Quotes : General + Governance
Making a mention of these quotes here doesn’t mean that i agree with all of what they say or mean. Albeit that they offer a mechanism or filter to see how different thinkers have viewed the world differently over time. They also serve for looking at history of various ideas and its critique.
GOVERNANCE/POLITICAL ORDER RELATED
Republics are’ created by the virtue, public spirit, and intelligence of the citizens. They fall, when the wise are banished from the public councils, because they dare to be honest, and the profligate are rewarded, because they flatter the people, in order to betray them. - American Jurist, Joseph Story
If men never disagreed about the ends of life, if our ancestors had remained undisturbed in the Garden of Eden, the studies to which the Chichele Chair of Social and Political Theory is dedicated could scarcely have been conceived. For these studies spring from, and thrive on, discord. Someone may question this on the ground that even in a society of saintly anarchists, where no conflicts about ultimate purpose can take place, political problems, for example constitutional or legislative issues, might still arise. But this objection rests on a mistake. Where ends are agreed, the only questions left are those of means, and these are not political but technical, that is to say, capable of being settled by experts or machines like arguments between engineers or doctors. That is why those who put their faith in some immense, world-transforming phenomenon, like the final triumph of reason or the proletarian revolution, must believe that all political and moral problems can thereby be turned into technological ones. That is the meaning of Saint-Simon's famous phrase about `replacing the government of persons by the administration of things', and the Marxist prophecies about the withering away of the state and the beginning of the true history of humanity. This outlook is called utopian by those for whom speculation about this condition of perfect social harmony is the play of idle fancy. Nevertheless, a visitor from Mars to any British--or American-- university today might perhaps be forgiven if he sustained the impression that its members lived in something very like this innocent and idyllic state, for all the serious attention that is paid to fundamental problems of politics by professional philosophers.-Isaiah Berlin, Two Concepts of Liberty
GENERAL QUOTES
The belief systems of early societies are thus characterized by “poetic metaphysics” which “seeks its proofs not in the external world but within the modifications of the mind of him who meditates it” (“Poetic Wisdom,” §374, p.116), and “poetic logic,” through which the creations of this metaphysics are signified. Metaphysics of this sort is “not rational and abstract like that of learned men now,” Vico emphasizes, “but felt and imagined [by men] without power of ratiocination...This metaphysics was their poetry, a faculty born with them...born of their ignorance of causes, for ignorance, the mother of wonder, made everything wonderful to men who were ignorant of everything” (“Poetic Wisdom,” §375, p.116)-https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/vico/
In De nostri temporis studiorum ratione, for example, Vico takes up the theme of modernity and raises the question of “which study method is finer or better, ours or the Ancients?” and illustrates “by examples the advantages and drawbacks of the respective methods.”[4] Vico observes that the Moderns are equipped with the “instruments” of “philosophical ‘critique’” and “analytic geometry” (especially in the form of Cartesian logic) (DN, 7–9), and that these open realms of natural scientific inquiry (chemistry, pharmacology, astronomy, geographical exploration, and mechanics) and artistic production (realism in poetry, oratory, and sculpture) which were unknown and unavailable to the Ancients (DN, 11–12). Although these bring significant benefits, Vico argues, modern education suffers unnecessarily from ignoring the ars topica (art of topics) which encourage the use of imagination and memory in organizing speech into eloquent persuasion. The result, Vico argues, is an undue attention to the “geometrical method” modeled on the discipline of physics (DN, 21ff.), and an emphasis on abstract philosophical criticism over poetry. This undermines the importance of exposition, persuasion, and pleasure in learning; it “benumbs...[the] imagination and stupefies...[the] memory” (DN, 42), both of which are central to learning, complex reasoning, and the discovery of truth. -https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/vico/
Vico traces the consequences of his insight that language can be treated as a source of historical knowledge. Many words of the Latin language, Vico observes, appear to be “derived from some inward learning rather than from the vernacular usage of the people.”[6] Treated as a repository of the past, Latin might be investigated as a way of “seek[ing] out the ancient wisdom of the Italians from the very wisdom of their words.”(DA, 40)- https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/vico/
“Life on earth is more like a verb. It repairs, maintains, re-creates, and outdoes itself.” Lynn Margulis
“The fabrics of interaction are going to be torn and they’re going to mend. And after all, we are only a model of what we are trying to talk about, and it would be absolute nonsense to try to construct that model as though it did not contain the tearings of fabric.” — Gregory Bateson
Systems Thinking, West Churchman: The systems approach begins when first you see the world through the eyes of another.
Heinz von Foerster once said – You cannot hold a system responsible for anything – you cannot shake its hand, ask it to justify its actions – and you cannot enter into a dialogue with it; whereas I can speak with another self, a you!
