Beyond Philosophy

οὔτε λέγει οὔτε κρύπτει ἀλλὰ σημαίνει Up to this point, we have glanced at three horizons: the intimate, the personal, and the strange. What holds all these together coherently, besides historical accident, is scale: they present what we might call a human scale, though the strange challenges this and moves beyond it, especially as civilization grows titanic. A human scale is one dominated by personal action, the kind of intentional behavior we observe in time and space close enough, and kin enough, to acknowledge our influence. Beyond the human scale, at the outer reaches of the strange or the abyssal depths of the intimate, where our personal agency vanishes in the face of wild Nature, we encounter one last horizon:  the universal . Before every horizon, humanity takes the view offered and expresses it somehow, as art or culture or civilization. Information from without ( the spoor of the stranger, the words of family, the emotion of the self)  is recognized, recei...

timeo Danaos et dona ferentes The next horizon we come to is a very difficult one to grasp. In the intimate and the familiar we confront what is close at hand: the self, the family, friends, foes whose faces we know. Of course much about these things close to us remains mysterious, dynamic, mobile. But the political brings new challenges, notably the challenge of the stranger . Almost all human action today takes place in arenas where strangers, people we don't know, play important roles, providing opportunities and dangers we don't always see easily. The best introduction I have come up with so far to the political starts, actually, with the familiar. Imagine that you are hunting with a few adult men from a tribe of San Bushmen. Louis Liebenberg did this, repeatedly, and wrote carefully about his experience. He records that the hunters were expert trackers, well aware of how to read a landscape after years spent playing there and watching and learning from others. And ye...