For background, I’ll make these three claims without trying to justify them: Human beings don’t come together just to be together or for any other sentimental reason; human beings come together to do things and because they are dependent upon each other, perhaps as a result of doing things together. Most moral behavior is learned … [Read more…]
I’m reading The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution by Walter Isaacson and find it interesting that Isaacson sees matters in terms of individual effort vs collaboration, parallel to my efforts to deal with human being in its individual and communal forms. The research laboratories such as … [Read more…]
As I move forward on my project to make sense of human being as both individual and community, I’m reading in certain areas of mathematics (topology and differential geometry and abstract algebra and others) and also trying to keep up my readings in history and literature. The project threatens to swallow me at times, but … [Read more…]
We of the modern West can’t deal with the complexity of human communities nor with the complex world implied by our modern empirical knowledge. We can’t produce proper `global’ understandings of human being, individual and communal, nor of this world with all its realms only partly reconciled and made coherent at even the `purely physical’ … [Read more…]
Over the prolonged founding of the United States, we were bereft of the baggage of the past. In this lay our great promise. Over the prolonged founding of the United States, we were bereft of the baggage of the past. In this lay our possible madness, but so strangely decent and often gentle and kindly … [Read more…]