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Peter Critchley

The Springs of Action - Making Facts Existentially Meaningful

Updated: Dec 27, 2022


I shall begin with this letter that Dr Amanda Power sent to the Guardian:


‘Matt Waddup states (Report, theguardian.com, 30 May) that a healthy society needs arts and humanities, and that these are “critical to our democracy.” This is an understatement. It is becoming increasingly obvious that the climate and environmental crises of our time cannot be addressed solely, or even principally, through science and technology. The situation requires a much broader range of expertise.

Arts and humanities graduates are essential to the necessary processes of thinking our way from the present system into sustainable ways of living for the future. This thinking cannot be achieved without a complex understanding of past societies, the stories that we tell about ourselves, and how we arrived in our present dangerous situation. It needs people who can engage critically and productively with the deeply embedded ideas that make change extremely difficult to envisage. The arts and humanities have never been more fundamental to imagining and creating a liveable future for humanity.’

  • Dr Amanda Power, University of Oxford, Letters, The Guardian, 1 June 2019


I don’t know who Dr Amanda Power is, but I feel like sending her a prize, or merely a few words of praise, even a song, for grasping a truth that seems to be utterly beyond some of the cleverest – but not thereby the liveliest – minds of the age. I have spent an intellectual lifetime not merely trying to induce those who equate all true knowledge with science and all practical art with technology and design to take the point made by Dr Power on board, and broaden environmentalism out genuinely and actively within the field of practical reason (ethics and politics), but have also written extensively, imaginatively, and creatively, with all the depth of scholarship and learning at my command, for over two decades now. I’ll just say that I am steeped in the humanities, with degrees in history, economics, ethics and philosophy. I think I may something about change and agency. Essay upon essay, paper upon paper, book upon book, post upon post on my Being and Place website have made precisely the point that Dr Power makes, developing it further with the depth it deserves.


I’m not quite sure what my reward for all that work has been. I have sacrificed health and wealth and very probably true fulfilment and happiness, and a lot more besides, working from my little hobbit hole, in detachment from people and the world. It’s a cruel isolation. I used to love watching the football, but gave up my season ticket at my beloved Liverpool in order to keep working, even as funds ran short. I have been read by many and it is reward enough to know that I have influenced and inspired others to act on the ideas. But I wrote with the intent that my lessons on practical reason be assimilated in such a way as to shape an effective eco-praxis.


I have to report that my engagement with science- and technology-based environmentalists over the years has not been encouraging, quite the reverse, in fact. I’ve noticed that far too many of them soon start to talk about overpopulation and the need to ‘cull the herd’ describing the human beings as a species that live in tribes that get bigger and bigger unless numbers are kept down by wars. (These were the exact words of one environmentalist who thought I was one of them – I asked which government he would trust to do the culling and what criteria of fitness he would apply). Dreary, misanthropic drivel that tells me precisely what happens to humanity when it sheds the transcendent source and end of hope and starts to rely on its own meagre psychology bounded by an indifferent, purposeless nature.


I have to report, too, that the sniffy disdain for arts and humanities is as alive and as unwell and uninspiring as ever. I’ve been told directly by people with backgrounds in the natural sciences that I know nothing of nature and nature’s laws, that ‘social sciences’ are not true sciences, that ethics is irrelevant, that all six-year olds know the difference between right and wrong and that people like me merely complicate ethics so as to make ourselves look smarter than we are, and that all my writing is mere ‘idle intellectualizing.’ I used to keep a document full of the abuse – and this from ‘friends’ and colleagues and associates in environmental causes, mark you. I respond that they know nothing of human beings beyond a neurononsense that explains the easy biochemical stuff but has nothing to say on the very things by which human beings constitute their distinctive humanity.


My attitude to all of this now is good riddance. It’s time to face the music or make your peace with the planet (or, better still, God), whichever way you want to look at it.

