Sublime

Socrates was put to death because most people, rightfully prefer myth to critical thinking. Strauss understood that Athens and Jerusalem are two competing ideals, two mutually exclusive models, for organizing society. Athens espouses the ideal of negative capability, but Jerusalem espouses the ideal of obedience to the Divine Law.

Foucault is the most explicit about the ever-present danger of oppressive systems: My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same as bad. If everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do. So, my position leads not to apathy but to a hyper-and pessimistic activism. I think that

Hedgehogs, Berlin explained, “relate everything to a single central vision” through which “all that they say and do has significance.” Foxes, in contrast, “pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way.” The distinction was simple but not frivolous: it offered “a point of view from which t

‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.’

Democratic networks assume that everyone is fallible, and that includes even the winners of elections and the majority of voters.

By way of an Oxford party, an Archilochus fragment, and Tolstoy’s epic, Berlin had stumbled upon two of the very best ways to become intellectually indelible. The first is to be Delphic, a trick known to oracles throughout time. The second is to be Aesopian: turn your ideas into animals, and they’ll achieve immortality.

what the philosopher can contribute to politics is not at all the will to power, but disinterestedness.

Postmodern secular culture tends to underemphasize responsibility, thereby generating a strange contradiction. On the one hand we have almost unlimited freedom to choose. On the other, when things go wrong, it is rarely our fault.

In conceiving of the state as a generational compact, de Gaulle was echoing Edmund Burke, who defined society as ‘a partnership . . . between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.’[69]