Tue, 04 Feb 2003 03:42:33 GMT

Everything is old… but we forget.

Mitch Ratcliffe: David Weinberger cites one of my favorite philiosophers, Richard Rorty, who nicely deconstructs the argument that everything is new at the forefront of history. In fact, everything is old and only newly considered.

This is an important point of humility that “visionaries” and “revolutionaries” conveniently forget, leaving the rest of us to pick up the pieces. Pragmatic thinking about the whole of history, instead of just the recent changes, places society, individual life, business, investments, all of it, on a much firmer foundation.

[Seb's Open Research]

This is somehwat interestingly compared to my argument that social forms are fairly fixed and even reflexively repeatable throughout human history, whereas the objects that they form around or perhaps even concepts they form around develop in interesting and rhyzomatic ways, creating alternatives to the old systems which are in fact nothing other than the old system with new objects and subjective relations….