Sublime

He described modernity’s obsession with Machen —do/make—as the belief that only what we can build, manipulate, or produce is real. This becomes the default metaphysics of acceleration: faster iteration, more output, more control. But Ratzinger contrasts this with another mode of being: Verstehen and Stehen —to understand and to stand. That is, to s... See more

Any concept of justice that hopes to win broad support in the real world has to be political in these three ways: to be narrow in scope; to be free-standing of any comprehensive moral doctrine; and to be grounded in widely shared ideas drawn from the public political culture. The original position ensures that Rawls’s principles possess these featu

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The dream of a Liberal (arts) education—which is the scaled, democratic form of the Keatsian ideal of negative capability—cannot hold up when liberalism itself is held to be suspect.

to participate in the great decisions of government. There was, Lippmann brooded, no “intrinsic moral and intellectual virtue to majority rule.” Lippmann’s disenchantment with democracy anticipated the mood of today’s elites. From the top, the public, and the swings of public opinion, appeared irrational and uninformed. The human material out of wh

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“The existence of a public realm,” Arendt observed, “and the world's subsequent transformation into a community of things which gathers men together and relates them to each other depends entirely on permanence.”