their admirers.
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