“The inflation of specialized vocabularies, far from giving us the means for a more refined and rigorous understanding, multiplies the crutches with which we try in vain to make up for the loss of confidence in our capacity to understand and to speak.”
From volume IV of the file · Book · 21st century
Themes: language & writing
More from Pierre Manent
“Today the human ambition is to be a creator. There are great creators, middling creators, and small creators, but everyone has the desire to be a creator. And it seems to me, once again, that to understand what is, is not something that stirs the ambitions of our contemporaries. They are more interested, one might say, in what is not. Rousseau, the great master of the modern in this matter, said, “Only what is not is beautiful.” For me, fundamentally, the opposite is true: only what is interests me. And this is perhaps the reason why, at least since I became an adult, I have not been able to be on the left, because the left prefers to imagine a society that is not, and I have always found the society that is more interesting than the society that might be.”