Sublime

The shift in background, or better the disruption of the earlier background, comes best to light when we focus on certain distinctions we make today; for instance, that between the immanent and the transcendent, the natural and the supernatural. Everyone understands these, both those who affirm and those who deny the second term of each pair.

Plato: the state should make possible the conditions under which everyone can provide for themselves and seek the Good. Aristotle: all communities aim at some good, and the state is the highest kind of community, aiming at the highest of goods. Locke: The state is legitimate if it enforces contracts and acts as the guarantor of private property.

Part of my reason for wanting to shift the focus to the conditions of belief, experience and search is that I’m not satisfied with this explanation of secularism 2: science refutes and hence crowds out religious belief.

AIs operate in the social sphere in ways more similar to those of states and corporations than robots or marionettes. Therefore, it becomes useful to consider them in the tradition of political thought that deals with collective personhood, in works such as Hobbes’s Leviathan, Plato’s Republic, or How Institutions Think by Mary Douglas.

Freud’s framework makes us always unsure of ourselves, never trusting even our own emotions. Therefore, we are bound inside the conundrum of late modernity, which tells us to be concerned only with being our unique self. This uniqueness can be validated as truly our self only by the recognition of others who affirm our self by liking our creations,

The glory of play goes along with sovereignty, where sovereignty simply means being free from necessity, from purpose and utility. Sovereignty reveals a soul ‘which stands aloof from caring about utility’.1 The compulsion of production destroys sovereignty as a form of life. Sovereignty gives way to a new kind of subordination which, however, masqu

The ethic of freedom and order has arisen in a culture which puts at its centre a buffered self.