Sublime

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.

CHAPTER XX Aristotle’s Ethics

we can enlarge and enrich experience by recognizing how Greek authors, prior to modern science, represented the thing that is both closest to us and yet is still, in some sense, quite mysterious—our own essence as a human self. Many of their ideas are utterly remote from the individualistic and secular contexts of our body-centered market capitalis

importante. Qu’est-ce que l’être humain ? De quoi est-il composé ? Quelles sont les possibilités et les limites de sa connaissance ? Quel est le moteur de son existence ? Quelles sont l’origine et la nature de ses sentiments ?

Whatever justification they propose, the suffering in the world is always disproportionate to the religious explanation offered. Which is why we have to think a bit more about the ‘God’ of religion as opposed to the ‘true’ or ‘real’ God,