Dinesh's photos with the keyword: Thinking Without a Banister

. . . Aristotle made a very great discovery, which, in a nutshell, lies in the word ‘energeia’ -- that is, in activity that has its end in itself. Thus in his ‘Nicomachean Ethics’ Aristotle talks about flute playing. Flute playing is an activity that has its end only in itself. It doesn’t leave an end product beyond its activity. And such activities, according to Aristotle, are the highest because they are the only ones where the means-end category does not apply. Where there is an end and everything else is considered the means, and end is deprived. ~ 482

From Faces in the cloud Without action, without the capacity to start something new and thus articulate the new beginning that comes into the world with the birth of each human being, the life of man, spent between birth and death, would inevitably be doomed beyond salvation. The life span itself would be running toward death, inevitably carrying everything human to ruin and destruction. Action, with all its uncertainties, is like an ever-present reminder that men, though they must die, are not born in order to die but in order to begin something new. “Initium ut esset homo creatus est” -- “that there be a beginning man was created,” said Augustine. With the creation of man, the principle of beginning came into the world -- which, of course is only another way of saying that with the creation of man, the principle of freedom appeared on earth. ~ Page 307

www.arlingtoncemetery.mil/Explore/Tomb-of-the-Unknown-Soldier Action without a name, a “who” attached to it, is meaningless whereas an artwork retains its relevance whether or not we know the master’s name. Let me remind you of the monuments to the Unknown Soldier after World War I. They bear testimony to the need for finding a “who,” an indetifiable somebody whom four years of mass slaughter should have revealed. The unwillingness to resign oneself to the brutal fact that the agent of the war was actually nobody inspired the erection of the monuments to the unknown ones -- that is to all those whom the war had failed to make known, robbing them thereby, not of their achievement, but of their human dignity. ~ Page 305 (Excerpt: Chapter: Labor, Work, Action ~ “Thinking Without Banister” ~ Hannah Arendt

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