The greatest modern philosopher was moved by nothing more than by duty. His life, in consequence, was unremarkable.
The very same ‘mystery’ that veils the human person from the neurophysiologist veils human history from the Marxian determinist and human morality from the sociobiologist.
Spinoza wrote the last indisputable Latin masterpiece, and one in which the refined conceptions of medieval philosophy are finally turned against themselves and destroyed entirely. He chose a single word from that language for his device: caute – ‘be cautious’ – inscribed beneath a rose, the symbol of secrecy. For, having chosen to write in a language that was so widely intelligible, he was compelled to hide what he had written.
The picture of a universe of infinitely many wholly unrelated substances is at least as hard to understand as the monism of Spinoza, and far less easy to reconcile with appearances.
Music, Schopenhauer wrote, is not unconscious arithmetic, as Leibniz had claimed, but unconscious philosophy, since in music the inner essence of the world, which is will, is made directly present to the mind.
A reactionary is fixed on the past and wanting to return to it; a conservative wishes to adapt what is best in the past to the changing circumstances of the present.
Civilization is always threatened from below, by patterns of belief and emotion that may once have been useful to our ancestors, but that are useful no longer.
Opportunities are enhanced not by closing things down, but by opening things up. It is by allowing autonomous institutions to grow, by protecting the space in which they flourish, and.
Free speech is a sign of a strong first-person plural, which enables people who disagree over fundamental things to live together in a condition of mutual toleration.
The God of the philosophers disappeared behind the world, because he was described in the third person, and not addressed in the second.
Smith emphasized that trust, responsibility and accountability exist only in a society that respects them, and only where the spontaneous fruit of human sympathy is allowed to ripen. It is where sympathy, duty and virtue achieve their proper place that self-interest leads, by an invisible hand, to a result that benefits everyone.
Conservatism is not a matter of defending global capitalism at all costs, or securing the privileges of the few against the many. It is a matter of defending civil society, maintaining autonomous institutions, and defending the citizen against the abuse of power.
One thing is immediately apparent, and this is that many statements made in the first-person case are epistemologically privileged.
In place of top-down government, Burke made the case for a society shaped from below, by traditions that have grown from our natural need to associate. The important social traditions are not just arbitrary customs, which might or might not have survived into the modern world. They are forms of knowledge. They contain the residues of many trials and errors, as people attempt to adjust their conduct to the conduct of others. To.
In discussing tradition, we are not discussing arbitrary rules and conventions. We are discussing answers that have been discovered to enduring questions. These.
For a certain kind of temperament, defeat is never defeat by reality, but always defeat by other people, often acting together as members of a class, tribe, conspiracy or clan.
The worst mistake in politics is the mistake made by Lenin – the mistake of destroying the institutions and procedures whereby mistakes can be recognized. Something.
Top-down solutions have a tendency to confiscate problems from those whose problems they are.
The slaves had been liberated, and turned into morons.
Western democracies did not create the virtue of citizenship; on the contrary, they grew from it. Nothing is more evident in The Federalist than the public spirit that it puts in play, in opposition to factions, cabals and private scheming. As.