On hope, philosophical personalism and Martin Luther King Jr...

On hope, philosophical personalism and Martin Luther King Jr | Aeon Essays

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The simple individualistic humanist frame treats the person as the seat of agency, the atomic unit of moral responsibility and choice-making.

I want you to see the limits of this model. Agency exists at micro- and macro-scales, the “person” is just one step on the ladder.

Tweets From Richard D. Bartlett · @RichDecibels • Tweet

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Too often today, the only narratives that matter are personal ones, and many have seen a widening gulf between their individual hopes and dreams and those of the world around them. Too often, as well, people feel like powerless observers of forces and trends they cannot control. The rekindling of social imagination is one aspect of taking back cont

Geoff Mulgan • Another World Is Possible: How to Reignite Social and Political Imagination

Relationalism asserts that human beings are both fundamentally broken but also splendidly endowed. We have egoistic self-interested desires, and we need those desires in order to accomplish some of the necessary tasks of life: to build an identity, to make a mark on the world, to break away from parents, to compete, create and to shine. Our savage

David Brooks • The Relationalist Manifesto

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Hope, writes the moral philosopher Kieran Setiya,18 “keeps the flicker of potential agency alive.”

Brad Stulberg • Master of Change: How to Excel When Everything Is Changing – Including You

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The power of agency is, in practice, the power to build: to direct our intelligence toward the work of understanding the world and adapting it to our needs. It’s how we impose a purposeful order on nature’s chaos.

Gena Gorlin • Death is the default

Sarah Drinkwater and added

This liberalism relies upon the idea that consciousness is not a thing but an activity; that its elemental constituent is not some soul-like substance but the activity of understanding; that it knows itself and the world only imperfectly, through its reflections on the world and itself; that its freedom is a matter of degree and a function of its u

Matthew Stewart • An Emancipation of the Mind

Debbie Foster added

We need modern philosophers -- much better philosophers than me -- to wrestle with modern questions. It would be foolish to be the generation with the most individual agency and the least intentional thought about what to do with it.

Packy McCormick • Existential Optimism

sari added

“It would not be good news to learn that we are all roped together intellectually, droning away at some featureless, genetically driven collective work, building something so immense that we can never see the outlines,” biologist Lewis Thomas writes in The Lives of a Cell (1974). Humans understandably prefer to believe in their own agency, even if ... See more

Real Life Mag • Colony Collapse - Real Life

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