What we share is what I have been calling “the immanent frame”; the different structures we live in: scientific, social, technological, and so on, constitute such a frame in that they are part of a “natural”, or “this-worldly” order which can be understood in its own terms, without reference to the “supernatural” or “transcendent”. But this order o

Intimate space is, of course, social space, in that it is shared with (a few, privileged) others. But there is a close connection between inner space and zones of intimacy. It is in these latter that we share something of the depths of feeling, affinity, susceptibility, that we discover within ourselves.

the earlier field of more promiscuous contact, in which nobles mingled at table and elsewhere with a host of retainers, is now split by a new distinction intimacy/distance.

its “inner” side, the replacement of the porous self by the buffered self, for whom it comes to seem axiomatic that all thought, feeling and purpose, all the features we normally can ascribe to agents, must be in minds, which are distinct from the “outer” world.

disenchantment.

Modern humanism tends to develop a notion of human flourishing which has no place for death. Death is simply the negation, the ultimate negation, of flourishing; it must be combated, and held off till the very last moment.

There is another reaction which has arisen against precisely the models of benevolence and universalism in Deism and humanism. This is an attack that sees them as levelling down. Everybody is to be equal, and the old virtues of aristocracy are no longer valued: the virtues of heroism, for instance, the warrior virtues.

Nietzsche was getting at in The Genealogy of Morals, where he says that what humans can’t stand is not suffering, but meaningless suffering. They need to give a meaning to it.

But in the case of Panglossian optimism, the unrealism is held to be-token an immaturity, a lack of courage, and inability to face things.