On the part of the one who overdoes it, such negative affirmation is a self-pleasuring form of not really listening that is hardly heard, but more often resented, or, sometimes even worse, re-echoed.
On the part of the one who overdoes it, such negative affirmation is a self-pleasuring form of not really listening that is hardly heard, but more often resented, or, sometimes even worse, re-echoed.
Political events in Egypt are being determined primarily by questions of sovereignty and systemic adjustment rather than by ideology, whether liberal-democratic, Islamist, or Egyptian-nationalist
Democracy Is Obsolete — The League of Ordinary Gentlemen In short: We condemned East Germany for a lot less than what we are doing to ourselves, right this moment. Whoever you vote for in November, that fact will not change.…
The two main alternatives that are put forward and passionately defended by partisans are utopian, not because they are particularly imaginative, but merely because they cannot be implemented. They cannot be implemented, or no one can quite be bothered to implement them, in part because we seem to be heading to where they lead, or to where they fail to lead, to nowhere, anyway.
The perfect speech contains nothing slipshod; in it there are no loose threads; it contains no word that has been picked at random; it is not marred by errors due to faulty memory or to any other kind of carelessness; strong passions and a powerful and fertile imagination are guided with ease by a reason which knows how to use the unexpected gift, which knows how to persuade and which knows how to forbid; it allows of no adornment which is not imposed by the gravity and the aloofness of the subject matter; the perfect writer rejects with disdain and with some impatience the demand of vulgar rhetoric that expressions must be varied since change is pleasant. — Leo Strauss
“Every philosophy is the philosophy of its own day… thus it can find satisfaction only for the interests belonging to its own particular time,” “philosophy… is its own time grasped in thought” (Hegel)
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bounded particularity is universal
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a uniquely determinative objective of a philosophy adequate to our particular time
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to understand philosophy as always and everywhere in principle the same quest for timeless and universal truth (Strauss)
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what is always most modern is modernity’s own obsolescence, the having arrived at a non-existent destination (the time-boundedness of thought negates thought as thought, producing time)
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