I successfully avoided finishing a book this evening, called The Science of Qualitative Research by Martin Packer, which I need to finish by tomorrow evening to write something up for a reading group I belong to. One of the many things I did instead was reflect on the maxim we examined in class today. To wit: We promise according to our hopes This was written by the great French stylist and writer of maxims Francois de La Rochefoucauld, who crafted and built amazing palaces of sentences within which to house his piercing insights into human conduct. I want to revisit the controlling values we started to articulate in this statement. I hear in this statement a "conditional," and as a conditional statement, there must be some effect, and so: When Why? Well, what is the antithesis of hope? Despair? Or is it rather hopelessness? Hopelessness and despair are quite different. When we hope, we leave ourselves open to the hope getting crushed. Hope needs despair and despair hope. Indeed, the more high the hope, the more deep the despair one is likely to fall into. If there is no hope, there is no disappointment, no despair. This is the meaning of what the ancient Greeks called the Stoic philosophy. What I have just done here is walk through the scheme, the figural structure, of the antithesis that Rochefoucauld gave us the hint of with his maxim. He only gave us a fragment: just the context. Here is a scene from the wonderful musical The Man of La Mancha, where Miguel de Cervantes seems to be speaking back to Rochefoucauld:
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