Sublime

A well-functioning mind recognizes the futility and cruelty of constantly finding fault with its own nature.

“The more you think happiness is a social thing, the better off you are,” Brett explained to me, summarizing

comme l’a dit Sir Isaiah Berlin, d’imaginer qu’il existe une réponse unique à la question : Qu’est-ce qu’une bonne vie ? Ainsi, n’importe quelle tentative d’imposer une réponse unique aux masses ne peut qu’aboutir à la coercition et aux camps de concentration. Les sociétés libérales modernes adoptent une conception plus limitée de l’État : il doit

The point is not that you are the ultimate and independent cause of your actions; the point is that, for whatever reason, you have the mind of a regicide.

In private, meanwhile, he filled notebooks with philosophical thoughts alternating with Nazi-flavoured anti-Semitic remarks. When these ‘Black Notebooks’ were published in 2014, they provided yet more confirmation of something already known: Heidegger was a Nazi, at least for a while, and not out of convenience but by conviction.

Dutch historian Rutger Bregman summarizes these underlying assumptions about human nature here: “The doctrine that humans are innately selfish has a hallowed tradition in the Western canon. Great thinkers like Thucydides, Augustine, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Luther, Calvin, Burke, Bentham, Nietzsche, Freud, and America’s Founding Fathers each had their

Meanwhile, in the other camp, public philosophers such as Alain de Botton have sometimes risked derision to publish books or establish institutions designed to take a dry and analytical field back to its humanitarian roots. They have dared to remind us how the great thinkers of history might help us navigate our modern world contentedly and with

complexities involved in differences of taste or sensibility rooted in the unconscious factors that determine how we interpret the world that lies before us. Here’s an example of what I mean.

this can be viewed as a defining feature of Freud's modernity: his total engagement with compound meanings and contradictions; his continuous excavation of mental life, all the way down to its primal substances. We do not think logically like characters in a novel. The mind is messy and loose chains of association unravel in unexpected directions.