tom cunningham

When Aristotle is reincarnated he will not say his problem was lack of data. He will see that we're working with mostly the same old jigsaw pieces but we've put them together in a different way, & he'll recognize it's better.

The dolphin is next to the dog, not the fish. The far East is next to the far West. The sun belongs with the stars, the moon belongs with the earth. Heat is motion. The different races and sexes of humans are closer to each other than he had thought, and they're also all fitted in very close to the apes and the monkeys.

We'll just need to show the jigsaw to Aristotle, how we've rearranged all the pieces that he already had available, and he'd recognize that it's right. We wouldn't have to show him new facts, just new theory. We've accumulated a lot of new pieces but the patterns that those new pieces helped to form are, in retrospect, visible in the pieces he already had.

There are also collections of pieces which Aristotle was working on fitting together but which we have given up on. Early philosophers tried to slot together the different types of Virtue, the different types of Republic, the different types of Friendship, as if they came out of some periodic table -- the four humours, the seven vices. That expectation is much weaker today.

You can list to some 1965 lectures by Isaiah Berlin on "the Roots of Romanticism" as podcasts. Very good.

In a nutshell he's saying that in the late 18th century, after thousands of years, Western thought finally hit the ceiling of rational inquiry. The Romantic movement is just the sound of European intellectuals banging their heads against that ceiling.

He says that there came across Europe a general and explicit realization that the jigsaw has no solution; the mess cannot be untangled; the shards do not form a whole.

There is no rational reconstruction of religion, morality, aesthetics, justice, social order. There is no transcendent form which human things approximate. There is no higher truth about who is right or wrong. There is no deeper principle which can reconcile two conflicting imperatives.

The manifestation of this realization, Berlin says, is the Romantic mindset: a sudden drying up of the appetite for earnest inquiry. There is no buried treasure so put down your spade. A turn towards nature, art, irrationalism, authenticity, commitment to a cause (whatever the cause may be), primitive and ancient things, the sublime.

This also gives an interpretation of subsequent intellectual history. There were additional attempts to systematize and make sense of human ends (Utilitarianism, Marxism, Logical Positivism, Modernism, Welfare Economics, Rationalism), but they tend to be adopted only by the less clear-sighted, and attempts to make them intellectually rigorous fizzle out. The mainstream position has instead been either to avoid talking about fundamental ends at all or to adopt some kind of explicit irrationalism (Existentialism, Postmodernism, Pragmatism).

Isaiah Berlin himself is famous as an advocate of muddling-through: he says somewhere else that all the problems of the 20th century came from taking abstract ideas too seriously.

you keep asking Why , one after the other , climbing branch by branch up the hierarchy of ends towards the ultimate reasons, and you can sense you're getting near the top when it starts to sting each time you ask another one -- it feels shameful to ask why you would do these things -- asking why you would tell the truth, asking why you would love your mother; up in these heights there's also a noticeable fog of ambiguity: are these are means or are they ends? is freedom good because of its effects or in spite of them? is honesty the best policy or is honesty better than policy? These are questions without answers and it's time to climb back down.

Expanding on yesterday's single-sentence macro model, here's a longer version, trying to explain the key themes of macroeconomics as exchange among farmers in a village:

tecunningham.github.io/posts/2026-10-…