Krzysztof Michalski
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780691143460
- eISBN:
- 9781400840212
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691143460.003.0002
- Subject:
- Philosophy, General
This chapter introduces the images of the grazing cows, the child at play, and the person observing them with envy and emotion. It argues that these images are supposed to confront us with human ...
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This chapter introduces the images of the grazing cows, the child at play, and the person observing them with envy and emotion. It argues that these images are supposed to confront us with human life, concentrated in the lived moment and simultaneously tearing the past from the future. It is life stretched out from “yesterday” to “tomorrow” and thereby burdened with memory and guilt—and at the same time innocent and oblivious, growing out of time in its every instant: the connection between time and its sickness, eternity. Such a concept of the human condition, the chapter shows, carries far-reaching consequences.Less
This chapter introduces the images of the grazing cows, the child at play, and the person observing them with envy and emotion. It argues that these images are supposed to confront us with human life, concentrated in the lived moment and simultaneously tearing the past from the future. It is life stretched out from “yesterday” to “tomorrow” and thereby burdened with memory and guilt—and at the same time innocent and oblivious, growing out of time in its every instant: the connection between time and its sickness, eternity. Such a concept of the human condition, the chapter shows, carries far-reaching consequences.
Peter D. Norton
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- August 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780262141000
- eISBN:
- 9780262280754
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- The MIT Press
- DOI:
- 10.7551/mitpress/9780262141000.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, History of Science, Technology, and Medicine
Before the advent of the automobile, users of city streets were diverse and included children at play and pedestrians at large. By 1930, most streets were primarily a motor thoroughfares where ...
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Before the advent of the automobile, users of city streets were diverse and included children at play and pedestrians at large. By 1930, most streets were primarily a motor thoroughfares where children did not belong and where pedestrians were condemned as “jaywalkers.” This book argues that to accommodate automobiles, the American city required not only a physical change but also a social one: before the city could be reconstructed for the sake of motorists, its streets had to be socially reconstructed as places where motorists belonged. It was not an evolution, the book states, but a bloody and sometimes violent revolution. It describes how street users struggled to define and redefine what streets were for. The book examines developments in the crucial transitional years from the 1910s to the 1930s, uncovering a broad anti-automobile campaign that reviled motorists as “road hogs” or “speed demons” and cars as “juggernauts” or “death cars.” It considers the perspectives of all users—pedestrians, police (who had to become “traffic cops”), street railways, downtown businesses, traffic engineers (who often saw cars as the problem, not the solution), and automobile promoters. The book finds that pedestrians and parents campaigned in moral terms, fighting for “justice.” Cities and downtown businesses tried to regulate traffic in the name of “efficiency.” Automotive interest groups, meanwhile, legitimized their claim to the streets by invoking “freedom”—a rhetorical stance of particular power in the United States.Less
Before the advent of the automobile, users of city streets were diverse and included children at play and pedestrians at large. By 1930, most streets were primarily a motor thoroughfares where children did not belong and where pedestrians were condemned as “jaywalkers.” This book argues that to accommodate automobiles, the American city required not only a physical change but also a social one: before the city could be reconstructed for the sake of motorists, its streets had to be socially reconstructed as places where motorists belonged. It was not an evolution, the book states, but a bloody and sometimes violent revolution. It describes how street users struggled to define and redefine what streets were for. The book examines developments in the crucial transitional years from the 1910s to the 1930s, uncovering a broad anti-automobile campaign that reviled motorists as “road hogs” or “speed demons” and cars as “juggernauts” or “death cars.” It considers the perspectives of all users—pedestrians, police (who had to become “traffic cops”), street railways, downtown businesses, traffic engineers (who often saw cars as the problem, not the solution), and automobile promoters. The book finds that pedestrians and parents campaigned in moral terms, fighting for “justice.” Cities and downtown businesses tried to regulate traffic in the name of “efficiency.” Automotive interest groups, meanwhile, legitimized their claim to the streets by invoking “freedom”—a rhetorical stance of particular power in the United States.
