carnival and lent

did you reset your clock? Daylight saving times… getting darker…

…and scary. Watching Pence speaking right now, I can’t wait to hear Trump, …gotta  go,  here he is coming….

…now I can go back to read, while Santa Klaus dresses up for the occasion.

[…] becoming conscious of existing structures of domination always has an emancipatory effect. Becoming conscious can also transform modes of behavior implanted by authority into guiding images determine one’s own free behavior. Hegel is an excellent example of this too, which appears reactionary only to those predisposed to think so. Tradition is not the vindication of what has come down from the past but the further creation of moral and social life; it depends on being made conscious and freely carried on.

What can be submitted to reflection is always limited in comparison to what is determined by previous formative influences. Blindness to the fact of human finitude is what leads one to accept the Enlightenment’s abstract motto and to disparage all authority—and it is a momentous misunderstanding when the mere recognition of this fact is taken to express a political position, a defense of the status quo. In truth, the talk about progress or revolution—or even conservation—would be mere declamation if it laid claim to an abstract, apriori saving knowledge. It may be that under revolutionary conditions the emergence of the Robespierres, the abstract moralists who want to remake the world according to their reason, will win applause. But it is just as certain that their hour is appointed. I can only consider it a fatal confusion when the dialectical character of all reflection, its relation to the pregiven, is tied to an ideal of total enlightenment. To me that seems just as mistaken as the ideal of fully rational selfclarity, of an individual who would live in full consciousness and control of his impulses and motives. […]

Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method p.573-574

Pieter Bruegel The Elder 1559 • the fight between carnival and lent