-SM Stirling, Prince Of Outcasts (New York, 2017), Chapter Eighteen, p. 386.
This is the point of materialist philosophy. People have to eat before they can think. How a society organizes economic production and distribution determines its ideas about property, laws, rights, duties, obligations and values. Personal loyalty was paramount in feudalism whereas clearly demarcated property rights have become paramount. A poet or a philosopher needs food, clothes, shelter, an income, pen and paper to work with and freedom from the necessity of physical labor. Ideas did not preexist physical necessities. Plato stood reality on its head when he thought that general ideas were more real than particular objects or that souls contemplating ideas could exist independently of bodies needing food.
3 comments:
Existence is contingent, ultimately chaotic in the strict sense of the word; most of human society exists because people -believe- it does.
Everything beyond the individual is an act of imagination, all communities (tribes, classes, religions, whatever) being "imagined communities".
Humans are naturally inclined to think that way, being social animals, but anything beyond a couple of hunter-gatherer bands is "unnatural", a cultural construction.
Reiko is reflecting that her ancestors in the time of the Pacific War had essentially all the determination there is -- many armies talk about fighting to the death, but they really did it -- but underestimated the determination of their more numerous opponents.
They weren't as death-defying as the Japanese, but they were determined -enough-, when the other factors were considered.
As for feudalism, essentially the same thing that happened in Europe in the post-Roman period happened in Japan after the collapse of the Heinan court system and the rise of the samurai.
Samurai started out as hired retainers of the court nobility; in an exact parallel, "samurai" originally meant precisely "servant", as "knight" had.
Eventually the samurai decided to kick the court nobility out of the way and take everything themselves because they realized that under the ceremonial forms there was nothing to stop them... so they stopped paying attention to the forms.
It's a tribute to the power of ideas that they kept the remnant around for ceremony's sake, essentially because of religious sanctions.
Incidentally, this is the reason the First Sophistic -- the appearance of an intellectual system capable of using the dissecting scalpel of the negative elenchos, the self-conscious examination of its own assumptions -- was such a radical thing.
The question 'why believe that?' is incredibly culturally destabilizing to systems which arise, as almost all do, in enclosed self-referential belief circles, where the conclusion is used to prove itself.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
The Americans of the Pacific Theater of WW II were not merely determined enough to defeat Japan, they had the superior numbers and resources necessary to finally force Japan to surrender. Which is why Admiral Yamamoto disliked the idea of Japan going to war against the US, because he did not believe Japan could beat an aroused and enraged America.
Merry Christmas! Sean
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