Sublime

Protagoras observed a strange paradox about language. Despite the perpetual flux and change of the physical world, language lends the mistaken impression that the world is not in flux, that it is stable. As the Presocratic philosopher Empedocles had observed only a few years before, ‘there is no birth for any mortal thing, nor any cursed end in dea

Plato said those who tell the stories rule society and he was right.

“To imagine a language is to imagine a form of life.” — Ludwig Wittgenstein

Once you know that the tendency to think dichotomously and militaristically is not just a local phenomenon, pertaining to this or that particular case, but exemplary of “our deeper error in parsing the complexities of human conflicts and natural continua into stark contrasts formulated as struggles between opposing sides,” then you have set yoursel

He feared that the higher ideals of the Enlightenment were “irretrievably lost” and that only the imperative of “economic compulsion” would prevail.

This reaction is understandable, as it based on two defining characteristics of today’s social decay that the peace researcher Johan Galtung calls anomie, the loss of norms and values, and atomie, the breakdown of social structures.

les phrases célèbres de Mauriac écrites en 1963 : « Tant qu’il y a eu des Allemagne, nous nous y sommes promenés ; lorsqu’une Allemagne est née enfin, ce fut pour nous fini de rire. Aujourd’hui qu’il y en a deux, nous pouvons de nouveau dormir, au moins d’un œil. Quand les deux morceaux seront recollés, il faudra redevenir ce lièvre qui dort les ye