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KPI Description
| Title | P. I. Painter (Pip): Draft articles – “The Nature of Mind” and “The Social Nature of Man: Some Implications”, n. d. [1946] |
| Author | Painter, P.I. (Pip) |
| Description | File contains a typed draft on “The Nature of Mind”, 10p.; and a typed draft on “The Social Nature of Man: Some Implications”, 5p., authored by P. I. Painter. |
| URI | http://hdl.handle.net/10694/404 |
| Document Date | n.d. [1946][1] |
Contents
The Nature of Man
[1] 1. Man is personal – embodied – living – mind. That is the fundamental datum of experience which you can't deny without contradicting yourself. All reflection on man's nature and situation must therefore start from it.
2. When we reflect on this experience we find ourselves driven to conclude that the real nature of this mind is: A CREATIVE ENERGY ALWAYS MAKING FOR 'HARMONY'.
3. What is mean by harmony? To answer this all we have to do is to reflect on harmony as we experience it, e.g. […] [2]
4. Man is a growing concern. His existence, his life, is a passage from embryo towards maturity. […] [3]
5. […]
6. […]
7. […] [4]
8. […]
9. Now, as a person the individual is not an isolated fact, but a member [5] of the world of persons. Here we find the supreme example of the truth … […]
10. This creative activity has two aspects:
Man as personal:
Man a mind.
11. […]
12. […]
13. […]
14.[…]
15.[…]
SUMMARY […]
The social nature of man: some implications
[11] Man as a social … […]
1. […]
2. […]
3.
4.
5. [12]
6. [13]
7. [14]
8.
9. But though the facts of man’s social nature and his social decisions form precise and inevitable limitations, and produce specific and unavoidable consequences, there is here too a measure of elasticity and range of choice which call freedom. And it is as disastrous and foolish to say “these social conditions are inevitable and I can’t do anything about them” when I can, as it is to turn a blind eye on or rebel against real social ‘necessity’. If the mind is both a creative energy and a truth-seeking activity which pursues and can achieve knowledge of objective facts, it must be our real business to accept what is necessary, but to accept it not with resignation but as the condition of creative advance. E.g. In the present stage of industrial society it is equally futile to cling to the vanishing freedom created by economic liberalism for a privileged minority with the passionate regret of ar. Ixion Hayek; or with the economic determinist, to accept the extinguishing of all human freedom by the totalitarian Leviathan of a Planned Society with tears of pious resignation as an inevitable destiny. This means that he creative energies of the mind must see to it that the ‘planning’ of industrial society, and its institutions, give birth to new possibilities of freedom and enrichment for mankind.
10. This involves what Keats called an act of “dying into life”. But every new affirmation of life and freedom is, in some respect or other, such an act [15] of dying.
11.
Editor's Reference
- ↑ According to the letter P.I. Painter sent to Karl Polanyi on 1 October 1946, where he wrote that he/she (or someone else) had "now typed out the précis of [his] ideas, we can reasonably consider that these are these texts.