Sublime

"I'm out to follow an argument, not seduce people."'

Pocock argues that while humanists, such as Machiavelli, believed that the citizen fulfilled himself through civic virtue rather than through ecclesiastical sacraments, they were still unable to develop a theory of history, or what Pocock calls historicism.

In his novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Tolstoy writes, of the terminally ill Ivan: “The syllogism . . . ​‘Caius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal,’ had always seemed to him correct as applied to Caius, but certainly not as applied to himself. . . . He was not Caius, not an abstract man, but a creature quite, quite separate from

Wittgenstein devoted his philosophical energies largely to identifying and combating what he regarded as insidiously disruptive forms of “nonsense.” He was apparently like that in his personal life as well.

He is more than clever, he is amusing. He is more than successful, he is alive. You will find him stranded here and there in all sorts of unknown positions, almost always in unsuccessful positions.

Specifically, Freud helps Cavell to interpret the attempt to secure the certainty and reason of philosophy as pathological mother-denial, a refusal of our humanity.

Men can enjoy life under considerable limitations, if they can be sure of their limited enjoyments;

They accepted that the interests of society were above that of the individual. They did not believe in the unlimited individualism of the Americans.