Sublime

Il écrira plus tard cette pensée, qui me semble résumer l’essentiel de son œuvre : « Plus la raison critique prédomine, plus la vie s’appauvrit ; mais plus nous sommes aptes à rendre conscient ce qui est inconscient et ce qui est mythe, plus est grande la quantité de vie que nous intégrons. La surestimation de la raison a ceci de commun avec un pou

The attentions of others might be said to matter to us principally because we are afflicted by a congenital uncertainty as to our own value – as a result of which what others think of us comes to play a determining role in how we are able to view ourselves. Our sense of identity is held captive by the judgements of those we live among.

volitional

According to Nietzsche, Socrates had started us off on a dangerous path, causing us to value reason and enquiry over the instinctual, creative urge. The new type of hero he posits would connect us once again with the rich, intuitive realm of Dionysus; one to which Greek Tragedy had once connected us, but we have since left long behind.

En matière de philosophie, j’avais concentré mes lectures sur les ouvrages de la Lebensphilosophie, la philosophie de la vie, qui abordent la question de la signification et des valeurs de la vie. Des auteurs tels que les Grecs anciens, Kierkegaard, Sartre et, bien sûr, Nietzsche.

Freud, in other words – like Musil and Mann, but in a different kind of language – is describing a loss of confidence in our knowledge of the good, of the good as something we can both recognize, and aspire to live by, whatever our versions of the good happen to be (after psychoanalysis, distinctions between good and evil become less tenable, less

If the capacity to love is part of what it means to be human, then to assume that someone is incapable of love is to see them as less than human;

By the accident of my present detachment, I can see the inevitable smash of the philosophies of Schopenhauer and Tolstoy, Nietzsche and Shaw, as clearly as an inevitable railway smash could be seen from a balloon. They are all on the road to the emptiness of the asylum. For madness may be defined as using mental activity so as to reach mental helpl

Socrates—who, like Adam Smith, argued that people are generally good even without enforcement.