Sublime

Der Romancier Wilhelm Genazino hat dazu bemerkt: »Oft lügen wir nicht, weil wir etwas vertuschen wollen, sondern wir lügen, weil wir nicht sagen können oder wollen, wie merkwürdig und sonderbar die Wirklichkeit für uns ist. Weite Teile der Realität sind enttäuschend und unserer permanenten Aufschönung bedürftig.«

Kafka’s “The Burrow,” a tale of creaturely existence reduced to the obsessive and anxious pursuit of self-preservation, is one of the bleakest portrayals in literature of life as a solitude cut off from any mutuality. It is a dark prospectus of human life in the absence of community or civil society, at a furthest remove from the collective forms o

Hannah Arendt wrote to Jaspers in 1949; it was that he had no character. Sartre said a very similar thing in an essay of 1944, speaking of Heidegger’s Nazism: ‘Heidegger has no character; there’s the truth of the matter.’ It is as if there was something about everyday human life that the great philosopher of everydayness did not get.

Language is source of misunderstandings.

by reducing the scale of events it can introduce much larger events.

Reality, better say, lost the quotes it wore like claws—in a world where independent and original minds must cling to things or pull things apart in order to ward off madness or death (which is the master madness).

This vocabulary, a sign of the “specialist” and, of course, the elitist, thwarts universal understanding. It keeps the uninitiated from asking unpleasant questions. It destroys the search for the common good. It dices disciplines, faculty, students, and finally experts into tiny, specialized fragments. It allows students and faculty to retreat into

Der russische Philosoph Michail Bachtin (1895–1975) war der Ansicht, Menschen zu täuschen heißt, sie zu Objekten zu machen. Aber warum sollte ein Objekt glauben, das sei schlimm?