I won’t hesitate to state clearly that many people who think themselves the smartest and most active people around are actually dull-witted and thoroughly impractical, hammering away at the same things, little understanding why they are so ineffective and provoke so little response from the public. They are political naifs, although given their contemptuous attitude towards politics – and people - they would consider such condemnation as praise: they think they can use science as an authority to dictate truths to politics – and people. They are mistaken, and profoundly so, and that mistaken attitude seems destined to continue to hobble environmentalism.


I’ve spelt out my reasoning on this many times over the years. I’ll state it simply one more time: scientific knowledge and technological know-how do not have the true character of a virtue since they lack the appetitive component; they give us the ability to act but not the will or desire. If we are serious about ‘changing the world’ or acting effectively on the slogan ‘system change rather than climate change,’ then we need to make the transition from theoretical reason (our knowledge of the external world, the world of fact and physical explanation) to practical reason (the field of ethics and politics within which human beings come together to decide how they will live together and govern their common affairs, a field which includes economics as a branch, in my view). So long as environmentalists continue to press science into service as ethics and politics, our technics will continue to misfire and the state of civilization will go from bad to worse, further and further removed not just from our biological and ecological matrix, but from the source and end which gives human beings a sense of belonging, identity, purpose, and meaning.


But thank you Dr Amanda Power, it is indeed ‘becoming increasingly obvious that the climate and environmental crises of our time cannot be addressed solely, or even principally, through science and technology. The situation requires a much broader range of expertise.’


I suppose it all depends on what you think of people. If you really do think there are too many people on the planet, and that human beings are greedy, stupid, selfish, easily distracted and diverted by football and pop music (yes, that’s me, Liverpool and Elvis then), then, yes, you won’t really be inclined to get involved in the motivational economy and engage such flawed humans as active, informed citizens – you’ll just tell them what to do. Such people would prefer human beings were robots, responding automatically to external stimuli. That’s how some have been addressing citizens for decades now, to little effect and much lamentation. Such people will continue to blame human indifference instead of looking for the reasons why they, with their anti-politics of science-as-politics, have failed to elicit a response. This issue is not about informing passive empty minds but about forming characters in community.


What is becoming ‘increasingly obvious’ ought to have been plain decades ago. I’ve given it my best shot. I’m wondering what I could have done with all that time. I’m looking at old family photographs: so much happiness, so much promise as the future beckoned. ‘You used to be so happy,’ my mother told me as I held forth, yet again, on some issue or other, having become very well-educated and certified. But at risk of sounding a misery again … for all of your wealth of science and technology, and very probably because of your reliance on it, you are going to oblivion.


What has four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three at night?

Man – crawling on the floor as a baby, walking upright as an adult, and relying on a stick in infirm old age. We are using science and technology as a crutch to rest on and a stick to beat others with. This is no substitute for a genuine ethics and politics.


The Posts page on my Being and Place site has a section entitled ‘Making Facts Existentially Meaningful.’ This is key – truth cannot be simply and passively given but must be actively willed, assimilated, loved, and lived. Much more important than truth-telling by some is truth-seeking on the part of many.

That idea is a common theme in my moral ecology of the good. Please take the time to read.


We live in both a political world and a physical world. In any clash between politics and physics, physics will win. Our challenge is to avoid splitting the world up, removing civilization further and further from its biological and ecological matrix (and from the transcendent origin and end of all things) so that we come to be confronted with a choice between politics and ‘the real world.’ We need to give ourselves a ‘reality check.’ Science is the best reality check we have. That is true, in so far as we remain at the level of the explanation of physical processes, sticking to the facts and no more. I see the whole science vs religion antagonism misguided and self-defeating, originating in the split between fact and value that opened up in the modern world. I seek always to bring the realms of fact and value back together. This would avoid us having to make a choice between politics and ‘the real world.’


