Ideals
"Idealism, that gaudy coloring matter of passion, fades when it is brought beneath the trenchant white light of knowledge. Ideals, like mountains, are best at a distance."
--Ellen Glasgow
I think that this aphorism by Ms. Glasgow is one of the pithiest and most important I have come across. I believe it elucidates the Socratic and Aristotelian dictums that "Reality Exists", the check on unfettered idealism.
It was the idealism of Lenin and Stalin that created the Soviet Union, that of Mao that created communist China. The results of those two developments produced the slaughter of estimates of one-hundred million innocent people.
The opposite of unbridled idealism is the proposition that there are no final solutions, only trade-offs, i.e. you get something for giving something else up.
Or, as James Madison wrote in Federalist 41: "...cool and candid people will at once reflect that the purest of human blessings must have a portion of alloy in them; that the choice must always be made, if not of the lesser evil, at least of the GREATER, not the PERFECT, good.
--Ellen Glasgow
I think that this aphorism by Ms. Glasgow is one of the pithiest and most important I have come across. I believe it elucidates the Socratic and Aristotelian dictums that "Reality Exists", the check on unfettered idealism.
It was the idealism of Lenin and Stalin that created the Soviet Union, that of Mao that created communist China. The results of those two developments produced the slaughter of estimates of one-hundred million innocent people.
The opposite of unbridled idealism is the proposition that there are no final solutions, only trade-offs, i.e. you get something for giving something else up.
Or, as James Madison wrote in Federalist 41: "...cool and candid people will at once reflect that the purest of human blessings must have a portion of alloy in them; that the choice must always be made, if not of the lesser evil, at least of the GREATER, not the PERFECT, good.
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