It May Well Be That A Societys

Americans ... Do Not Naturally Apply The Term "bourgeois" To Themselves, Or To Anyone Else For That Matter. They Do Like To Call Themselves Middle Class, But That Does Not Carry With It Any Determinate Spiritual Content. ... The Term "middle Class" Does Not Have Any Of The Many Opposites That Bourgeois Has, Such As Aristocrat, Saint, Hero, Or Artist - All Good.

To Recognize That Some Of The Things Our Culture Believes Are Not True Imposes On Us The Duty Of Finding Out Which Are True And Which Are Not.

Locke Had Illegitimately Selected Those Parts Of Man He Needed For His Social Contract And Suppressed All The Rest, A Theoretically Unsatisfactory Procedure And A Practically Costly One. The Bourgeois Is The Measure Of The Price Paid, He Who Most Of All Cannot Afford To Look To His Real Self, Who Denies The Existence Of The Thinly Boarded-over Basement In Him, Who Is Most Made Over For The Purposes Of A Society That Does Not Even Promise Him Perfection Or Salvation But Merely Buys Him Off.

There Is A Perennial And Unobtrusive View That Morality Consists In Such Things As Telling The Truth, Paying One's Debts, Respecting One's Parents And Doing No Voluntary Harm To Anyone. Those Are All Things Easy To Say And Hard To Do; They Do Not Attract Much Attention, And Win Little Honor In The World.

There Are Two Threats To Reason, The Opinion That One Knows The Truth About The Most Important Things And The Opinion That There Is No Truth About Them. Both Of These Opinions Are Fatal To Philosophy; The First Asserts That The Quest For Truth Is Unnecessary, While The Second Asserts That It Is Impossible. The Socratic Knowledge Of Ignorance, Which I Take To Be The Beginning Point Of All Philosophy, Defines The Sensible Middle Ground Between Two Extremes.