"Government does not rest on force. Government is force; it rests on consent or a conception of justice.” -- G.K. Chesterton, What's Wrong With the World
“Adultery is bad morals, but divorce is bad metaphysics.” -- Charles Williams
The Freudian term “sublimation” has come to be used carelessly for two relationships between high and low, relationships which are not only different but even opposite to each other. I illustrate with sex, his obsession.
Kant thought we could either give the law to ourselves, which he called autonomy, or accept a law imposed from outside, which he called heteronomy. In this view, autonomy is freedom, but heteronomy is bondage. What does the picture leave out?
A churchgoing colleague explained to me once that his personal rule of faith is to believe whatever doctrine is the most “uplifting.” He tells me that he finds it more uplifting to believe in reincarnation than in death, judgment, and resurrection, because it “gives us as many chances as we need to get it right.”
The warlords, satraps, and barons of ancient times visited cruel burdens upon the underclass, but there was a natural limit to what they could do. Though a man could be treated like a dog, in the end a man was a man, and a dog was a dog.