Sublime

ancient theories of justice start with virtue, while modern theories start with freedom.

Any positions that characterize people as bereft of agency, as passive automatons open to manipulation or behavioral management, are usually deemed reductive or irresponsible.

Thus the right sees individual entities (units), and it sees them as belonging in a contextual whole (an aggregate), from which they are not divided. By contrast the left sees parts (units), which go to make up a something which it recognises by the category to which it belongs (an aggregate).

Whereas we had once been able to imagine Western civilization as a universalist project delivering rational enlightenment to humankind,1 with Hegel’s thought representing a particular highpoint, the sheer destructiveness of World War I shattered this self-image, revealing that it might only run skin deep.

The Renaissance increasingly adapted its course of study to produce a successful man of the world, though it did not leave him without philosophy and the graces, for it was still, by heritage, at least, an ideational world and was therefore near enough transcendental conceptions to perceive the dehumanizing effects of specialization.