k. > Recent Status Updates

The death of Socrates:

What is philosophy? What is reason? What is knowledge, and do we have any?

What does it mean to begin philosophy with Socrates? Plato's Socrates is rude, malicious, sly, arrogant, presumptuous, obtuse, contemptible, sarcastic, fallacious, and utterly deserving of his execution, for he wills it fully. What does this all mean for philosophy as a way of life?

Berman's point in the Goethe section seems to be that modernity is profoundly and irredeemably faustian, and the only way out is through, through more faustian bargains. But this is the way out of the human, and indication only of the railroad we were already tied to. It is not a revelation, but an impossibility—the idea that more capital could lead us anywhere but the destruction of the human soul.