But here’s my take on science and religion. I shall simplify greatly to express myself clearly. (Plus it is late, and I am very tired and have better things to be doing – like sleeping). I see science and religion as actually doing the same thing from different angles to the world. They both insist there is a real world that is outside human subjective will, projection, and preference, a reality that it is in our best interests to know, understand, and conform ourselves to. To the scientist, this reality is the Earth and its physical laws and planetary boundaries. Fail to respect those and you are on the path to (self)destruction. To the religious, this reality is God and God’s plan for Justice for the world. In God’s will is our peace, to that reality all things return. (I am quoting from St Augustine and Dante Alighieri here). Both sides affirm a reality to which we much conform our wills, establishing a ‘free necessity.’ There is a big difference in this respect. The scientist, sticking to empirical fact, will say there is no evidence whatsoever for the existence of God, and that we have to give the verdict in any intellectual dispute to the more parsimonious explanation – the explanation which fits the facts with least assumptions. In which case there is no God. In response, on behalf of the religious view, I will say that the scientist here is right insofar as he goes. But science can only go so far as the facts and no further. Once we bring in questions of value, meaning, and significance the situation changes. For we are not just explaining the physical universe, we are entering the motivational economy of human life, trying not merely to make sense of all that makes human life meaningful, but trying to motivate human beings into right action. Here, the scientific view which sees our existence on Earth – and Earth itself – as accidental, and the universe as objectively valueless, meaningless, purposeless, a barren rock that came from nowhere and is going nowhere, for no reason, is no help whatsoever when it comes to inducing human beings to act. What is the point of mere survival in the long run when we are told that life as such is meaningless? Someone coming from a religious viewpoint can answer these questions. I affirm God as the transcendent origin and end of all things, from which all things come and to which all things move, giving us the transcendent hope to go beyond the empirical facts that say we are doomed to press further to the true reality beyond them.


Either way, science or religion, both are agreed that there is a reality, and that it is our responsibility to respect that reality and put our self-created world in positive relation to it.


It's important to establish this point for at least a couple of reasons.

In the first place, it is important to expose the contradictory dynamics of the prevailing social system, in both our political and intellectual work. Here, we are charged with undermining the rationalizations which are presented as false fixities at the institutional and ideological level so as to facilitate the changes we need.

In the second place, we need not merely to deliver truth to the world – presenting it as some abstract truth to which the people must bow down to and serve. That will never ever work in politics. The temper of politics is judicious, it involves the people themselves coming together to determine the terms by which they govern their common affairs, having a hand themselves in the laws to which their wills will be subject. If politics is just about truth pure and simple, then philosopher-kings will do fine. But where, I ask, can we find such disinterested beings in a political and socially divided human universe? You might think climate change is the overriding good to be served, other philosopher-kings might think it the economy, others still may put a good word in for God. We lack the authoritative overarching framework that is able to settle such a question of objective foundations in such a way as to command common assent. Power will decide that one – as it decides the sophist politics of our day. There is precious little point in stating scientific truths here and warning that we will go to Hell if we ignore them. Religious folk have been saying the same thing for years in warning the world as it turns it back on God. Stating truths in this way has no effect, because it presumes a moral imperative that lacks the means of moral action. We need the virtues and the practices to make it work.


There is a need, then, to get the individuals composing the demos to see and understand these social and environmental contradictions themselves, in the process of constituting themselves as an active, informed citizen body capable of mobilizing themselves as a genuine public, reclaiming government as their own common power from the death-dealing 'realpolitik' into which it has fallen under the sway of dominant economic interests and forces (and consequences arising therefrom).


Hence my interest in the view of Rousseau as the greatest of the modern Platonists that is presented by David Lay Williams in his book Rousseau's Platonic Enlightenment. Rousseau is a figure who interests me greatly in the way that he succeeds in uniting the two dominant wings of western political philosophy: the notion of objective reality and truth and subjective will. Rousseau's apparently paradoxical notion of "the general will" (a will can only be particular and never general, say philosophical critics) makes the point that the true and the good cannot just be passively given or stated: in a democratic age, these things have to be willed by the people, people have to know them intimately. In other words, the cognitive has also to be affective in order to be practically effective in changing the world for the better.


