A SWEET PARAGRAPH FROM THIS MORING’S WORK ON PHILOSOPHY “This history of philoso

A SWEET PARAGRAPH FROM THIS MORING’S WORK ON PHILOSOPHY

“This history of philosophy can be reduced to the five struggles:

1) First, between man’s primary desire to retreat into the limits of his senses in the face of evolving complexity, and his reluctant acknowledgement that he must learn and employ the tools of reason and calculation in order to extend those limited senses, despite the discomfort these unintuitive abstract tools subject him to.

2) Second, the conflict between his preference for the material ease of commercial society and his emotional discomfort at the consequential alienation caused by post-tribal, post familial, and increasingly individualistic commercial society.

3) Third, between the comfort of historical norms and the precious status we achieve by adhering to them, and the opportunity of economic, technical and organizational innovation that of necessity disrupts those norms.

4) Fourth, the need to develop justification of our system of norms such that we can resist or conquer the economic strategies, organizational strategies, and status signals embedded in competing systems of norms.”

5) And fifth, between the masculine aristocratic inter-temporal instinct to concentrate capital and to constrain the breeding and consumption of the lower classes, and the feminine communal instinct to perpetuate her genes no matter how she has bred them, and her defensive posture of granting others the same opportunity, despite that it threatens us with Malthusian fragility.

These five conflicts define the history of philosophy as an attempt to justify existing norms, or an appeal to modify them so that we may adapt to the future or regress into the past.”