Sublime

sensory element

So Weber and Nietzsche together provide us with the key theoretical articulations of the contemporary social order; but what they delineate so clearly are the large-scale and dominant features of the modern social landscape. Just because they are so very effective in this regard, they may be of little help in deciphering the small-scale

It would follow that a principle for the choice of which no reasons could be given would be a principle devoid of authority.

“The mind cannot form any notion of quantity or quality without forming a precise notion of degrees of each.” “Abstract ideas are in themselves individual, however they may become general in their representation.” This theory, which is a modern form of nominalism, has two defects, one logical, the other psychological.

What Murdoch took from this “admirable Platonist” was the conviction that seeing well is tantamount to doing well. Discerning the Good—the way the world truly is—whittles down our range of choices to just one.

To disentangle what can be accepted from what must be rejected in this argument against the identification of knowledge with perception is by no means easy. There are three inter-connected theses that Plato discusses, namely: (1) Knowledge is perception; (2) Man is the measure of all things; (3) Everything is in a state of flux.

I don’t think most people are good, or bad, for that matter. I think people are neutral. From a distance, they look almost interchangeable. It seems to me that “good people” can become “bad people” when provided the opportunity within an existing power structure—to claim and exert power at a deadly cost to others and get away with it.