The point may seem arcane or academic – and the lack of response I have had on this in environmental circles suggests it may be (or that environmentalists are, as I believe, ill-equipped to inspire, sustain, and effect change) – but in my view the key in resolving the environmental crisis all along has been how to bridge the gaps between theoretical reason (our knowledge of the external world) and the field of practical reason (ethics and politics, of which economics was once a branch and, to my mind, still is - however much capital disembedded economics from government, society, ethics, and ecology). Knowledge - and I would put technological know-how as the product of science alongside knowledge - only give us the ability to act; neither of these things make us want to act, since they lack an appetitive component. That world of appetites is the one that interests me. That’s where I work, at risk of drawing insults with respect to lacking anything by way of true knowledge and having my ‘head in the clouds.’ It is becoming ‘increasingly obvious’ that our scientifically informed practical men and women are proving singularly ineffective in mobilising the action we need to avert climate catastrophe. We can blame any number of other forces for this – politicians, capitalists, people etc etc. You are the ones who know what the problem is, it is for you to create the means and mechanisms of effective collective action and command the active consent, better still, win the mass support, of the people.


Creating the will for change takes us into the motivational economy of the human world, the springs of action, however murky and sulphurous and even biased the human world is compared to the reality of the physical universe. At risk of offending my scientist friends, but you really do the easy stuff here – classifying things and counting different coloured beans and putting them in the appropriate boxes (OK, we can lose the polemics, but I’m long beyond being patient with people who refuse to budge on this, because they are the real deniers who are the problem). We have to get serious about the seriously difficult material that humanity is. We cannot do the easy thing and lament greed and stupidity, and complain there are too many people on the planet to boot. That also gets us nowhere. And I would also comment in passing how quickly people, in our clever secular post-Enlightenment times, have forgotten why the seven deadly sins were called deadly. And I would also say that in calling the soul back – as we need to do – we will have to have the nerve to see, identify, and name human maleficence for what it is – sin. I would also insist on differentiating between those specific social relations that foster and licence sinful behaviour, turning vices into virtues, and those which inhibit it and bring us back to virtuous living.


This issue is really a fight to constitute a politics that is worthy of the name – creating a citizen body of "polites," meaning those who are interested in public affairs, as against its antonym "idiotes," referring to those interested only in private affairs. There is nothing wrong with subjective choice as such, but alone it is an incomplete freedom. Milton Friedman's Free to Choose leaves ‘free’ choosing individuals isolated and powerless in the face of external collective forces: market, accumulative imperatives, climate change etc. That is no freedom at all, but a case of incremental, uncoordinated individual rationality and freedom generating a collective irrationality and unfreedom that embraces all. Instead of a common law which we voluntarily give ourselves, we become subject to an involuntary necessity in the shape of the unintended consequences of our actions. In this instance we are facing the collective challenge of climate change, without appropriate and effective collective media and mechanisms. Creating those is a question of politics.


I would encourage everyone who wants to cut straight to the chase to stop reading the words and go to the figures provided by Aubrey Meyer. The work he does at the Global Commons Institute provides figures that serve to focus the mind – and ought to focus our politics.


