Sublime

Years ago, it had occurred to me that Darwin and Nietzsche agreed on one thing: the defining characteristic of the organism is striving. Describing life otherwise was like painting a tiger

Within the humanities, some of the key theorists drew inspiration from the writings published at midcentury by the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who had analyzed, with stunning lucidity, the body’s influence upon even our most rarefied cogitiations.

The Ancient Greeks understood that both the mind and body must be exercised.

The romantic spontaneity and courage are gone, the vision is materialistic and depressing. Ideals appear as inert by- products of physiology; what is higher is explained by what is lower and treated forever as a case of 'nothing but'—nothing but something else of a quite inferior sort. You get, in short, a materialistic universe, in which only the

There are several capacities that animals do not seem to have. We have already mentioned libertarian freedom of the will. Animals also do not seem to have moral awareness. Animals do not seem to grasp key notions central to morality such as the notion of a virtue, of a duty, of another thing having intrinsic value and rights, of universalizing a mo

We are not the isolated, conscious minds often assumed in our folk psychology. Rather, we are fundamentally embodied. Any spirituality that ignores how the body influences what we think and do will not be usefully transformative.