Re: [Leica] Again and again (was: never again)

[Martin Howard <howard.390@osu.edu>]

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/        +---------------------------------------