Tuesday, September 07, 2004
BUSH'S NY Republican Convention speech September 04
"To everything we know there is a season--a time for sadness, a time for struggle, a time for rebuilding. And now we have reached a time for hope. This young century will be liberty's century. By promoting liberty abroad, we will build a safer world. By encouraging liberty at home, we will build a more hopeful America. Like generations before us, we have a calling from beyond the stars to stand for freedom. This is the everlasting dream of America--and tonight, in this place, that dream is renewed. Now we go forward--grateful for our freedom, faithful to our cause, and confident in the future of the greatest nation on earth."
Nicholas Berdyaev , "Slavery and Freedom" Chapter 2
It is well to repeat constantly that man is a being who is full of contradictions and that he is in a state of conflict with himself. Man seeks freedom. There is within him an immense drive towards freedom, and yet not only does he easily fall into slavery, but he even loves slavery. Man is a king and a slave. In the Phänomenologie des Geistes, Hegel gives expression to some remarkable thoughts on the subject of master and slave, about Herrschaft and Knechtchaft. He is not there discussing the social categories of master and slave, but something deeper. It is the problem of the structure of consciousness. There are three conditions of man, three structures of consciousness, and they may be distinguished under the name of "master", "Slave" and "free man". Master and slave are correlatives. Neither of them can exist without the other. The free man, however, exists in himself; he has his own quality within him, without correlation to anything placed in antithesis to him. The master is an existing consciousness for himself, but that consciousness is derived through some other, it is through the slave that he exists for himself. If the consciousness of a master is consciousness of some other for him, then the consciousness of the slave is the existence of himself for the other. The consciousness of the free man, on the other hand, is consciousness of the existence of each one for himself, but with a free ongoing from himself to the other and to all. The boundary of a state of slavery is the absence of awareness of it.
¶ Tuesday, September 07, 2004
