BOOTLICKER

Date: 2021-02-03

Given the difficulty people seem to experience doing it these days, I’d say listening to others is more important than speaking. I think it’s quite a colonial settler mentality, prizing above all the ability to be able to effect whatever verbal output that takes your fancy at a moment’s notice.

I’d also add that the Lockean or Hobbesian concept of ‘freedom’ as one which pictures a body moving inhibited through space is a fairly bizarre and outdated definition of ‘freedom’.

Further, I don’t subscribe to the tradition in Western philosophy which is sceptical. We can trace the flourishing of this tradition back to Descartes—the position that everything conceptual needs to be torn down and reassembled in order to be made rational again.

I see all these things as interlocking: a pernicious ideology which is more about the individual and their productive or wealth-accumulating capacity than their integration into a complex social ecology.

Freedom is ‘freedom with’, in the spirit of Hegel and Aristotle: a freedom whose metaphysics is ‘accumulative’, instead of subtractive.