Sublime

The crowd is the flâneur’s indispensable counterpart: the crowd turns people into observable objects . In Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Man in the Crowd’ the protagonist pursues an intriguing figure through the streets of London for a whole night without ever being able to see his face: in big cities, one can stroll through busy streets without recognisin... See more

From the Enlightenment on, modern political philosophy has been character- ized by the abandonment of a set of questions that an earlier age had deemed central: What is a well-lived life? What does it mean to be human? What is the nature of the city and humanity? How does culture and religion fit into all of this? For the modern world, the death of... See more

According to Putnam, the more we prioritize our private bubbles over public life, the more we disconnect from our local surroundings. This has weakened American democracy. Fewer people are engaged in politics, and those who do are often at the political poles. With less social capital, our neighborhoods are connected by fewer informal, reciprocal t... See more

when you create a social reality with no connection to a deeper divine essence, and not alignment to a value greater than itself, you get lost in a maze where essential human values and relationships are mimicked endlessly and blindly in a chaos of hollow repetition. Then, as now, the only way out is to connect to the sacred; to an experience that ... See more

“More and more young, intellectually inclined, and politically heterodox thinkers are showing disillusionment with the contemporary faith in technocracy and personal autonomy. They see this combination as having contributed to the fundamentally alienating character of modern Western life. The chipper, distinctly liberal optimism of rationalist cult... See more