Sublime

“The passage from the state of Nature to the state of Culture is defined by man’s ability to think biological relations as systems of oppositions; duality, alternation, opposition, and symmetry, whether occurring in defined or less clear form, are not so much phenomena to explain as fundamental and immediate givens of social reality.”

Lines of force twist and elongate between people, objects, institutions, ideas. The individuals are tragically like marionettes, independently animate but bound by a web they choose not to see; they could resist if they wished, but so few of them do.

A capitalist system requires that, like the natural world, bodies become resources, which requires creating boundaries between individuals.

Perhaps she should not be asking who she was but, rather, of what she was a part.

no more need to have them enforce our contracts.

As scientific practice has matured, we’ve come to understand the value of interpretation, situated knowledge and trained judgement; but this fallacy has been perpetuated by our technologies, which flatten and lump together the myriad different expressions of the world.

In the century and a half since Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, we still are stymied by the complexity of the biosphere, and, just as with our financial systems, our efforts to intervene have often led to confounding results.