Now try to think
what is
the form of life
that corresponds
to the form of law?
« May 2007 | Main | August 2007 »
what is
the form of life
that corresponds
to the form of law?
"Total failure is excluded a priori,
for at a 'deeper' level
all processes will always be seen to culminate in success;
and since there must always exist
a level 'deeper' than that of any given insight,
there is in principle no empirical test
of what constitutes 'ultimate' success or failure.
Teleology is a form of faith
capable of neither confirmation or refutation
by any kind of experience;
the notions of evidence, proof, probability, and so on
are wholly inapplicable to it."
Isaiah Berlin in Liberty:
Essay on Historical Inevitability
"Everything that is 'necessary'
is endowed with an event-like character:
things become necessary
in and through the encounter of practises and times,
not outside of them,
and therefore can cease to be necessary in time."
----
"In these events...
the necessity of a given legal and political order is revoked
('reduced to its beginnings,' as Machiavelli says)
to the contingency of its emergence,
and therefore
lets itself be overthrown;
while, conversely,
the contingency of new orders
are given the appearance of necessity.
Without this possibility
of 'repeating' the necessary as the contingent,
and the contingent as the necessary,
there would be no radical political change."
in Miguel Vatter's Between Form and Event:
Machiavelli's Theory of Political Freedom
----
"A thing may have happened quite at random,
but, once it has come into existence and assumed reality,
it loses its aspect of contingency
and presents itself to us in the guise of necessity.
And even if the event is of our own making
or at least we are one of the contributing causes...
the simple existential fact
that it now is as it has become (for whatever reasons)
is likely to withstand all reflections on its original randomness.
Once the contingent has happened,
we can no longer unravel the strands that entangled it
until it became an event -
as though it could still be or not be."
in Hannah Arendt The Life of the Mind/Willing