Ideology Of My Imagination
Many, if not most, of these features may be lost in the modern movement, yet each still serves as a striking marker to help us assess our thought and action, tying it to something beyond our narrow ideological or political priorities. They draw our attention to the bigger picture of human flourishing, allowing our imaginations to align and adapt.
Joseph Sunde is an associate editor and writer for the Acton Institute. Joseph resides in Minneapolis, Minnesota with his wife and four children. Get updates on the latest and most popular blog posts from Acton.
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About Events Publications Multimedia. Free weekly Acton Newsletter. Click below to view our latest and most popular posts! Sign up for our weekly Newsletter! Soon enough, I would be moved to call myself a conservative once again.
My attention had shifted from ideology to imagination, from the strictly political to the broadly cultural. It was about caring about and cultivating something distinctly better and more beautiful in its place. Free community is the alternative to compulsive collectivism.
The voice of the lonely crowd
Through what proceeded, Kirk prompted me to reconcile my principled individualism with a principled communitarianism, giving me a faith and a confidence that such a marriage was, indeed, possible. Kirk accomplished this through his own compelling thoughts and poetic words.
But he also did it by connecting me to a greater movement and history of ideas, from Burke of whom I had not yet heard to Tocqueville to Hawthorne to T. In my college dorm room, amid the heat and fury of cable news and talk radio, it was a compass. More practically, I was searching for a richer filter through which to think about and respond to the world. Therfore I stynte, I nam no divinistre; Of soules fynde I nat in this registre, Ne me ne list thilke opinions to telle Of hem, though that they writen wher they dwelle.
Arcite is coold, ther Mars his soule gye! In this he is unlike Theseus and the retired ruler, Egeus.
Whereas in death Arcite had uttered questions the poem takes seriously, and revealed human potentials all too rare in the universe he inhabited, the old man now indulges in a series of generalizations designed to remove any discomfort spectators may feel at what has happened ll. He observes that men are mortal: Everything in the poem invites us to reflect critically on a wide range of substantial issues including Theseus's version of order, and problems concerning theodicies and to test out generalizations against particulars.
The poet is the last person to have missed how Egeus evades the topics and the experiences realized for imaginative exploration in the tale. All distinctions about the different forms of life and death are dissolved into the old man's commonplace abstractions. Nor are the next lines more impressive, for all their plangent solemnity: This world nys but a thurghfare ful of wo, And we been pilgrymes, passynge to and fro Deeth is an ende of every worldly soore. The final movement in the Knight's Tale includes the long speech Theseus makes in parliament concerning order, love, wisdom and the perfect joy he intends to create by marrying Emily to Palamon ll.
Like other rulers through the ages, Theseus sets about presenting his order in a solemn setting and with a language which exalts, sanctifies and seemingly depersonalizes his thoroughly material and partial ambitions.
From ideology to imagination: How Russell Kirk brought me back to conservatism
Chaucer selected the word 'wille' l. The setting is part of a brilliant dramatization of the possible connections between political rule and metaphysical ideas in orders such as that of Theseus. The first half of the duke's address involves a patchwork of abstractions from different parts of the Consolation of Philosophy.
The 'experience' he asserts, is enough to prove such assertions: One hardly needs to be familiar with fourteenth-century criticism of traditional metaphysical proofs of God's existence to notice the incoherence of this particular version of the argument from design, vulnerable enough in any form and place let alone in the contexts established by the Knight's Tale.
The speech reveals further inadequacies in areas important to the poem. The treatment of love is one of these. Its reductive dehumanization is a travesty of the poem in the Consolation of Philosophy used in the passage, and Chaucer shows how the ruler's metaphysics illustrates far more about himself and his own version of order than about the hidden structures of the world metaphysics had traditionally sought to disclose.
Its negativity reflects the idealization of sheer power over others in Page The grounds of his outlook emerge plainly as his parliamentary address moves to its practical end: Thanne is it wysdom, as it thynketh me, To maken vertu of necessitee, And take it wee1 that we may nat eschue, And namely that to us alle is due. And whoso grucceth ought, he dooth folye, And rebel is to hym that al may gye. The duke simply assumes that the existing social order and its practices, under his governance, are fully sanctioned by a transcendent God who seems to be envisaged as other than the gods the poem has exhibited.
Any protest about anything is branded as folly and any attempt to challenge this order presented as rebellion, not just against Theseus but against the supreme deity.
Putting Ideology Before Art Impoverishes the Imagination - Washington Free Beacon
In his lack of reflexivity about his own discourse and order he never wonders whether a supreme deity might not share all his own values, and might not admire the forms of love and worship of Mars he and his followers relish. These are traits characteristic of rulers who wish to sacralize their own government, imagining themselves as gods on thrones l.
This enables him to move easily to a set of values which have much to do with aristocratic culture but little to do with the Boethian language he has just been applying: And certeinly a man hath moost honour To dyen in his excellence and flour, When he is siker of his goode name; Thanne hath he doon his freend, ne hym no shame.