Arguments matter because we live an embedded life in which reality determines moral life, and moral life determines reality. In other words, is it not only true but also legitimate?
Tag: Hannah Arendt
If common sense and superstition are two extremes on a knowledge spectrum, then a hard distinction contained in the folkish idea of speakers and doers is cozying up to superstition.
"...to be educated is not to be in control or to master chance, it is to become more authentically who you are."
As we saw from Part 1 in this series of posts (which I encourage you to read before going on), our current systems of knowledge and power are not so much concerned with the authentic identity of concrete persons (you and I). Those systems are primarily concerned with objects of study including such commonplace perspectives … Continue reading Authenticity Under Threat, Part 2: Alienation or Being Lost in Mass Society
Personally, I am informed by both a Continental-Philosophical tradition and a communitarian Christian religious background that criticized Adam Smith as hostile to charity and a theoretical bastion of “self-interest”; it would not be a stretch to say that both modern economics and its critics have failed to connect Smith’s moral anthropology to his more famous economic theory.
"...it is physically impossible to pick oneself up by one’s own bootstraps..."
The disappearance of the unique individual corresponds to the loss of freedom - and the avatar is its technique.
Arendt invokes the realm of privacy, which is the realm of persons who are significant others to the individual. These significant others are the context for the emergence of an individual. In other words, the realm of privacy includes our social sphere where each of those significant others has a reciprocal relationship with each other. Not only do these significant others constitute our identity as individuals, but each individual also has some responsibility to act as a significant other to the other members. I would call this “community”.
"...with the surprising eradication of relatively unconscious structures that housed and empowered a certain inspiring model of human flourishing, we may want to reconsider how we have housed and empowered human flourishing."
Natality is the condition for continued human existence, it is the miracle of birth, it is the new beginning inherent in each birth that makes action possible, it is spontaneous and it is unpredictable.
Raymond Klassen - Ideals and Identities 