Sublime

So there we have it: an unexpected corollary of Epictetus’s advice. If we ignore everything over the other side of that line – everything that we do not control, everything other than our own thoughts and actions – we tend to remove anxiety and even achieve more success. And by reminding ourselves, as and when pressures arise, to distinguish betwee

The philosophers of Greece, down to and including Aristotle, were not individualists in the sense in which I wish to use the term. They thought of a man as essentially a member of a community; Plato’s Republic, for example, is concerned to define the good community, not the good individual. With the loss of political liberty from the time of Alexan

(On Earth, incidentally, civilisation is the result of a group of humans coming together and suppressing their instincts.)

this troubled world can be achieved by acquiring and wielding a special kind of know-how, a knowledge that alone can save.3

that this would not have occurred to them as an argument in favour of transcendence, but as an experience of self-transcendence intuitively projected onto the universe.

they are both obsessed with questions of meaning. Sometimes I think this is just a way of winding up those atheists who betray a religious or evangelical intensity in promoting their atheism.

I wonder who it was defined man as a rational animal. It was the most premature definition ever given.

Locke, as we saw, believed pleasure to be the good, and this was the prevalent view among empiricists throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Their opponents, on the contrary, despised pleasure as ignoble, and had various systems of ethics which seemed more exalted. Hobbes valued power, and Spinoza, up to a point, agreed with Hobbes.