Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2000/12/04
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Robert Appleby jotted down the following: > "Barthes emphasises the need to probe the history of social arrangements. > Rather than scratching human history to reveal the solid rock of a universal > human nature, he argues, a progressive humanism must scour nature to discover > history, and finally to establish Nature itself as historical.... It is the > superficial "humanizing" of others, rather than the empathetic probing of > different lifeways, experiences, and interests that creates the crises of > understanding that break open at times of war." Yeah, this is practically the major flaw and shortcoming of the human race. We're equipped with these large brains, but our default behaviour seems to be to use them as little as possible. Almost every opportunity for deep understanding of something typically ends up as an exercise in categorization, stereotyping, and superficiality. Our world is subjective and dynamic, but almost any treatment of it assumes that it's objective and static. M. - -- Martin Howard | Visiting Scholar, CSEL, OSU | Vis tecum sit. email: howard.390@osu.edu | www: http://mvhoward.i.am/ +---------------------------------------