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For Mill, it is the healthy diversity of purposes and destinies that makes for a happy society and a truly free society. The purpose behind individual liberty is not allowing people to do whatever they want, it is allowing people to do what his father had never permitted him: to discover in their own way what truly fulfills them. This, Mill argued, is the essence of true freedom.37
Allowing men and women to say what they believe, Mill argues, and publish what they think is true promotes the spread of new discoveries and truths while pushing out the false and misleading. This is what is sometimes referred to (somewhat misleadingly) as “the marketplace of ideas.” Mill’s analysis owed less to economics than it did to the Romantics. Freedom of speech adds to the creative intensity of life. The free exchange of ideas will prevent a culture from growing stale and rigid.
Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy (virtually a point-by-point refutation of the first chapter of On Liberty)
Are human beings happiest when they are left alone or when they submit to an order greater than themselves?47 As the nineteenth century wore on, the heirs to Aristotle and the Enlightenment became the staunchest defenders of liberty, while the partisans of Plato were increasingly attracted to the authority side of the barricades.
the Iroquois’s wigwam
Hmm.... OK, an error of fact here. Are there others?
As with Plato, Hegel taught that the key to human happiness was belonging to an entity larger than ourselves. For Hegel and the Hegelian, the desire of each person to lead his or her life as he or she pleases—the Lockean individual of the Enlightenment—was as morally absurd as it was physically impossible. We are all inevitably parts of larger and larger wholes, Hegel explained, both organically (the individual and his family belong to a village or town; that local community is part of the nation; and so on) and over time, as all things become integrated into the ultimate reality of the
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For Nietzsche, the most important of the pre-Socratics was Heraclitus.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra is a parable of the end of modern civilization. The main character, the prophet Zarathustra, has entirely reconciled himself to this bleak reality and the fact that in a world of eternal recurrence, the only choices that matter are the ones we make for ourselves. This realization transforms him into a new kind of human being, the new man, the Übermensch, or Overman. He is a being beyond good and evil, because “the greatest evil is necessary for the Overman.”15 He is a being freed at last from Plato and Aristotle and the chains of Western rationalism. He is a being
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How “flat earthers” (or “global warming deniers”) become repellent to our common sense has little to do with objective evidence, Peirce realized. It has everything to do, however, with how we weigh doubt in
the balance of outcomes. The more vital the consequences, the less tolerant we are of doubt and the more certain of our judgment. Yet doubt, Peirce pointed out, is the starting point for acquiring all certain knowledge. What Peter Abelard had believed about logic and theology—“Through doubting we come to understand”—Peirce insisted was the basic rule for modern science as well. It is the desire to clear away doubt that leads to genuine empirical investigation and to arriving at the truth. But with it comes a realization that some of “our indubitable beliefs may be proved false.”26
Our rational nature is geared toward energeia, creative engagement in the world as individuals, not cogs in the collectivity.
too much Plato brings a rigid dogmatism and an elitist arrogance—which, as Karl Popper pointed out and as the world saw in the age of Hitler and Stalin and Mao, easily slides into totalitarianism.
Those waiting for the modern technological global system to collapse from its own weight back to “sustainability” are bound to be disappointed.
