Different voices may meet. With a sympathetic reading the two examples below may go some way to display this meeting.
" I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence :
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -
I took the one less travelled by,
And that has made all the difference. "
( from Robert Frost " The Road Not taken" )
For me this is a beautiful piece of writing that connects as poetics might connect being more and less than rational discourse. Yet there are those that seem to be "at home" with a poetic bent even if they are from academia and scientific institutions. With this in mind I paste here another little piece :-
The choice between barbarism or socialism
"In traveling down the path of capitalist development, we have discovered, much to our alarm, that often it is the very political regimes that describe themselves as 'free market democracies' that have become unremittingly resistant to self-criticism. The struggle to build a world free from exploitation is a daunting one, and requires that we take path less traveled, that take us in directions less familiar, and toward destinations less certain. We make the path to freedom as we walk down it. And we remake ourselves in the process. Today, as in previous times when history has placed us at the dangerous crossroads, we face the ultimate choice between barbarism or socialism." - Peter McLaren, Professor of Education at UCLA
The above comes from the website of Juha Suoranta ( see my links)
Perhaps it is not always the case that different conversations, texts and language-games cross each other without meeting. Different worlds with a world?
7 comments:
Zola - was this the piece you intended to link to Wittgenstein?
I'm sure it is valuable to take the path less travelled. I think McLaren has made a phoney dichotomy between socialism and barbarism, if we could just learn to be content with less in the Western World then our society would improve, I'm not sure socialism is necessary to curb our consumerism but I often wonder what is. I would like everyone to have a sudden realisation that the good things on earth come from family, friends, love, nature, decency and beauty. Is it that hard to achieve?
Less selfishness and more empathy, I would have thought, Toby.
Good points made.
Toby : Indeed a meeting has been achieved because now we can see that one of the basic problems with critical socialist thought is that it lacks a fine appreiction of nature. Indeed this seems tru of most social theory. But Robert Frost helps this to emerge.
Anticant : Again I agree so long as this valid empathy is linked to solid action. This because the main point is not simply to understand the world but to change it.
Thanks both for comments that do manage to form links and do make critical comments upon critical comment itself.
What more could i ask. Thanks.
Zola, I don't go much for -isms. I'm neither a right-winger nor a left-winger; I'm a non-party middle-of-the-roader.
You doubtless know the old canard that if you're not on the Left when you're young you have no heart, and if you're still there when you're old you have no head. When I was at Cambridge we had some lectures on political theory from a funny old clergyman who defined Socialism as a blindfold man in a darkened room searching for a black cat that isn't there. Naughty but nice!
This is the type of civilised discussion I enjoy - not wrangling with bloody old BS about his idiosyncratic rules of engagement.
Well, having sniffed around the burrow, do you feel safe?? And what about the Lady?.......
Yes Anticant : those "isms" are nasty things I agree with you.
problems seems to come though that, as part of language and communication and cultural constructs, even a position that denies itself as an ism becomes one.
Such is one aspect of the formal tragedy of culture is it not?
BTW : When i used the terms "links" and "alternatives" I meant just that but without any "one way" linear logic being enforced as if there were any such one way linear logic.
'Well, having sniffed around the burrow, do you feel safe?? And what about the Lady?.......'
If I were a Lady, I would not feel safe within a league of the BoldZola.
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