/lit/ - Literature

>Moreover, these trends were accompanied by a propensity to identify with amorphous abstract entities like ‘humanity’ or ‘the public’, people thereby absolving themselves from individual responsibility for what they thought and said. To put it crudely, there was safety in numbers: ‘everyone can have an opinion; but they have to band together numerically in order to have one’ (PA 91). And somewhat similar considerations applied at the level of practical behaviour. People were ready enough to talk of doing things ‘on principle’, but they were apt to treat the principles they appealed to as if they were endowed with a purely external or impersonal authority, unrelated to the agent's own preferences and concerns; in this sense, one could ‘do anything “on principle” and avoid all personal responsibility’ (PA 85). As Kierkegaard remarked elsewhere, ‘no man, none, dares to say I’; instead, a species of ‘ventriloquism’ had become de rigueur – the ordinary person had become a mouthpiece of public opinion, the professor a mouthpiece of theoretical speculation, the pastor a mouthpiece of religious meditation. All were in different ways submissive to abstractions to which they attributed an independent reality. Rather than confront the fact that everyone is finally accountable to himself for his life, character, and outlook, they took refuge in a depersonalized realm of reified ideas and doctrines.

Where do I start with this beautiful madman's books?

>>11892893
>>11892906
Ausfag here. I don't have any American friends to ask this: How likely do you guys honestly think it is people will go out on the streets and start shooting each other? My countrymen are so generally placid it boggles my mind to even imagine the possibility occurring.

>>11548124
Not him but isn't it amazing how this wolf has been overlooked for years because everyone always focused on his seething partner?