From Modernity to After-Modernity. (21)

Part 2. Theoretical considerations
Chapter 5. About the arts

5.2. The origins of the arts.

It is my contention that to have a valid conversation about the arts we have first and foremost to understand how and why they emerged in the first place. The arts are indeed not a given and they also did not fall from the sky. Nature has no patience with things that are of no use to it and very fast it discards such un-useful things. So logic implies that a human demand must have arisen, sometime and in a given context, for the usage of the arts. They must indeed have emerged as a valid answer to a human necessity in a given context. That’s what I want to address here.

From Modernity to After-Modernity. (20)

Part 2. Theoretical considerations
Chapter 5. About the arts


Dear readers,

Technical problems prevented me from publishing my last series of posts over the last 4 weeks. The problem is finally solved.
I'll now be publishing, the 5 final posts of this winter series, on the coming Fridays...
Sorry again for the interruption.

Laodan

From Modernity to After-Modernity (about chapter 5)

 Part 2. Theoretical considerations
Chapter 5. About the arts

Hello to my regular readers and to everybody else,


As of my post last Friday my writing this winter already generated 560 book pages.  I started working on the last chapter, this chapter 5, but will pass this week's publication because I was exhausted and needed some time to put my ideas together. This chapter should be the culmination of this winter's writing so I feel I need to get it right.

This is how I presently envisage the architecture of this text:

From Modernity to After-Modernity (19)

Part 2. Theoretical considerations
Chapter 4. About societal governance and societal evolution


4.7.2.4. The Chinese empire

I mentioned in “4.7.2.3. The transition from tribes to empires. A. What is an empire?” that the word “empire” is a European construct and that the understanding of the concept in the European acceptance is not adapted to all contexts. But more to the point; the way Europeans have defined the concept around the exercise of power has no place in the Chinese context and more particularly in its early phase of unification and centralization 

From Modernity to After-Modernity (18)

 Part 2. Theoretical considerations
Chapter 4. About societal governance and societal evolution

4.7. About the institutions of governance (part 2)



I touched very briefly on the subject of Chinese governance in "4.6.3. Societal reproduction – Individual communion 2. China unified its early kingdoms along the Yellow River some 3000 years BC under the '3 sovereigns' and the '5 emperors' ". What follows is an expansion on the content of that text.

From Modernity to After-Modernity (17)

 Part 2. Theoretical considerations
Chapter 4. About societal governance and societal evolution

4.7. About the institutions of governance

4.1 to 4.6 were devolved to the 25 interactions and feedback loops between the most determinant parameters shaping individual and societal life. These interactions constitute the backbone of an analytical framework that helps to analyze and to understand the working of societies and how to operate them the most efficiently. I completed a succinct analysis of these 25 interactions in 4.6. It reads like a “philosophy of life and societal governance” that is being derived from one initial axiom which says that the life of species is given by the play, or the dance, between their two polarities: societies (assemblings) and individuals (particles). The knowledge, about the operation of their polarity-plays, acts like a handle that reveals the future.