• George Grant Lament For A Nation Pdf Printers

Principally, I would say, Professor Grant, because of your book,Lament for a Nation,dated 1965, which I had the pleasure of reading then and browsing through again last night, wondering how, if at all, your views had changed about the nation whose departure from this earth you were lamenting, in a way, in 1965.

By 1970 George Grant was recognized as one of Canada’s leading political philosophers. The previous year he had delivered the Massey Lectures, the country’s most prestigious lecture series, entitled Time as History, on CBC radio. In April 1970 he felt the need of a rest and he and his wife Sheila went on holiday to Barbados.

While returning to their hotel after an evening out, the taxi in which they were riding collided head-on with an oncoming vehicle. Four people died in the accident; both Grant and Sheila were injured, in his case extremely seriously. His leg and right hand. In these talks I am going to discuss the conception of time as history.

Next week I will try to enucleate what is being thought when time is conceived as history. What part does such a conception play in what we think ourselves to be? What is its relation to what we think worth doing? After that I will attempt to say something of how this conception came to be in the Western world.

That there is something unique about Western civilization seems to me indubitable when one remembers the fact that in the last three hundred years agents. To start from the obvious: the word ‘tradition,’ in its present common sense usage, is much nearer to its origins, as an English word out of Latin, than is the word ‘revolution.’ It still means what is handed over, what is passed across. Indeed in earlier usage, the sense of ‘handed over’ could be used to express betrayal. A country was handed over to its enemies; it was betrayed; it was said to be traditioned. But now we use it simply in the sense of what is handed over or across the generations: what one generation knows about nature,. Individual life is always the loser in nature. Because human beings are self-conscious, the apprehension of this is a startling presence, even when the death concerned has been long expected and comes at the end of a natural span.

But when death comes for the young – a child before his parents, a young man who has only begun the course – death appears unnatural and therefore more terrible. When the young death is that of a noble person (in origin the words noble and beautiful mean the same) then there is a deep revolt against the fact of death – against its. I thought I would say a few remarks about the study of objectivity to those of you who are going into the practical life.

My examples will be from history. Such examples come easily to my mind – because before I became a philosopher I studied history and still think very much as an historian. But what I am going to say applies equally to other studies. Let me say what should not need to be said in any university and does not, I think, need to be said in a subject with traditions such as history, that intellectual integrity is. The politics of technologized societies are an open field for demagogic tactics. Politics is the working out of public disagreement about purposes. But politics is now increasingly replaced by administration, as disagreement about purposes is legitimized away by the pervasive assumption that all which publicly matters is the achievement of technical ‘rationality.’ Elections become increasingly plebiscites in which the masses choose between leaders or teams who will be in charge of the administrative personnel.

George Grant Lament For A Nation Pdf Printers

In plebiscites it is necessary to have leaders who can project their images through the various media, and so catch the interest of the masses who. The first section, following, is an excerpt on the language of ‘values’ from pages 31–48 in the original. Pages 1–30 contain several draft ‘beginnings’ that do not add substantially to what is published elsewhere. How then do we know what purposes we should use computers for and what not? The content of ‘should’ certainly does not come to us from ‘nature’ because in bringing the computer to be we have represented nature to ourselves as objective stuff which we master in our transcending of it; certainly not by the revelations of God because we have been taught that.

LAPIERRE: And Dr George Grant, author and professor of religion at McMaster University in Hamilton. GRANT: What happened, in my opinion, was that the biggest empire on earth decided about a little country right around the other side of the world from it, that it would smash it if it didn’t have the government that the Americans wanted. Now, this was a terrific lesson for Canadians because this wasn’t a crime done by people who were alien to us. This was a crime done by people who speak the same language, who share the same continent, under whose influence. COOK: Well, George, you’re a philosopher and a professor of religion.

But a great deal of your writing seems to me to deal with public affairs. Does that get you in trouble with your fellow philosophers? GRANT: Well, you know, philosophers in the English-speaking world have been mainly interested in certain logical questions and not very interested in the public world. But I don’t think it cook: Well, how do you explain your own ability to escape what you call ‘modern philosophy?’ That is to say, you are a kind of an outsider in terms of modern philosophy. GZOWSKI: George Grant, author, Rhodes scholar, professor of religion, now at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, is also, I hope he will not be embarrassed to hear me say, something of, if not a cult figure, then a folk hero of sorts to many people.

Principally, I would say, Professor Grant, because of your book, Lament for a Nation,dated 1965, which I had the pleasure of reading then and browsing through again last night, wondering how, if at all, your views had changed about the nation whose departure from this earth you were lamenting, in a way, in 1965. The classical way of asking ‘what is politics?’ was the unhistorical question ‘what is the political?’ What is that common quality which belongs to any event that we call political, the absence of which makes an event apolitical?

Clearly if the word political means anything more than what happens, then some human events are not such. Modern common sense starts from the judgment that the political has to do with the activities of the state. But immediately a theoretical difficulty arises. If we are not totalitarians, we imply in so naming the political that there are some activities which transcend.

