In other words, people are so lost in thought that they walk into walls or run stoplights before they realize it. They weren't in the car driving, they were examining reddish rocks on Mars or arguing with someone who's been dead for years. Have you ever wondered why people cut their fingers of with saws?

There is a big difference between that and being silently aware of yourself and your surroundings at the present moment. It is the present moment that is reality. It is what must be understood and dealt with. There is nothing else, all else is thought inside your own head and therefore abstract and not real. That's not to say that thought or intellectual endeavours are useless, but they shouldn't be allowed to take over and turn us into people so lost in abstraction that we become ideologues or run stoplights and kill people.

Applying this to economics, if people would just get their households into order by dealing with their present needs and plan for future ones, and stop letting those thoughts tell them that they need this expensive dress or that bass boat, there would be little or no need for such abstract 'sciences' as microeconomics or macroeconomics, whatever those phantoms are supposed to be.

Dr. Fleming @98:
Are you referring to the ISI college guides?

I quite agree. Its more popular and modern manifestation is the neo-con's penchant for using contradiction of terms such as their favorite: "creative destruction." The taking of innocent life so that one might have life in abundance. The obliteration of bad governments so to add chaos to the lives of those suffering from its ill effects. As one english historian of the West put it, " Our old enemies had guts and could think like the devil who inspired them. But the modernists are inspired by a little minor he-devil, with one eye and a slammer, and the result is very poor."

Underlying these aberrations is a detachment from "things as they are." A poem I grappled with in youth and then gave up on at least addresses the subject:

The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.

They said, "You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are."

The man replied, "Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar."

And they said then, "But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,

A tune upon the blue guitar
Of things exactly as they are."

I can never remember quite what conclusions I came to so long ago about what Stevens was driving at, but he raises the question, at any rate. The causes of this dissociation are many and varied, though I would not think Petrarch played much of a part, one way or the other. My old bugbear Ficino and his friends, though, may be guiltier than I suspected when I spent a dreadful year, as a firstyear graduate student at Chapel Hill, wrestling with Renaissance Latin under the benign, though severe, tutelage of Douglas Thompson. Ficino is not always (not ever?) completely candid, but the Neoplatonists and Hermetics he adored at the peril of his soul did speak of the mastery of the elements to be gained by men who held the right ideas and knew the right words to speak to the archons who rule the planetary spheres. I wonder if this is related to the fact that much of Renaissance science--ethical as well as natural--aims at power rather than knowledge per se or Machiavelli's power-based analysis of politics? I fear JE's comments have led me into territory where a humble philologist and moralist should not have strayed.

The problem is, in short, Not Paying Attention to Things. Ideologizing is the political-rhetorical manifestation of platonizing abstracts: abstracts are really just that, ab-stract, having no real being except in (first) substances. The moderate realism on the problem of the universals, more or less agreed upon by the (pre-nominalist) Scholastics -- whatever profound gulf divides the fully-fleshed Thomistic and Scotistic metaphysics of the univerals -- strongly affirms this, as Aristotle had begun to insist against Plato. Analytic philosophers today are rushing in this direction too, through the slightly odd but perfectly sensible medium of (modal) logic. I suspect this is culturally motivated, at least within the 'science'-worshipping academic culture, by the raw primacy of sense-observation inexorably required by post-Newtonian physics.

But the trouble is that, whatever a few (and in many other respects quite foolish) philosophers claim to think, virtually *everybody* today thinks ideologically, or rather Ideally, at more or less every verbal moment of their lives. We worship 'Mere Words as Such' -- when they don't really stand for Real Things at all; we don't distinguish meaning and reference, or imagination and abstraction, because we don't know the difference between Bodies and Bugaboos. As if a finite being could imagine abstracts! (Abelard was the first, I think, to note that, if this were true, then humans could create ex nihilo; which puts a saliently luciferan spin on this sort of Idealism.)

This so far might be merely carelessness, the slothful man's unwitting slouch toward satan -- but the really loathsome gnostic violation committed by the Idealists (and ultimately Plato) was the blindness to bodies that this hypostasization entails. But just the contrary to this 'blindness to bodies' is the historical fact that lies at the heart, or rather mystically *is* the Heart, of Christianity. No body-hater can love the Incarnate; all ideologues are political-rhetorical body-haters; so every ideologue is politically-rhetorically denying the Incarnation. (But the physicality of the political-rhetorical denial is the actual crucifixion of the Body of the Incarnate.)

At least the practical non-theorist, who simply knows How to Get Things Done in the World -- and Xenophon knows this masterfully -- precisely in his practicality, is not blind to bodies!

"Euclid alone has looked on beauty bare."
(A poet describing first principles)

“It is not possible to formulate a “theory” of this kind of life or to express in words its essence: it is too simple. “To love,” “to live in naked reality” – that is all that we can say with human words.”
(A Carthusian monk describing the contemplative life)

"The point, I think, is to develop a wholesome point of view by reading and studying good books in company with people of sound minds who are averse to lying."
(Tom Fleming on Education)