Sublime

that self-interest, if properly directed, need not be divorced from the common good,

Locke, as we saw, believed pleasure to be the good, and this was the prevalent view among empiricists throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Their opponents, on the contrary, despised pleasure as ignoble, and had various systems of ethics which seemed more exalted. Hobbes valued power, and Spinoza, up to a point, agreed with Hobbes.

These merits, however, seem scarcely sufficient to justify his immense reputation. The appeal to reason is, in a sense, insincere, since the conclusion to be reached is fixed in advance. Take, for example, the indissolubility of marriage. This is advocated on the ground that the father is useful in the education of the children, (a) because he is m

Moreover, for Camus, true rebellion does not mean reaching towards an ecstatic vision of a shining city on a hill. It means setting a limit on some very real present state of affairs that has become unacceptable.

Years ago, it had occurred to me that Darwin and Nietzsche agreed on one thing: the defining characteristic of the organism is striving.

What’s interesting is that Antipater thought that most of these ethical questions were pretty straightforward. His formula for virtue was “in choosing continually and unswervingly the things which are according to nature, and rejecting those contrary to nature.”