People may be inclined to carry on drifting in the political world of divided societies. This political world is certainly a real world, with a power of its own – hence the looming ecological catastrophe. But I quote Max Weber's statement from one hundred years ago a lot and for a good reason: "Where there is nothing, both the Kaiser and the proletarian have lost their rights." By nothing, Weber was referring to the collapse of the authoritative moral framework in the aftermath of Nietzsche's "death of God." With the disenchantment of the world, the world was revealed by modern mechanistic science to be objectively valueless and meaningless. We've been living in a world of purposeless materialism, and a worldview that reflects such a truth about the world can never succeed in motivating action. There is a world to win, said Marx, but not when that world is conceived by our science as a "nothing." There is “something,” I say, and people feel it. The nature of that true reality has been debated by metaphysicians and theologians for centuries. In the very least, we can be sure that a “something” we have is the Earth. The planetary ecology isn't quite the same thing as an authoritative moral framework, mind, and we still need such a framework, in my view. We may well come to lose the planetary health upon which civilization depends on account of our moral failure to see what we have in common and make a stand on that ethic. In other words, we need to see that the arguments over the terms on which the possession of the Earth is divided up is unimportant without any overarching ethic and unity. In fact, we need to see reject this squabbling over terms of possession entirely, seeing it as a mere power struggle without any point or purpose beyond an immediate possession and sophist expediency that is itself pointless. How to pull politics out of this sophist struggle into an appreciation of non-possession, is precisely the task we face.


I've just been told of some politician - I think it was John Selwyn Gummer - claiming all these targets are too ambitious, demanding changes that are too big to achieve in too short a time. That’s what politicians have been telling us all along, with the result that the problems we are charged with resolving have become even bigger, as the time to solve them has become shorter. I don't know how to stop or delay the clock, but it won't stop ticking because of political inertia (Heavens above, the years we have wasted in Brexit doesn't augur well at all when it comes to forming unity from within this fractured terrain on which we live).


If we remain stuck within the realm of political expediency - defining politics as the art of the possible - then we may as well miss by a billion miles as by an inch. What is possible within untransformed institutions and relations is actually ecologically impossible in the long (and short) run. Here’s the problem, though – which is why we have to develop an effective politics – human beings live in the here and now, not in the future. The only time human beings have ever been motivated by a vision beyond the here and now was when society was united in a common devotion to God. In the absence of a mass conversion – and you cannot conjure up belief as a matter of engineering - we need a social identity in which short term individual good and long term social good coincide. This addresses the tricky problem of reconciling collective action and individual choice.


Hence my concern to avoid the clash between politics and physics (where there can be only the one winner) by changing the institutions, assumptions and relations within which politics are set. That has to be done, but it can only be done from within the political and social realm. Science is not politics, and politics is not science: neither the one can dictate to the other - that antithetical relation will doom civilization.


I’ve never been keen on demonstrations and protests, and I see a danger of making a fetish of the politics of permanent opposition which comes to stand in the way of being genuinely radical in embedding and institutionalising social power in material form. At some point, climate rebellion has to constitute an active and informed citizen body capable of voluntarily legislating the right way to live to itself – as opposed to having a vicious necessity involuntarily imposed on it. That, for me, is the only way we will get out of this crisis. It's a big ask, but it's a big problem, the biggest civilization has faced. If evolution is challenge and response, then the challenge of the accumulation of human actions generating abstract power and consequences governing society as external force is huge. The response also has to be big - by which I mean taking all the great ideals of political philosophy and ethics going back to the ancients, and coming to realize the ideal of a rational freedom that is rooted in the common moral sense of each and all so as to deliver true government as the agency of the common good. We've had a couple of millennia trying to achieve that one. The fact that we have tried for so long and failed is not encouraging. And not actually a fact. We have achieved plenty. We need to continue the achievements.


These are times that test men's souls, Tom Paine said, in face of a problem that was local in comparison to the one we face. I’m expending a lot of words (yet again) but it is all part of my concern to emphasise building a climate legitimacy through the constitution of a public for action - building the will for the transformation we need by drawing individuals out of the private realm of idiocy into becoming active moral and political beings. That’s the active and creative engagement we need, as against to merely speaking truths to power, politics, and people too. Those truths have to come in from the inside, take root and grow. Should we succeed in achieving that, then the concerted action on the part of governments within a comprehensive framework will come to be buttressed by popular will in the context of widespread social transformation. Anything that falls short of that, and the best we have is government as an environmental rescue squad, doing too little, too late, responding to events that will always be racing ahead of them.


