Sublime

Aristotle’s views in practical philosophy, ethics and politics, are much plainer sailing than his metaphysics and psychology. They turn on the idea that the best kind of society is one whose individual members live the best kind of lives.

It is at this point in the discussion that people invoke the objective/subjective distinction.

Ortega held the process to be the driving force of history. The “reciprocal action between the masses and select minorities,” he wrote, “is the fundamental fact of every society and the agent of its evolution for good or evil.” Ortega’s masses we now call the public. By “select minorities” he meant the admirable few: elites who, at their best, lavi

The point of all this is to try to appreciate how a worldview—or better, what philosopher Charles Taylor calls a “social imaginary”19—is “carried” in everyday rituals and practices.

At the center of his analysis was the insistence that modern man, “like Macbeth,” had made an evil decision to trade allegiance to transcendent principles for present gain.

The disordered love of learning makes you a mere technician of information for some end other than wisdom, and the irony is that philosophy could devolve into just another way of idolizing.