A few degrees above freezing.

Winter’s gentle, late-afternoon light. Roses, purples, blues. Repeating shapes and congruence.

A suspended crescent moon.

John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme.

Liberalism

Now: One of Nietzsche’s aphorisms: it is easy to be against something — but for what?

Earliest: what is liberalism, after all?

Earlier: some searching had led me to John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty.

Mill’s only accepted justification for coercion of an individual — to prevent harm to another individual:

That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant … Over himself, over his body and mind, the individual is sovereign.

Mill’s requirement for discussion and defence and strengthening of any idea, and guarding against blind adherence to dogma:

First, if any opinion is compelled to silence, that opinion may, for aught we can certainly know, be true. To deny this is to assume our own infallibility. Secondly, though the silenced opinion be an error, it may, and very commonly does, contain a portion of truth; and since the general or prevailing opinion on any subject is rarely or never the whole truth, it is only by the collision of adverse opinions that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied. Thirdly, even if the received opinion be not only true, but the whole truth; unless it is suffered to be, and actually is, vigorously and earnestly contested, it will, by most of those who receive it, be held in the manner of a prejudice, with little comprehension or feeling of its rational grounds. And not only this, but, fourthly, the meaning of the doctrine itself will be in danger of being lost, or enfeebled, and deprived of its vital effect on the character and conduct: the dogma becoming a mere formal profession, inefficacious for good, but cumbering the ground, and preventing the growth of any real and heartfelt conviction, from reason or personal experience.

Now: At heart, liberalism is about being a Philosopher. As Plato reasoned, only between two philosophers can the spark of Truth be attained — not when they do battle against one another, but when they battle together for Truth.

Individualism

Any true individualism is grounded in universality and submits to the best of what is.

Individualism is ruthless — cutting the superfluous — adding the essential — feeling and learning and judging and knowing which is which.

From Wikipedia, we know that John Coltrane searched far and wide, not only within music:

His library of books included The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, the Bhagavad Gita, and Paramahansa Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi. The last of these describes, in Lavezzoli’s words, a “search for universal truth, a journey that Coltrane had also undertaken. Yogananda believed that both Eastern and Western spiritual paths were efficacious, and wrote of the similarities between Krishna and Christ. This openness to different traditions resonated with Coltrane, who studied the Qur’an, the Bible, Kabbalah, and astrology with equal sincerity.” He also explored Hinduism, Jiddu Krishnamurti, African history, the philosophical teachings of Plato and Aristotle, and Zen Buddhism.

From Wikipedia we also know that Coltrane’s association with Bill Evans had led to some of his discoveries:

Bill Evans was an avid reader, in particular philosophy and humorous books. His shelves held works by Plato, Voltaire, Whitehead, Santayana, Freud, Margaret Mead, Sartre and Thomas Merton; and he had a special fondness for Thomas Hardy’s work. He was fascinated with Eastern religions and philosophies including Islam, Zen, and Buddhism. It was Evans who introduced John Coltrane to the Indian philosophy of Krishnamurti.

Conservative and liberal

I rather like the notions of conservative as “to conserve what good has been achieved already” and liberal as “to be open to the fact that the best has not been achieved”.

Both have their place. Both are constructive.

Yin and yang can be thought of as complementary (rather than opposing) forces that interact to form a dynamic system in which the whole is greater than the assembled parts.

emphasis is mine, source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yin_and_yang