If modernity is built on a refutation of the ancient world, a denial of eternity, of which Beauty was the royal road, and if modernity has arrived at last at some “final truth,” the truth that all values are subjective. Then, at the end of its history, modernity must resemble a “perfect negative” of the ancient world. The shape …
Progressive modernity says that reality is a dead thing and that what we do is to project our feelings and notions onto it merely. How thrilling it may seem to become like gods, making good and evil for ourselves. You can be whatever you want to be, and the world can be whatever you make …
The importance of Strauss for many in the present is in his exceptional classical scholarship and his recognition that in liberalism lay a deep relativism that would exhaust into permissive nihilism. The collapse of moral norms would divide society which was unified by the force of the law under the social contract. With no more …
“Without genuine, deep inwardness, we cannot take a stand against the inauthenticity of the world. Fighting noise with more noise will not do. In doing so, inevitably, the crowd becomes the measure, just as political chatter so easily becomes the content of our thinking.”
The existential void in modernity leads to a crisis, which leads the individual towards a search for meaning. Every search leads to a finding, and it wouldn’t be strange to assume that many of these findings may be of the special type, of the type that seems to burst violently into the individual´s conscience, in …
Horror’s success on the big screen is because there is a persistent recognition of the problem of evil, one of the greatest metaphysical and theological conundrums that have occupied some of the greatest intellectual minds past and present. Horror is that dreadful reminder that evil exists even as we moderns like to deceive ourselves in …
For humans, the path to unity with the prime mover was through nous: humans were to follow a single ethical direction with various adjustments made to remain on this path. Virtue was not obedience to abstract rules but following practical wisdom (phronesis) as led by the primer mover’s pull. Phronesis consequently was the motion between the primer mover and humans …
Humans could discern the law from what was most divine within them, i.e., their intellect (nous). As Plato wrote, “Of all studies, that of legal regulations provided they are rightly framed, will prove the most efficacious in making the learner a better man; for were it not so, it would be in vain that our …