During this century Western civilization has speeded its world-wide influence through the universal acceptance of its technology. The very platitudinous nature of this statement may hide the novelty which is spoken in it. The word ‘technology’ is new, and its unique bringing together of techne and logos shows that what is common around the world is this novel interpenetration of the arts and sciences.11 As in all marriages, this new union of making and knowing has changed both parties, so that when we speak ‘technology’ we are speaking a new activity which Western Europeans brought into the world, and which.

Different civilizations and different periods within the same civilization have had differing paradigms of knowledge. The principle of each of these paradigms has been the relation between an aspiration of human thought and the effective conditions for its realization. In our present civilization our paradigm is what we call ‘natural science.’ One does not have to be a physicist to know that physics has been the exemplary and most remarkable intellectual achievement of our era. Therefore it is appropriate in discussing ‘the frontiers and limitations of knowledge’ to start from a discussion of that paradigm.

Indeed at a meeting of. ‘Beyond industrial growth’ can be interpreted¹ with the emphasis on any of the three words. Different issues will arise depending upon which word is emphasized.

My task in this series is to emphasize ‘beyond.’² What will it be like to live on the further side of industrial growth? The other day when I had taken a foreign guest to Burlington³ she asked me on our return to Dundas:⁴ ‘Where is Toronto?’ I replied: ‘Toronto is on the further side of Burlington.’ (What it is to be beyond Burlington is of course quite beyond my imagination.)⁵ The thinker who first caught. I think that on the whole, there is going to be less to go around in the North American economy, making it tougher to divide the pie than in the past. I regret it, but I think there is going to be an increase in class struggle. I am not a Marxist and I regret that tougher actions will result from the divisions in the economy. When there are tough actions, the weak suffer.

I think that more and more people live within the orbit of some great corporation which protects them. These corporations can be business, trade unions, government. Suffers, yields What do I mean by obedience what was its relation to the old view of what is good what does obedience mean to the new – The classic case of obedience is X.¹ the lamb led to the slaughter – suffers, Yields X. Commands by beseeching One way of looking at obedience is to ask the question backwards why does the ancient view of good include the idea of obedience (therefore) write down what was said about good Good was what we were suited for As animals we were suited for life, pleasant life, procreating life As thinking we.

Did Nietzsche ever write about comedy? Perhaps this is what is most wrong about him and perhaps about Heidegger. There is a romantic egocentricity about Nietzsche and Heidegger that I find hard to stomach.

If one sees that historicism is true but that it is deadly to the soul – then one way of opting out of the deadliness of the situation is to go in for myth-making (are they delusions?) as a way of escaping from the natural or perhaps actual?. There is something like might in all history. Hysteron-proteronis when you put first things last – and last things. This book gives a powerful account of what has been going on politically and economically in Canada during the last decades, and particularly under the Trudeau administration since 1968.² It is opportune that the book should appear at this time because it describes coherently the complex relation between the political crisis caused by the establishment of the PQ government in Quebec City, and the degeneration in the fabric of our country by our growing dependence on American imperial capitalism.³ The relation between these two central themes of our history has never been easy to understand.

Its complexity is illustrated in. Canadian politics has had two main questions: (i) how to maintain some independence while sharing this continent with the most powerful modern empire; and (ii) how to maintain workable relations between the French and English-speaking communities. Those two very complex questions can only be thought about clearly if they are thought about together. This country was made up of two founding groups who weren’t very friendly to each other, but who made a contract because they thought such a contract would help each of them achieve their own particular ends – but they were different purposes.

The present constitutional crisis has. The subject matter of this book is of central significance for those who study political philosophy. Socrates is the primal figure for that uniquely Western activity. More than any other modern thinker, Nietzsche placed Socrates at the centre of Western history as the creator of rationalism, and claimed in his own thought to have overcome that rationalism.

Therefore, in Nietzsche’s view of Socrates we are near the centre of thinking about the nature of political philosophy. For somebody from outside the US (such as myself) it is a happiness to find that a professor of government at Cornell should devote. QUESTION: Let’s look back at Lament for a Nationeleven years later. First, do you still think that Canada’s disappearance as a nation is a matter of necessity? Do you think that nationalism has a future as far as Canada is concerned?

GRANT: Obviously no sane person predicts the details of the future. It is quite clear that the central ruling class of the great corporations, national or multi-national, do not think in terms of Canadian independence. Beyond that I find it very hard to believe that the general English-speaking bourgeois want anything particularly distinctive to be built on the. ‘Faith and the multiversity’ is a subject which could be tackled from many angles, both practical and theoretical.

The essence of the question is, however, the relation between faith and modern science. 11You may well say – not that terrible old chestnut once again! Hasn’t there been so much discussion of this over the last centuries that there is nothing worthwhile left to be said about it? My answer is no.

The relation between modern science and faith lies at the core of the relation between faith and the multiversity; and thought has not yet reached that core. Many Christians turn. Why did so many Canadians love John Diefenbaker? Watching his funeral on television, I had to ask myself why I should feel such affection for him, such a sense of debt for what he represented. The trust of his countrymen had enabled him to break the long smooth reign of the Liberals from 1935–57, and had been the basis of the enormous electoral victory of 1958. But this love was even more marked in the elections of 1963 and 1965. In those elections he had the full weight of the powerful classes against him (including its members in his.