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Wednesday, 30 August 2017



Draw a triangle with thinking, feeling and willing at the corners, call them the powers of the mind or of consciousness. Now embed this triangle upside down in a larger triangle, or so that a new outward-facing triangle is drawn on each edge. Each of the three new triangles representing a combination of two of the three powers. The good, the true and the beautiful which are the goals, purposes or ideals of the mind are described by these pairs. Thus the good is in the combination of feeling and willing, where feeling is understood as the perception of value, say as positive or negative, as enhancing or diminishing life. When this is combined with the power of action, when it is the guide of action, then we have the striving for the good. Again, thinking and willing yield the true, understood as what we strive towards using our power of resolving in clarity. Lastly, the beautiful combines thinking and feeling, and is disinterested, having no component of the will admixed with it. It is disinterested contemplation against the ideal of combining clarity and value. This may have a certain elegance, but there is a further dimension not included which distinguished between higher and lower ideals. The combination of will and value takes in both the worlds of business (what is money but a concrete form of value?) and of ethics, the two outward preoccupations that define what Matthew Arnold called 'Hebraism' with all its virtues and excesses. Similarly Arnold's 'Hellenism', the ideals of 'sweetness and light' which embraces beauty and truth respectively, has its higher and lower forms, 'bathos' and the 'sublime', science and philosophy respectively. This combinatoire for what it is worth, enables you to make some interesting connections.

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