Sublime

Il aurait fallu opposer l’analyse d’Hannah Arendt à ce grossiste en gadgets digitaux. Pour elle, chaque individu pouvait faire son usage du héros homérique. Le héros était la référence, le symbole d’une vertu particulière, l’étalon permettant de mesurer notre propre grandeur.

Dans le sillage de la Révolution cognitive, le bavardage aida Homo sapiens à former des bandes plus larges et plus stables. Mais lui-même a ses limites. La recherche sociologique a montré que la taille « naturelle » maximale d’un groupe lié par le commérage est d’environ 150 individus. La plupart n’en peuvent connaître intimement plus de 150 ; on r

Primo Levi, who wrote about his survival at Auschwitz, described Elias, a dwarf who was interned in the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II. He was enormously strong, bestial, and quite insane, and with those qualities he not only navigated the Auschwitz system, where so many died all around him, but actually thrived. He ate, stole, an

The message of the Bible for the politics of the contemporary West is that it is not enough to have a state. You also need a society – meaning, that common belonging that comes from a sense that we are neighbours as well as strangers; that we have duties to one another, to the heritage of the past and to the hopes of generations not yet born; that

The contemporary idea that more is better, that follow counts are a good indicator of popularity, that basing the world almost solely around economies and GDP is reasonable would have appealed to him. He lay the groundwork for them. 

After his father fell upon difficult times (another biographical detail common to many of the early Zionist leaders), Ahad Ha’am decided to move to Odessa, the hub of the intellectual Jewish renaissance to which he was so drawn. The sole Russian city in which Jews were permitted to live, Odessa was home to a thriving Jewish intellectual milieu; man