If system change it is - and I keep looking at this and drawing that conclusion (hence my interest in Kevin Anderson saying the age of greening the current system is over) - then we need to analyse the nature of the prevailing system, be clear about alternate institutions and structures, and engage the citizen body in order to build a mass agency actively involved in social transformation - putting the above and the below together. It's ... a very big ask in .... a very short time frame.


The problem is that we lack a meaningful political and institutional ‘we,’ in the sense of a collective body with political and legal force. But there is a ‘we’ at the level of humanity – and this we, in the political institutions at our disposal, have become less and less convergent with planetary realities as the decades have passed, emitting some 900 Billion Tonnes of CO2 in the last three decades, half of which has been added to the atmosphere, serving to drive temperatures up further. The alarms are being sounded. Once more. But we live within social and political arrangements that are institutionally deaf. As for the politicians sticking to the art of the possible – this is a case of doing too little too late, leaving us facing the problem of having to attempt too much too soon the closer we get to our date with catastrophe.


The demands are and have been measured all along, they only seem too much in relation to institutional inertia and political compromise.


Check the work of Aubrey Meyer at the Global Commons Institute out.



How real do people want it? How much reality can people cope with? I always find the accusations of alarmism over the years ironic - we've been dealing with politically expedient and convenient evasions and underestimations at the institutional level for a long, long time now. We can possibly be lenient here and say this has been for reasons of pragmatic politics - to get some movement, to get something done – but it has drained the time away, wasted talent and energy too. I do hope people understand the numbers. Just saying "time for action" is not enough. I was once told to "stop thinking, act!" To which I replied, "don't act, think!" Of course, the two go together in an interactive and mutually informing process, but I'm an old dialectician.


Aubrey Meyer gave me this in response:

If we're serious, doing the numbers means this


“ . . the first thing you learn when learning to play the violin is that you learn it, as it sure as hell doesn't learn you . . . yes - playing-learning-by-doing, playing better-learning-by-doing - but fundamentally it's not a perceptions issue, it's a one-way street, cut-and-dried . . . dead parrot . . . .”


Aubrey Meyer: Here's the CBAT page




I commented in response:

This is truly brilliant, Aubrey. I'd strongly encourage people to spend just the ten minutes or so to listen and learn from this. And be inspired by it. It points to the sacrifices people have made, and the reason why.

I'd strongly encourage people to listen to these words and follow the other links above. This is a really important thread.


There are important words here on how to convert the climate lottery back into “the stable, solid, timeless structure,” which is the language of music.

“It is innately structured, it is innately proportioned, it is an interesting point that in the politics of this, Contraction and Convergence (C&C) is not fair, it is just. In music, correct tuning is called just tuning , because it is just right. It is not fair, it is just right: it's not too high, it's not too low, it's not too fast, it's not too slow. You have to work hard as a musician to achieve that."


It is just right. Right. Just. Tempered. It avoids vague language about fairness. What is fair? That's a question designed to stump all those demanding justice. (As Marx knew, and hence avoided the language of fairness, but I digress slightly).


It's all about eliminating error from the climate debate to achieve something that is equitable, viable, and deliverable.

You learn the violin, it doesn't learn you. There's a great question to be addressed here concerning imposure and disclosure. Imposure is the modern idea that truth, goodness, and meaning are human projections upon an objectively valueless universe. That seems liberatory, in appealing to the notion of human beings as authors of their own futures, 'men as gods.' But it is a delusion, leading to humans as masters of nowhere. Disclosure is ancient, more in keeping with Leibniz's notion of a preordained harmony. The world is objectively valuable, good, and purposeful. And it is participatory. We are co-creators in the sense of acting within an endlessly creative universe. That's the notion I go with. (Although I try to put imposure and disclosure together, as in ancient Chinese thought (I need to add this to my ancient Greek sources). But the notion of a "stable, solid, timeless structure" takes us right back to the notion of an objectively valuable world, as against the modern disenchantment which stripped the universe of inherent worth.


