Sublime

The movement that began about the thirteenth century (I’m not going to get involved in any argument about the exact date) towards the autonomy of man (in which I should include the discovery of the laws by which the world lives and deals with itself in science, social and political matters, art, ethics, and religion) has in our time reached an undo

On comprend mieux maintenant l’atopia, l’étrangeté du philosophe dans le monde humain. On ne sait où le classer, car il n’est ni un sage ni un homme comme les autres. Il sait que l’état normal, l’état naturel des hommes, devrait être la sagesse ; car elle n’est rien d’autre que la vision des choses telles qu’elles sont, la vision du cosmos tel qu’i

Aristotle is the last Greek philosopher who faces the world cheerfully; after him, all have, in one form or another, a philosophy of retreat. The world is bad; let us learn to be independent of it.

comme l’a dit Sir Isaiah Berlin, d’imaginer qu’il existe une réponse unique à la question : Qu’est-ce qu’une bonne vie ? Ainsi, n’importe quelle tentative d’imposer une réponse unique aux masses ne peut qu’aboutir à la coercition et aux camps de concentration. Les sociétés libérales modernes adoptent une conception plus limitée de l’État : il doit

With people it’s all a question of what they’re used to, even in the matter of the state and politics. Habit is the prime mover.

in Kant, philosophers are a bit like librarians: if you want to know something, go upstairs to the section labelled Science.

Political Philosophy: Studies good and bad social institutions, and how society ought to be arranged.

Denis Diderot (1713–84), an equally fervent (and more brilliantly insightful) materialist, famously declared that ‘Never shall man be free until the last king has been strangled with the entrails of the last priest’.