Lughnasa Moon of the First Harvests
A slower day today. We both needed a little less activity. Nice to be able to ratchet back and not worry about it.
Did spend an hour plugging the new credit card number into those accounts that need it. Our card got stolen by someone who bought a hotel room and flowers. A romantic thief. A bit of a hassle but not too bad.
I’ve also been reading Jean Jacque Rousseau for the Modern and the Post Modern MOOC. Kant, too. Kant’s essay What is Enlightenment began the course. It contains his Dare to know idea. That is, trust your own reason and act on it.
The two Rousseau essays are very interesting, one on the arts and sciences which I plan to give more time here at some point, argues that the arts and sciences represent culture at its most decadent, at its furthest remove from the state of nature. It’s a very interesting argument.
The second, which I’m reading right now is on the origin of inequality. Here a couple of quotes from it:
Nature speaks to all animals, and beasts obey her voice. Man feels the same impression, but he at the same time perceives that he is free to resist or to acquiesce; and it is in the consciousness of this liberty, that the spirituality of his soul chiefly appears…
(Henri not Jacques)
It is by the activity of our passions, that our reason improves…and it is impossible to conceive why a man exempt from fears and desires should take the trouble to reason.
The first language of man…was the cry of nature.
…as to adjectives, great difficulties must have attended the development of the idea that represents them, since every adjective is an abstract word, and abstraction is an unnatural and very painful operation.