On the musical model over against the prevailing ecosuicidal economic model, I can remember Nicholas Stern (A Blueprint for a Safer Planet 2006) saying that the ‘two great challenges of the twenty-first century’ are fighting poverty and combating climate change. Since the environmental crisis is global in its origins and its impacts, it requires a global deal concluded at the supra-national level. Stern sets out the terms of this deal. ‘That global deal must be effective, in that it cuts back emissions on the scale required; it must be efficient, in keeping costs down; and it must be equitable in relation to abilities and responsibilities, taking into account both the origins and impact of climate change’ (Stern 2010).


A Blueprint, a Plan, a man with a plan – we need a plan, and we need a mobilisation of men and women behind it. Act, yes, but know what you are doing and where you are going and why.


There is a lot of information exchanged in the world. A lot of it is restating the problems we already know about (other than noting they are getting worse). I tend not to do much of that. There's a danger of endlessly writing our own obituaries on this. We need to analyse the problem, identify the solution, seek agreement, establish the conditions of concerted action within a comprehensive framework, build a democratic will and legitimacy through the participation of a public which respects citizen agency. Do all of that and we may start to get to where we ought to be.


I'd say that within the prevailing economic model, citizen agency is totally undercut and overridden by the imposition of accumulative imperatives, with government reduced to having to facilitate that expansionary, and ecosuicidal, process. In challenging that, we can recover the notion of an active, informed citizenship, breathing new life into the old principal of self-assumed obligation, only with this crucial rider – this is not a self-legislating power, seeing the world as a human creation – imposure or the projection of truth and goodness on an objectively valueless world – it is co-agency in the ceaselessly creative, musical, world – disclosure. The great partnership – men and women with a plan.


Here is Plato. It’s an ancient wisdom, of course, from a time long before our own. But people are people, and reality is reality. With respect to timeless structures, the date at the top of the newspaper is irrelevant. Plato set out the terms of the solution long ago, linking the parts together to form a 'well-tempered harmony'. The word that Plato uses is 'just,' not 'fair.' It's important to understand this:


"The just man does not allow the several elements in his soul to usurp one another's functions; he is indeed one who sets his house in order, by self-mastery and discipline coming to be at peace with himself, and bringing into tune those three parts, like the terms in the proportion of a musical scale, the highest and lowest notes and the mean between them, with all the intermediate intervals. Only when he has linked these parts together in well-tempered harmony and has made himself one man instead of many, will he be ready to go about whatever he may have to do, whether it be making money and satisfying bodily wants, or business transactions, or the affairs of state. In all these fields when he speaks of just and honorable conduct, he will mean the behaviour that helps to produce and preserve this habit of mind; and by wisdom he will mean the knowledge which presides over such conduct. Any action which tends to break down this habit will be for him unjust; and the notions governing it he will call ignorance and folly." (Plato, Republic 444d, Cornford translation, 141-2).


"Philosophy, I said, tempered with music, who comes and takes up her abode in a man, and is the only saviour of his virtue throughout life." (Plato, The Republic).


I received a nice comment from Aubrey Meyer in response:


Dear Peter - when you write that, I feel the lift and am so glad and grateful that you do . . . it brings peace back towards one.

Thank you to you and our friends and guides and to Dante and to Plato and to Pythagoras and to Patanjali and to providence . . .


I do hope people read all this and follow up the links. We have a problem, we know. We need to address it. If we ever get a future that is worth having, then it will have been down to the efforts of good folk such as Aubrey Meyer. I’ve given it a go myself, to the best of my abilities. Not having the numbers, only the words, there is always the danger that I may have confused rather than clarified.




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