Long Sunday

Fichte, Philosopher of Freedom

"Mine is the first system of freedom. Just as France freed man from external shackles, so my system frees him from the fetters of things in themselves, which is to say, from those external influences with which all previous systems – including the Kantian – have more or less fettered man. Indeed, the first principle of my system presents man as an independent being." (Quoted in Editor's Introduction of J. G. Fichte Introductions to the Wissenschaftslehre and Other Writings trans. Daniel Breazeale (Hackett: Indianapolis, 1994), p. vii.

Do politics exist?

A not-so-favorable review of the Dylan movie, I'm Not There (previously discussed, and contra others).  Most provocative excerpt being this:

It was during a recreation of the London concert at which a betrayed folk fan screamed “Judas!” at Dylan that I realized the best analogy for I’m Not There is Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. Only Gibson’s film is equal in its commitment to surreal reverence and literalism. The truly unbearable aspect of the Passion was not its primeval anti-Semitism or pornographic bloodshed; it was its predictability. Despite being a story that so many know down to its barest details (in four separate versions), Gibson retold it with grinding exactitude. Even Gibson’s recourse to dead languages had no effect on the film’s sense of inevitability. The horror that dawned on me when I realized that I knew – and that everyone who had read the Gospel of Matthew (or Ginsberg’s “Howl”) knew – the Aramaic for “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (“Eli, eli, lamma sabacthani?”) was the same horror that gripped me when I realized I’m Not There couldn’t resist a recreation of the “Dylan-goes-electric” 1965 Newport folk festival, replete with the apocryphal story of Pete Seeger attempting to take an axe to the electric cords because he couldn’t hear Dylan explaining that he wasn’t going to work on Maggie’s farm anymore.

Meanwhile the real beef on Saval's part appears to be two-fold:

Favorite Epictetus moment

from Epictetus Encheiridion, #51

How long do you put off thinking yourself worthy of the best things . . . ? You have received the philosophical propositions that you ought to agree to and you have agreed to them. Then what sort of teacher are you still waiting for, that you put off improving yourself until he comes?

Popular, Responsible

Via s lot, from The Lost Art of Cooperation by Benjamin Barber:

...While Darwin famously saw evolution as an exercise in species-enhancing competition, the Russian thinker Peter Kropotkin insisted that it was an exercise in cooperation. In Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902), he argued that survival was fostered by cooperation within and among species rather than by murderous rivalries. Similar arguments can be found among evolutionary biologists and social scientists today, as Robert Wright shows in Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny (2000). The communitarian paradigm offers a portrait of humans as naturally embedded in communities. Here, the political project is one of individuation: creating artificially the conditions for personal freedom from a cooperative democratic process. In this view, democracy is not a product of freedom, freedom is a product of democracy. Democratic societies do not secure cooperation by sacrificing freedom, they create conditions for freedom by associating us in cooperative communities.

Let us apply this short lesson in political theory to the American experience. In the American ideal of “liberal democracy,” the two tendencies embodied in this term are supposed to stand in a healthy tension. The “liberal” part of our culture is individualistic and competitive, focused on private freedom and property; the “democratic” part is communitarian and cooperative, focused on public freedom (civic freedom), justice, and the common ground that makes private property possible. Today, the liberal element dominates the democratic communitarian element, upsetting the delicate balance.

Blinks

• A plug for a project several LS-friends are currently involved in: Edu-Factory.og.

• Yesterday was the 100th anniversary of Simone de Beauvoir (incidentally also the name of my new cat). Better reading than the debate over Hillary Clinton's allegedly evental tears: The Second Sex.

• OpenDemocracy needs your support, and deserves it because they consistently publish popular-yet-largely-responsible articles such as this one by Tina Beattie: "The end of postmodernism: the 'new atheists' and democracy:"

The most pressing question confronting us lies here: how to respond to the slow death of democracy. The recent confrontation between religion and science is in this context a smokescreen which is distracting us from much more urgent political and intellectual issues. It allows the secular intelligentsia to hide behind a convenient and inflated - where not fabricated - myth of religious extremism which masks from us our own complicity in the murder and mayhem by which western global supremacy and our own privileged status within that are now maintained.

To partisan or not to partisan?

Since nobody else appears to be posting...allow me to echo this somewhat nostalgic lament for passionate US electoral partisanship on the Democratic side:

Yep, I've been catching up on Digby. For more on Obama and the current political terrain kindly see this post (or any of the several hundred following).

Bore me with your grand pronouncements

We've written about politics a lot here on Long Sunday, so maybe a quick post, however reluctant, is warranted.