jhameia: ME! (Under Control)
[personal profile] jhameia
This will be an update as I read this damn thing.

Suffice to say, I'm becoming fast annoyed at this outlook on life. A footnote says that freedom was understood to consiste of a) status, b) personal inviolability, c) freedom of economic activity, d)right of unrestricted movement. As a result, the slave is completely out, a craftsman isn't even mentioned because the craftsman is limited by his compulsion to work, and a merchant is out because os his compulsion to keep accumulating shit. This means the only people who're actually free are those who freely i) enjoy a life of consuming the beautiful, ii) devote their life to the polis (politics?) which produces beautiful deeds, and iii) devotes their lives to thinking about eternal, beautiful thing (good because it doesn't produce or affect current beautiful things).

Firstly, this devalues pretty much 90% of the human population who support that last 10%, ON THEIR BACKS. I can't believe how petty and ignorant this is. And this is Aristotle! I can't believe that a thinking philosopher would be so arrogant to believe that he is better than 90% of the population simply because he has leisure time to sit and think - there is a reason why he had no economic limits, and the reason was because of the 90% of people then! This harkens back to both Marilyn French and the current book I'm reading ("When God Was A Woman") on why men are so powerful: because women were too busy working in the domestic space to notice men were getting big-headed about their free time and what exactly the free time meant. I don't know how more time spent in public space means greater autonomy and thus superiority, but that's pretty fucked.

This is some serious being-out-of-touch with the common man here. Just because you've got time and inclination to go vote for (and participate in the politics of) how to rule everybody else doesn't make you better.

Even with the disappearance of the city-state, action wasn't becoming valued, but contemplation was seen as the ideal "free" way of life. The ideal of Christians (and many other religions too) that contemplation is superior to action is a move to be free from worldliness, but it doesn't exclude it to a small ruling elite; religion made it a right of all people. Why? Well, it's just easier to keep people in line if you promise them something beyond death, so they shouldn't complain in this life.

I'm actually rather irked by the idea that contemplation > action. It's true that if a person doesn't contemplate, their actions won't really have much thought nor quality behind them. But to think without acting is impotent and equally as worthless. You can have all the opinions you want, but you better stand up for what you believe.

Okay, here's a direct statement:
JUst as war takes place for the sake pf peace, thus every kind of activity ... must culminate in the absolute quiet of contemplation.
That is. Wow. A TERRIBLE ANALOGY.

Here's a paraphrase of a statement:
The reason why contemplation > activity is because anything a human does / produces could never measure up to the perfection of the cosmos, which govern themselves. This perfection, however, is visible only when the human mind is completely quiet and contemplative.

January 2025

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