It is no wonder that the paradoxical moral logic of the Old Testament appealed to Chesterton. Even less surprising is that the concise invocation of its paradoxes in ‘The Sign of the Broken Sword’ should appeal to that other metaphysical romancer, Jorge Luis Borges. That Borges was an admirer of Chesterton is well known. Less …
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 …
Perhaps then our closeness will increase, our lust for destruction will be tamed, and perhaps in that peace, we will gain the confidence to, with great enterprise, bring greater life to a neon polytheism, to greater and more complex nights of euphoria, to more evident poetry in the mundane, and cold beers on a summer …
Sometimes, people are hampered by a certain intimidation factor when it comes to difficult texts. They feel that they are too uneducated, haven’t read such-and-such books that ought to come before, need the for-dummies introductory version, and need someone to hold their hand while offering them a glass of milk.
If this is so, then Cohen would seem to be acknowledging human responsibility for at least part of the darkness of the world. We are not blind puppets. WE kill the flame of life in others with a free will. Man is a wolf to man, according to the proverb. A man who accuses God …
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 …
If you can read a text breezily, in a reclining position, with a cocktail in one hand, and come away with confident assurance that you have understood every single thing the author has said, then that text is probably not worth your time. It might be good as pure, time-filling entertainment, but you may as …
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 …
Artificial Intelligence also challenges how we make “art” and what is ultimately considered “art” in the two worlds. We need AI because it will accomplish the minor tasks that we need to move on to the bigger and more sophisticated ones. This also means that we shouldn’t be putting huge effort into the little things …
Beauty is developed through an internal workshop that may be influenced by the mundane, but that chooses to transform the mundane and shape it by its own divine right. Artistic beauty is, therefore, born from the privacy of the subject´s mind, something stemming from existential loneliness and quietude.
