Tag: Broken

• June 24, 2014

  ‘This place would fall apart without me…’

  ‘This place would fall apart without me.’ Is that so? ‘Yes, were it not for my efforts, it would have already collapsed.’ So it teeters on the brink–is that it? ‘Not so long as I keep intervening. It’s a question of constant vigilance.’ Oh? Then suppose you were to let it go for a day. ‘Just walk away?’ No,…
• June 23, 2014

  The function of systems

  In an earlier post, I wrote that something that is broken has lost its sense of wholeness. While this is true at a formal level (formal cause), it leaves out the clearer implication that this machine has ceased to function as we would like it to. Quite naturally, we think that broken things are broken…
• June 21, 2014

  Calling tool talk into question

  On the assumption that the world is broken, one of the concepts that would come in handy (so to speak) would be that of the tool. The tool is an instrument for working on some bit of reality in order to improve it, repair it, or restore it. The tool is to be wielded in such a…
• June 20, 2014

  And if the world weren’t broken?

  It is often said that the world is broken and thus in need of fixing. I do not think so. We would not say that something is broken unless we also thought that it had once been intact. Something that is intact has all its pieces together, with each piece connected in the proper fashion to…
• June 19, 2014

  4 responses to the world’s being broken

  Suppose you begin with the thought that the world in its entirety is broken. Then, there are only four possible ways of responding to its brokenness: return it to a prior state before it was broken, bring it to a new state that is better off than the broken state, smash the broken thing and begin…