Sublime

If we are nothing but what we think about, then no predefined ‘inner nature’ can hold us back. We are protean. He gave this idea a Sartrean makeover in a short essay which he began writing in Berlin, but published only in 1939: ‘A Fundamental Idea of Husserl’s Phenomenology: Intentionality’.

All great artists are, said Arnold, imbued with ‘the aspiration to leave the world better and happier than they find it’.

The neoliberal reforms we have witnessed over the past decades are no doubt pernicious. The downfall of the welfare state, however, is due not only to neoliberal ideology but also to the general reliance on the generation of capital wealth, which makes the welfare state hostage to economic crises.

realism, or a “realist empiricism.”117

distinctly human about our lives seems to depend upon our viewing one another as autonomous persons,

What if the opposite of loneliness is finding ourselves together? What if friends aren’t threats or competitors but gifts?

One way of thinking about Heidegger is as a literary innovator, and perhaps even as a kind of modernist novelist.