Some nice articles over on: http://www.gn.apc.org/resurgence/home.htm

which is the homepage of a magazine titled "Resurgence".

I've read Illich's works for a few years now and he cuts pretty deep, though not specialist. He has a good article on this site reviewing the contributions of Leopold Kohr and his sense of Kohr's support for the concept of proportionality. Article at: http://www.gn.apc.org/resurgence/184/illich.htm

snip example:

THIS CONCEPT, which one can understand as "the just measure '', "reasonableness'', or "proportion'', the Greeks named tonos. These differences in meaning invite one to look at its history. I want here -- especially in the light of energy tax proposals -- to look at tonos as the foundation for understanding cosmic relations in Western thought; it is also central in a 2,000-year tradition of making sense of oneself and of the world. Then one can see that if the common welfare is not built on a tonos, a certain tension, a proportion between humans and nature, the energy tax idea, together with other economic alternatives, slides into adaptive utilitarianism, systems-oriented technical administration or diplomatic environmental gossip.

A hundred years before the French Revolution, proportion as a guiding or orienting idea, as the condition for finding one's basic stance, began to be lost. Up to now, this disappearance has hardly been recognized in cultural history. The correspondence between up and down, right and left, macro and micro, was acknowledged intellectually, sense perception confirming it, up to the end of the seventeenth century.

Proportion was also a lodestar for the experience of one's body, of the other, and of gendered relations. Space was simply understood as a familiar cosmos. Cosmos meant that order of relationships in which things are originally placed. For this relatedness, this tension or inclination of things one to another, their tonos, we no longer have a word today. One cannot even imagine the experience of Dante, emerging from hell, rejoicing in the harmony of four new stars, having moved into the realm of justice, temperance, fortitude and prudence (Purgatory, Canto I). Today, one is confined to the positivist symbol of a scientific paradigm.

A snip is:

-- Anonymous, April 14, 2000

Answers

I know Jim and Diane have read him.

Now a reality check:

A hundred years before the French Revolution, proportion as a guiding or orienting idea, as the condition for finding one's basic stance, began to be lost. Up to now, this disappearance has hardly been recognized in cultural history. The correspondence between up and down, right and left, macro and micro, was acknowledged intellectually, sense perception confirming it, up to the end of the seventeenth century.

Had it not been for the Catholic church we might have got rid of the mistaken correspondence even earlier. Up and down are archaic flatland thinking, the proper terms are in and out (the referent point is the center of the earth's gravitational well). Sense perception confirms nothing! Time stamps and energizes perhaps but its not a path to truth.

What was being lost in 1650 was the control of the church of most everything through the trade guild system which was breaking down as printing and information flows increased. And lots of other reasons that your all free to point out.

We must develop a workable cosmology that has a firm sciencific/ reality/factual basis, one that works as well on Jupiter or in deep space as it does in Nowhere, North America.

Vividness is not the same as truthfulness.

You can believe anything you want to as long as you do not believe your beliefs are true.

Practice ruthless logic and rational self-interest.

ok, fire away. dave

-- Anonymous, April 15, 2000

David says: "We must develop a workable cosmology that has a firm sciencific/ reality/factual basis, one that works as well on Jupiter or in deep space as it does in Nowhere, North America."

Cosmology? Maybe. But our psychological constructs are still embodied and informed by our existence as bodies. UP and DOWN are personal experiences which end up becoming used as metaphorical building blocks for more abstract concepts. Up is good, "higher" is better... Heaven is "up there" and hell is in the "nether regions". These aren't arbitrary linguistic artifacts.

We grow up from babies on a planetary surface, and it informs our sense of the world (as well as all the IRM's that have also so worked for our lineage). So I'm wondering if the cosmology suitable for Jupiter won't be just a neo-cortex conceptual graft over our deeper mammalian and reptile neurologies.

"Vividness is not the same as truthfulness."

Agreed. And either is conviction.

The discussion gets even more slippery though when we ask what linguistic correspondances are necessary for "truth" or "truthfulness" to be manifesting. Engineering and certain branches of therapy have one answer (specifically - what works in a pragmatic sense) but that is a pretty positivistic and circumscribed domain. Any thoughts?

"Practice ruthless logic and rational self-interest."

Shades of the ghost of Ayn Rand. She was a great read in adolescence; inspiring, and providing great cartoon heroes. Her philosophy and ontology kind of ignore big chunks of human history, anthropology, psychology, and sociology - as well as even the branch of logic that she was so fond of quoting. (Aristotle's "A is A" seems adequate until you meet the lying Cretan. Then you realize that both language and classification are not so black and white trivial.)

How about instead we use a coupling of rigor, imagination, and compassion?

-- Anonymous, April 17, 2000