Poetry

Day 3683, Civic Humanism,

Daily picture, Definitions
Dvina, Isegran Fartøyvernsenter

Civic Humanism (SEP)

Although widely and commonly confused with republicanism, civic humanism forms a separate and distinct phenomenon in the history of Western political thought. Republicanism is a political philosophy that defends a concept of freedom as non-domination, and identifies the institutions that protect it (Pettit 1999). In particular, republicanism stands against two alternative theories of politics. The first is despotism, especially as manifested in any form of one-man rule; a republic is self-governing, and so are its denizens. The second is liberalism, which posits the primacy of the autonomous individual vis-à-vis public order and government; the republican values civic engagement in order to realize a form of liberty achievable only in and through the community. Republican theorists sometimes refer to writings by historically antecedent authors, such as Aristotle or Machiavelli, but their concern is not primarily accurate interpretation. Rather, to the extent that they show an interest in the past, it is as a source of ideas that they find useful.

By contrast, civic humanism is a historiographical construct. As conventionally employed by scholars, the term refers to a group of thinkers who emerged during the period of the Italian Renaissance, especially in Florence, and who were committed to public engagement (in theory as well as practice) and whose values were fundamentally antithetical to the medieval past. The “invention” of civic humanism is primarily associated with Hans Baron (1900–1988), the famed German-American historian (Fubini 1992). Although he first used the phrase in its original German form (Bürgerhumanismus) as early as 1925, its popularity stems from the publication in 1955 of his classic book The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance: Civic Humanism and Republican Liberty in an Age of Classicism and Tyranny (revised 1966). In this volume, as well as in later writings that built upon it (many collected in Baron 1968 and 1988), he developed what has come to be called the “Baron thesis” (Witt 1996; Hankins 1995). Baron was not, however, the first scholar to propose that the form of humanism that emerged during the fifteenth century in the Italian cities mainly promoted the civic vita activa rather than the literary and philological pursuits ordinarily ascribed to the humanists. In two books from 1952 and 1954, written and published in Italian, Eugenio Garin defended a position almost identical to that of Baron’s: Renaissance humanism, especially as propounded in Florence, reflects a pronounced shift from the emphasis on contemplation typical of the Middle Ages to the priority of civil action to attain a common good (Garin 1947 [1965]). (If not for purely contingent reasons, the historiographical label for civic humanism might readily have been “the Garin thesis”.) In the present context, it should be noted that some advocates of civic humanism were disposed toward republicanism, but the latter is not entailed by the former.

Read the rest here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/humanism-civic/

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Day 3670, ten years.

Daily picture, My thoughts

These are the pictures I took 3673 days ago, on March 24, 2016. It was the day I told myself I should take my so-called hobby a bit more seriously, so I challenged myself to take a picture every day and post it online. For the first 604 days, it was just pictures, and I posted on a photo website that I no longer have. I still have all the pictures, but you cannot find them on this blog. I am not sure why I moved to WordPress, but I guess it was about time to not only post a picture a day but also share some of my writing. I have always written, but irregularly, and I guess it was time to take that hobby more seriously, too. I never really posted on social media, mainly because I moved away from them in 2016, and because I have all kinds of opinions and I don’t care too much for interaction with people who have other opinions. That is just a waste of time. I had a few good interactions with people who commented here over the years, who might disagree with me, but they were in the form of long emails, not lunch-sized critiques with a side of word salad.

If you look at the top of this post, you can see that I am on day 3670, not 3673. I don’t know exactly how that happened, but I remember a few times that I realized just in time that I had entered the wrong day numbers for a couple of days and had to go back a few posts to fix it. I guess that happened another 3 times, but by then, I could never recover from that mistake. Imagine changing the title of a thousand posts… But I swear I posted every day, though sometimes it was the day after, after midnight, or when I was in an airplane and had to wait until whatever time it was in the new time zone. I will stick with the 3670 for today because, as I said, I’ve been doing this for 10 years, and if I may say so myself, that is something.

Photography is still my hobby, but I don’t take pictures every day like I did at the beginning. I did that for a couple of years, often taking several good pictures in one day. Over time, I started using pictures from other days. So it is still a picture a day, but sometimes I go back to pictures from the last month, and sometimes to ones from 30 years or more, and use one of those old pictures. I still love taking pictures. For the last 1.5 years, I have been going to Fredrikstad’s center on Sunday mornings to take pictures. I did this just to push myself to find inspiration in streets I have walked many times and have seen every building through one of my lenses, but now I am done with it, and I wait for the moment when nature wakes up here, and I can go out with my macro lens again.

It never feels like a burden to write every day. It is so normal now that I see no reason to quit. Even on the busiest days, I always find a few minutes to snap an interesting picture with my phone, write a three-sentence poem-like thing, and post it. I can do that on the toilet if I have to. But seriously, for someone like me who thinks way too much and knows all too well how repetitive daily life is, these five minutes on the toilet, or more normally, 30 minutes to an hour behind my computer looking for a cool picture, editing it, and getting inspired to write something about it, keep me going. Without art, life is not much worth.

I asked the AI overlord to pick 10 random days. I took screenshots of those days and posted them below. 

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Day 3662, I deciphered.

Daily picture, Poetry, Quotes 
In the right circumstances
we can all feel vertigo
when looking up

I deciphered my handwritten notes from a notebook from 2004. It was all in Dutch but I translated it and took some of the rambling out, but maybe not enough. I leave that decision up to you.

What am I worried about?

Structuring society in such a way that every individual coming into the world, man or woman, is given nearly equal opportunities to develop their various abilities and thereby be able to utilize them in their work.

(uit L.J.C. Beaufort, Michael Bakounin, Majesteit, pag. 30)

Why would you worry about your fellow human? In my case, the lack of freedom for others takes away my own freedom. Everyone is increasingly looking alike, as if we no longer have a choice in shaping our own future.

That freedom seems vast because, apparently, no one tells you what to choose or forces you to do this or that. You can select which school to attend, where to work, how to live, and where to go on vacation. Most of the time, people also feel comfortable with those choices: ‘It’s all good, and I feel good.’ The measure of pleasure is whether you feel comfortable. Of course, it’s nice when people feel good; peace of mind is, after all, the ultimate goal of life, I think that is what they say.

But many people don’t feel good and, seemingly, have the same freedoms and opportunities but cannot use them. They can’t because they lack the necessary capacities and resources or, as in my case,  they don’t want to function within a capitalist consumption society. A consumer society involves consumption, and unnecessary products must be made to be sold with the money of the people who produce them. I admit this is a bit of an oversimplification, but essentially, that’s the core idea. Now, this itself isn’t so bad, except that no status quo can exist. Growth must happen, and the industry that promotes this is enormous.

Let’s say someone needs a pair of shoes, free of any influence but with the memory of painful, dull feet. They want shoes that prevent that memory from getting worse. Their new shoes do their job, and when worn out, they buy new ones. I’m not suggesting you should only have one pair of shoes, but how much is enough? Most people find it strange if you have 30 pairs, but many do. They probably serve a great purpose for the consumer society, but at what cost? It’s very hard to think through and measure, but I see 30 pairs of shoes made from material that must be extracted from the ground, processed, and transported, all just for the madness of someone who thinks they need so many shoes to protect their feet.

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