Sublime

Ethical codes may vary from culture to culture, but the human need to regard goodness as an absolute end in itself does not.

Leo Strauss, one of the leading philosophers of the twentieth century, writes: By becoming aware of the dignity of mind, we realize the true ground of the dignity of man and therewith the goodness of the world, whether we understand it as created or uncreated, which is the home of man because it is the home of the human mind.

To be human is to be a moral agent. That, in turn, meant that we live in a human universe the very structure of which is dramatic. And the great drama of any life is the struggle to surrender the “person-I-am” to the “person-I-ought-to-be.”

because wisdom requires that the three hang together.

Philosophy of Right

Concerning Locke, for example, Rommen writes, “Locke substitutes for the traditional idea of the natural law as an order of human affairs, as a moral reflex of the metaphysical order of the universe revealed to human reason in the creation as God’s will, the conception of natural law as a rather nominalistic symbol for a catalog or bundle of indivi