Which they occur, the symbols themselves, are what they are, are themselves determined by the actual structure of our world. Might have been, if the past had, in this or that particular, been otherwise, soon reaches its natural limits, limits created both by the weakness of our capacity for calculating alternatives – ‘might have beens’ – and (we may add by a logical extension of Tolstoy’s argument) even more by the fact that our thoughts, the terms in Our imagination and ability to calculate, our power of conceiving, let us say, what We are what we are, and live in a given situation which has the characteristics – physical, psychological, social – that it has what we think, feel, do is conditionedīy it, including our capacity for conceiving possible alternatives, whether in the present or future or past. We go on removing in our imagination what we know to be true, fact by fact, this becomes not merely difficult but impossible. The more difficult we find it to think away various circumstances, and conjecture what might have occurred without them and as Why? Because the more we know about all the relevant conditions and antecedents, Inevitable, determined it seems to us to be. “Sometimes Tolstoy comes near to saying what it is: the more we know, he tells us, about a given human action, the more
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |