The dogma of the Citizen mind.
Posted: Tue Feb 18, 2020 8:21 pm
The dogma of the citizen's understanding is vexed since in modern times it stands in contradistinction to the scientific understanding. The scientific understanding claims to be an improvement. The citizen must have the understanding fit for his political life and making a living in the modern economic countries. Thus, the citizen understanding is based on requirements local in time and historical when judged by the standard of a survey of human existence.
The Citizen mind includes the Scientific mind. It becomes confused as to which is meant to dominate. The notion of the Citizen mind is a specific modification of the notion of general opinion which came down from the middle ages in the Western countries, and after (or during) the Enlightenment established itself as over against the Utopian theological-political or reverse-Platonic vision of a "common sense" as in Descartes and Thomas Paine. The ancient cultures of the Mediterranean developed the notion of wise and ordinary opinion culminating in Aristotle's conception of endoxa. Thusly, one can see the movement of the understanding framing its general conditions in the aggregate via authoritarian interventions in the light of religion/duty or a notion of the public good or norm in the post Hobbseian settlement, which names the same thing (i.e., religious duty and normal rather than pathological behavior) in the general view of the last thirty generations or 2500 years.
The Citizen mind includes the Scientific mind. It becomes confused as to which is meant to dominate. The notion of the Citizen mind is a specific modification of the notion of general opinion which came down from the middle ages in the Western countries, and after (or during) the Enlightenment established itself as over against the Utopian theological-political or reverse-Platonic vision of a "common sense" as in Descartes and Thomas Paine. The ancient cultures of the Mediterranean developed the notion of wise and ordinary opinion culminating in Aristotle's conception of endoxa. Thusly, one can see the movement of the understanding framing its general conditions in the aggregate via authoritarian interventions in the light of religion/duty or a notion of the public good or norm in the post Hobbseian settlement, which names the same thing (i.e., religious duty and normal rather than pathological behavior) in the general view of the last thirty generations or 2500 years.