Sensitivity

Sensitivity means noble, obliging, discerning, or observational; then, there is immediately another definition. That is because of the senses, which operate like a linear sequence, or perhaps not. In Continental philosophy, it means the hope of the human being; and not the animal. Friedrich Nietzsche writes, "Suppose, therefore, we say with Nietzsche that there is no absolute truth, but that all that has been true in the past which has been the means of making the “plant man flourish best”—or, since the meaning of “best” is open to some debate, let us say, flourish in a Nietzschean sense, that is to say, thanks to a mastery of life, and to a preponderance of all those qualities which say yea to existence, and which suggest no flight from this world and all its pleasure and pain. And suppose we add that, wherever we may find the plant man flourishing, in this sense, we should there suspect the existence of truth?—I If we say this with Nietzsche, any sort of assumption or arbitrary valuation which aims at a reverse order of things, becomes a dangerous lie in a super-moral and purely physiological sense."

Fiction is a modality in its erstwhile form, because it speaks to the idea of sense duality with language, communication, religion, and absolute truth. It is, what it is not. I am therefore, I think. I am not fictional, then when we say the "plant man is flourishing," it is to say that I am not the man; I experienced the plant man flourishing as a fictional truth. Fiction is a good modality, however, it is not real in the political sense, only in the artistic sense.

Sensitivity is a another modality. A modality is the jurisdiction, history, and moral, even democratic will of a people at the time, to form an opinion, that becomes a societal will power. That develops business, technology, war, and philosophy. Gordon Wood spoke about the consent of the governed as a political modality. That Hume, Nozick, and many British philosophers agree that a government cannot exist without the will of the governed.

In Howard Zinn's "Federalism from the Bottom Up," he gives us an idea of how sensitivity, and its continental philosophy develop in a priori (from the former). "a body of lived experience that shaped the vocabulary those observers had at hand” (p 11)

References

This article "Sensitivity" is from Wikipedia. The list of its authors can be seen in its historical and/or the page Edithistory:Sensitivity. Articles copied from Draft Namespace on Wikipedia could be seen on the Draft Namespace of Wikipedia and not main one.

---