Cȯsꭑọ ∴ ọꭑƨȯƆ @cosmiccitizen@schelling.pt

A vegetable also has the potential to develop in complexity and organization. Call this maturation. And the incredible thing about vegetable maturation is that they seem to mature according to kind. Aristotle never saw a carrot get confused and accidentally develop into an apple tree, so it seemed to the Aristotelians that these paths to maturity were stable, predictable, locked-in runways leading from present to future. Call this the "telos," or "goal" of development.

Aristotleans linked this to other observations about nature: humans seem to have lots of potential, whereas ducks seem to have less, and mossy rocks seem to have barely any potential at all. If you shave a man he's still a man, but if you shave a mossy rock it ceases to be a mossy rock.

So this leads us to the distinction between mineral, vegetable, animal, and rational potentials. A mineral really only has one potential, which is the potential to exist. While a vegetable also shares that...

Beneath the funny hat and the fake mustache we find that there is, in reality, a deeper potential beneath the immediate behavior. This is the essence of the thing: a kind of potential or capacity that holds together lower-order potentials and capacities.

If Socrates is a husband AND a teacher, that simply reveals that whatever Socrates is in essence must also include the capacity to teach and the capacity to couple. And so on with other examples.

Aristotle's solution for this kind of thing is to introduce the idea of potential: the deer might eat grass, to be sure, but the deer might also survive on grain, apples, and the rest. The essential deer-ness of the deer has something to do with a deeper potential to transform deer snacks into fully functional deer. This has a more general application, too. Aristotle got to respond to the question of identity writ large by insisting that even when some identifiable whozit acts unusually...

Rationally, then, where does the deer end and the grass begin? Many contemporary philosophers are happy to let this land as a nice spot of ecological woo-woo and feel all wooly-headed. Likewise, both of the non-Aristotelian crews I referenced would be happy to assert that there was really no deer and no grass in the first place, and we draw pragmatic distinctions between grass and deer as it suits our purposes. Not Aristotle, however. Let us cleave the deer from the grass!

Aristotle's "De Anima" was all about creating a third option for analyzing natural phenomena that didn't rely on either the sophists / pyrrhonists slipperiness or any kind of metaphysical essentialism. This breezy pluralism is what has proven attractive to many people even since we've learned that the atomist metaphysicians were, in fact, correct all along.
One of the standard challenges to the definition of any living thing would be eating: a deer, say, survives by eating grass. ...

(He was supposed to have written his dissertation about Shelley, author of "Ozymandias," but got the two Romantic poets confused and considered it his gentlemanly honor to complete the project once endeavored. The unpublished manuscript occupies three feet of shelf space in the St. Hudibras College Library.)

Both Russell and Keynes recorded nightmares where G.R. Professorson reached inside their mouths and pulled their tongues out. Professorson once won an argument about inductive inference by killing a Spaniard, but also got out of service in the Great War as a conscientious objector. He received tenure during this time for his notes on a dissertation towards a Prolegomenon on the Egyptology of Keats.

G.R. Professorson -- born 1899 inside the women's waiting room of the library of St. Hudibras' College, Cambridge; died in his office as Sir Thopas Chair, Oxford, 2002; best friend of TS Eliot and JBS Haldane; first man in England to ever be found not guilty by reason of insanity for the crime of atheism; bisexual libertine and suspected father of at least 2 Fields Medalists; linguist, lawyer, geometer, alchemist; -- his only published work is *Why Are There Still Snails in My Garden?* (1953).

I love this lil video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ptFnIj71SM

WHICH WAY, NON-COMMIE?

The film also does an excellent job pointing at the gap between propaganda and reality.
When the President would recite pablum over the radio about "I pledge allegiance to the American flag," I was reminded of the stupid goddamn bullshit I had to listen to about how "we're all in this together."

I just watched Civil War, and while I think that the film overall pulled a switcharoo in its marketing (selling boomer dads on a political thriller), I do think that the film resonates uniquely well with the feeling of societal breakdown in 2020-1:
- it's not full-stack collapse, but only partial-stack
- breakdown is not emancipatory, but instead turns power over to small-town big-dicks
- sites, locations, and clearings are the root of biopower

Wow. Funny example. I meant to say "temporarily unavailable" but the typo ruptured through. Thrown once again into new possibilities.

Big thunderstorm over my area last night. Everyone's operating with disturbed sleep. Everything about consensus reality is six inches to the left. Harmonious social collaboration is temporarily available.

In *Empire*, Niall Ferguson features a cute little recipe that was promoted by the BBC for Dominion Day that included ingredients from all of the Crown's dominions. In a world in which people like Gandhi were actively organizing anti-racist politics in EG South Africa and India, this kind of propaganda is outright denial of reality.
But PBS American Portrait is far worse because it lacks the courage to acknowledge its celebration of cultural power and domination. It launders that message!