It is the Stoics that showed me most clearly the wealth of material that each of us is given for production. The Stoics are rising in popularity again, and this is predictable given the failure of the cesspool of chaos being served at the trough of the local feed-the-addiction saloon that I generally call screen-time. …
Continue reading “4.15, On the world as ready production material”
An interlude. The next post (4.15) continues with the production of virtue. Here we are in the middle between old and new. That means we are simultaneously at the end of the old and at the beginning of the new. One of the predictable feelings in the middle is lostness. Far enough away from the …
In one sense there is little new under the sun. The prime matter that underlies all change is neither created nor destroyed. In it is potential. What of that potential is actualized in form is new. Newness can be taken in two ways: brand new and new to he who has never encountered before or …
Continue reading “4.13, The conversion of waste into life-sustaining good”
Homesteading is the conversion of unowned (and so unused) material to owned (and so used) property. Ownership must be accompanied by signs of use. This is gestured at in Locke’s labor theory of property by which ownership is gained through the intermixture of body and labor with unowned material. I can’t wait to get back …
As the Puritanical Libertarian frames things down here (the only place he has ever been), there is both need for and possibility of development. This development he has characterized as the production of virtue. He has warned against the expectations and predictions about the time and cost of the production of virtue given that those …
Warning: in our contemporary setting the word I am going to use has been so ill-used in so many ways that it will likely repulse. Let’s try. “Faith”. Are you still here reader? I ask you to stay. There will be no alter call. There will be no promises that everything will be ok. There …
The setting: he who has poverty of spirit desires to be more. He desires to develop. What is he? He is rational (potentially) animal (actually). But what has he found? The animality is actual and the rationality is potential. At least, that is how things look from down here. He knows what Aristotle would say. …
For he who goes in for production there must be a model to aim at. Aristotle calls this the practically wise (prudent) man. From Aristotle: “Virtue, then, is a state of character concerned with choice, lying in a mean, i.e. the mean relative to us, this being determined by a rational principle, and by that …
How do I know when I have a virtue? This is a part of measuring for progress, and though I am leery about the over-emphasis of measuring for progress, it is not in itself wrongful. Why leery? An analogy: one cannot at the same time make money (produce) and count money (verify progress). Attention and …
Continue reading “4.7, The Aristotelian Insight on Virtue Production”
So, I aim, in my better moments, to produce. And of that which I can produce, I have decided that the production of the producer is first and foremost for its own sake and also for the sake of any earthly prosperity that is made possible by forces I cannot control. Call it fortune or …
