AfterThoughts
After Liberty
Questions like 'What is life, and how should one live it?', 'What kind of being am I, with what thoughts and struggles?', and 'How should I view the world around me?' have come to feel closer than ever. (...) John Stuart Mill's On Liberty, which I began reading last December, deepened questions that had been vaguely surfacing in my mind, provoking a fierce inner reaction. The emotional stirrings brought on by its passages passionately pushed me toward abstract visualization and musical composition. (...)

The whole strength and value, then, of human judgment, depending on the one property, that it can be set right when it is wrong, reliance can be placed on it only when the means of setting it right are kept constantly at hand. In the case of any person whose judgment is really deserving of confidence, how has it become so? Because he has kept his mind open to criticism of his opinions and conduct. Because it has been his practice to listen to all that could be said against him; to profit by as much of it as was just, and expound to himself, and upon occasion to others, the fallacy of what was fallacious. (...)
— John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, 1859