In relation to a movie star who does not even know some average schlub (a talentless, unattractive, or boorish person.) exists, that schlub can experience only emulation (this is what Girard calls “external mediation”). Meaning that the schlub will try to imitate the movie star. But in relation to a fellow schlub (talentless person) down the street (a “neighbor” in the Girardian-Biblical sense), emulation is a much more intimate affair (“internal mediation”, Girard calls it), which necessarily carries with it a simultaneous negative charge of desire to annihilate the person we seek to resemble. Among neighbors, the object of desire itself is eventually forgotten in the course of this process, and at the end the competitors stand in relation to one another as “doubles”: neither recalls what that thing is that the other had and that he or she wanted, and each has become undifferentiable from the other.- Rene Girard
Culture belongs to the imagination; to judge it rationally is to misunderstand its function- G. Willow Wilson
He finds that the moral difficulty of confronting evil is not just a matter of summoning virtues of courage and resolve to do what clearly needs to be done or willingly absorbing the high costs of moral action. There is a deeper problem for those trying to act well. It is the problem that “[t]he great masquerade of evil has played havoc with all our ethical concepts” (2). Evil that is widespread, systematic, and powerful can undermine not just our strength of will but also our moral understanding- About German scholar, theologian, and pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer by Kyla Ebels-Duggan (around world war 2)
Bernard Williams recognized a related possibility when he wrote that “there are certain situations so monstrous that the idea that the processes of moral rationality could yield an answer in them is insane”
...hand in glove there is another tension that i understand and its the tension between book learning and practical experience. And its a very interesting tension to me. And again, it goes way back in our history. Part of what Hofstede chronicles is the way the country shifts over time from more and more weight and credibility given to practical experience, the practical man, the wisdom gained through living versus the certification of schools, bookwork, intellectual endeavor,...we have moved in the 21st Century and become a culture of certification....what i strive for in my own work is how to blend these strands...i am very uncomfortable with binaries, simple dichotomies- Mike Rose, Research Professor of Social Research Methodology
“That the rules of morality are not the conclusion of our reasons”- David Hume
Loss of faith in a given religion does not by any means imply the eradication of the religious instincts. It merely means that the instinct temporarily repressed will seek an object elsewhere - Robert Charles Zaehner (1913–1974)
What we see in America, I think, is a government becoming much more powerful; but part of government being the courts, supposedly applying rules to limit government but in fact enhance the power of courts” - Robert Book, Professor of Law, Yale University -1978
“It takes a good deal of sophistication and poise to accept a system which is full of apparent paradoxes” - Leo Rosten
“it is human ideas which govern the development of human affairs.” - Hayek, Studies on the Abuse and Decline of Reason
"Perceptual inattention to the specific functions comprising inquiry, led realists and idealists alike to formulate accounts of knowledge that project the products of extensive abstraction back onto experience”- David L. Hildebrand
In his introduction to The Idea of Justice, Nobel Laurate Amartya Sen states that "the strong perception of manifest injustice applies to adult human beings as well (as children). What moves us, reasonably enough, is not the realization that the world falls short of being completely just – which few of us expect – but that there are clearly remediable injustices around us which we want to eliminate."
“Given the sometimes vast number of elements whose interactions create social structures and institutions, the social scientist will rarely be able to predict precise outcomes: one can accurately describe how a footpath will form, but one typically will not be able to predict its exact position. This leads him to distinguish between explanations that allow predictions and those that only can describe the principle by which a phenomenon is produced. Because of the nature of our materials, ‘explanations of the principle’ and ‘pattern predictions’ are often the best we can do in the social sciences.” Hayek, Studies on the Abuse and Decline of Reason
“By taking such concepts out of their established patterns and rearranging them in “constellations” around a specific subject matter, philosophy can unlock some of the historical dynamic hidden within objects whose identity exceeds the classifications imposed upon them.” - Adorno, Negative Dialectic, 1966
“How can this be, the authors ask. How can the progress of modern science and medicine and industry promise to liberate people from ignorance, disease, and brutal, mind-numbing work, yet help create a world where people willingly swallow fascist ideology, knowingly practice deliberate genocide, and energetically develop lethal weapons of mass destruction? Reason, they answer, has become irrational.” - Adorno & Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 1947
“Thus we find in apparent competition different conceptions of post-metaphysical philosophy: the projects of experiential meaning determination, of formal rational reconstruction, and of naturalistic explications of leading theoretical and methodological notions. Prominent objects of criticism to these include the verificationist theory of meaning and its claimed anti-metaphysical and non-cognitivist consequences as well as its own significance; the reductionism in phenomenalist or physicalist guises that appeared to attend the Circle’s attempted operationalisation of the logical atomism of Russell and Wittgenstein; and the Circle’s alleged scientism in general and their formalist and a-historical conception of scientific cognition in particular. .” - Stanford Philosophy on competing positions within the 1920s-30s Vienna Circle
Epistemology largely came to the fore in philosophy during the early modern period, which historians of philosophy traditionally divide up into a dispute between empiricists (including John Locke, David Hume, and George Berkeley) and rationalists (including René Descartes, Baruch Spinoza, and Gottfried Leibniz). The debate between them has often been framed using the question of whether knowledge comes primarily from sensory experience (empiricism), or whether a significant portion of our knowledge is derived entirely from our faculty of reason (rationalism). According to some scholars, this dispute was resolved in the late 18th century by Immanuel Kant, whose transcendental idealism famously made room for the view that "though all our knowledge begins with experience, it by no means follows that all [knowledge] arises out of experience". While the 19th century saw a decline in interest in epistemological issues, it came back to the forefront with the Vienna Circle and the development of analytic philosophy. - Wikipedia
“Thus we find him discussing there the differences between the French and the Scottish enlightenment; the importance of limiting the coercive power of the state to only those circumstances in which it is indispensable for reducing coercion by others; the limits of human knowledge and its implication that one should use general rules and abstract principles in designing a suitable legal framework; the tension that exists between preserving individual freedom within a market order and achieving distributive justice; and the importance for the smooth functioning of society of individuals submitting to moral rules and conventions that may appear to them unintelligible and irrational”. Hayek. Studies on the Abuse and Decline of Reason (The Collected Works of F.A. Hayek)
Principles are a means to prevent clashes between conflicting aims and not a set of fixed ends. Lord Acton pointed out long ago: “Whenever a single definite object is made the supreme end of the State, be it the advantage of a class, the safety or the power of the country, the greatest happiness of the greatest number, or the support of any speculative idea, the State becomes for the time inevitably absolute”.