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There is a desire, among theorists and non-theorists, to keep things simple. Everyone likes a simple tool that works in many cases or a simple user interface on a website. Simplicity is a virtue, and all virtues turn into vices due to lack or excess of. ...

On the way to one of France's high society members pied-à-terre, the narrator of In Search of Lost Time is in a one-sided conversation about the various origins of French words with the aim of uncovering to the meaning of the names of some of the towns they were passing by. ...

I am not sure of how many, if any, job postings there have been of recent past where the role is just for Hegel. Plato, Aristotle, Kant, or some combination of early moderns seem to be the standard large canonical figures of the West that warrant dedicated teaching roles. Whether or not you're a fan, Hegel is back. ...

All around him, everywhere he could see was ruined buildings. If he walked farther there were more ruined buildings. These were buildings of past empires run by despots, who maintained a short period of power only to fall into ruin. ...

Nietzsche is a reactionary. If a reactionary is someone who wants to bring about some prior ethical values, virtues, societal norms, or way of life in response to some egalitarian, utopian, progression vision, then Nietzsche is a reactionary. ...

Most the time you are reading a book, you get asked the question "What is it about?". It was one I got asked frequently over the course of last year while I was reading Proust's In Search of Lost Time. Answering the question always proved extremely hard, changing answers depending on the context, my mood, the amount of time I had, and any assumptions about the other person's type of interest. ...