[a]ny Notion Of The Serious

Commitment Is A Word Invented In Our Abstract Modernity To Signify The Absence Of Any Real Motives In The Soul For Moral Dedication.

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.

Our Nation, A Great Stage For The Acting Out Of Great Thoughts, Presents The Classic Confrontation Between Locke's Views Of The State Of Nature And Rousseau's Criticism Of Them... Nature Is Raw Material, Worthless Without The Mixture Of Human Labor; Yet Nature Is Also The Highest And Most Sacred Thing. The Same People Who Struggle To Save The Snail-darter Bless The Pill, Worry About Hunting Deer And Defend Abortion. Reverence For Nature, Mastery Of Nature- Whichever Is Convenient.

As Western Nations Became More Prosperous, Leisure, Which Had Been Put Off For Several Centuries In Favor Of The Pursuit Of Property, The Means To Leisure, Finally Began To Be Of Primary Concern. But, In The Meantime, Any Notion Of The Serious Life Of Leisure, As Well As Men's Taste And Capacity To Live It, Had Disappeared.

There Is No Real Teacher Who In Practise Does Not Believe In The Existence Of The Soul, Or In A Magic That Acts On It Through Speech.