Self-interest Is Hostile To The Common Good,

The Failure To Read Good Books Both Enfeebles The Vision And Strengthens Our Most Fatal Tendency - The Belief That The Here And Now Is All There Is.

The Utilitarian Behaves Sensibly In All That Is Required For Preservation But Never Takes Account Of The Fact That He Must Die... His Whole Life Is Absorbed In Avoiding Death, Which Is Inevitable, And Therefore He Might Be Thought To Be The Most Irrational Of Men, If Rationality Has Anything To Do With Understanding Ends Or Comprehending The Human Situation As Such.

Continental Thinkers Have Been Obsessed With Bourgeois Man As Representing The Worst And Most Contemptible Failure Of Modernity, Which Must At All Costs Be Overcome. Nihilism In Its Most Palpable Sense Means That The Bourgeois Has Won, That The Future, All Foreseeable Futures, Belong To Him, That All Heights Above Him And All Depths Beneath Him Are Illusory And That Life Is Not Worth Living On These Terms.

Socrates' Way Of Life Is The Consequence Of His Recognition That We Can Know What It Is That We Do Not Know About The Most Important Things And That We Are By Nature Obliged To Seek That Knowledge.

The Real Community Of Man, In The Midst Of All The Self-contradictory Simulacra Of Community, Is The Community Of Those Who Seek The Truth, Of The Potential Knowers, That Is, In Principle, Of All Men To The Extent They Desire To Know. But In Fact This Includes Only A Few, The True Friends, As Plato Was To Aristotle At The Very Moment They Were Disagreeing About The Nature Of The Good.