Sublime

Liberty has produced scepticism, and scepticism has destroyed liberty.

Plato having anointed truth as the goal of philosophy, the goal of human life. ‘Assuredly we must be bold to speak what is true, above all when our discourse is upon truth

ideas argue that racist policies are the cause

Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Huysmans, and Jarry. Surrealism preferred Heraclitus to Plato, and Raymond Lull’s mystico-alchemical fantasies to the ordered arguments of Thomas Aquinas.

After forty years of warning us about the dangers of postmodernism, the right now sounds like Jacques Derrida, and in the wake of Trump’s kidnapping of Perspectivism, the left now sounds like Allan Bloom.

The writer, the thinker, the dreamer, the poet, the metaphysician, the observer…he who tries to solve a riddle or to pass judgement will become an anachronistic figure, destined to disappear from the face of the earth like the ichthyosaur and the mammoth.

To Sartre’s celebrated examples of standing in line to board a bus, being stuck in traffic, and shopping at the supermarket could be added the unfathomable amounts of human time expended today in desultory electronic activity and exchanges. Whether in the mid twentieth century or today, seriality is the numbing and ceaseless production of the same.

That which was experimental in our plan of government was the question whether democratic rule could be so organized and conducted that it would not degenerate into license and result in the tyranny of absolutism, without saving to the people the power so often found necessary of repressing or destroying their enemy, when he was found in the person

Political corruption, instability, and conflict are the natural results of the abandonment of reason.