Verbum Humanum

Anyone who does not see the vanity of the world is very vain himself.

And so who does not see it, apart from the young who are preoccupied with bustle, distractions, and plans for the future?

But take away their distractions and you will see them wither from boredom.

Then they feel their hollowness without understanding it, because it is indeed depressing to be in a state of unbearable sadness as soon as you are reduced to contemplating yourself, and without distraction from doing so.

—Pascal, Penseés 70 (tr. Honor Levi)

For Nietzsche there was neither God nor man but only this unknown man-god.  For Dostoievsky [sic] there was both God and man: the God who does not devour man and the man who is not dissolved in God but remains himself throughout all eternity.  It is there that Dostoievsky shows himself to be Christian in the deepest sense of the word.

At its simplest, modernity is a shorthand term for modern society, or industrial civilization. Portrayed in more detail, it is associated with (1) a certain set of attitudes towards the world, the idea of the world as open to transformation, by human intervention; (2) a complex of economic institutions, especially industrial production and a market economy; (3) a certain range of political institutions, including the nation-state and mass democracy. Largely as a result of these characteristics, modernity is vastly more dynamic than any previous type of social order. It is a society — more technically, a complex of institutions — which, unlike any preceding culture, lives in the future, rather than the past.

The English architects Alison and Peter Smithson coined the term in 1954, from the French béton brut, or "raw concrete," a phrase used by Le Corbusier to describe the poured board-marked concrete with which he constructed many of his post-WWII buildings. The term gained wide currency when the British architectural critic Reyner Banham used it in the title of his 1966 book, The New Brutalism: Ethic or Aesthetic?, to characterize a by then established cluster of architectural approaches, particularly in Europe.

Further down...

Hegel thought that all logic and world history itself followed a dialectical path, in which internal contradictions were transcended, but gave rise to new contradictions that themselves required resolution.  Marx and Engels gave Hegel’s idea of dialectic a material basis; hence dialectical materialism.

Their own ideas, in their own words, neatly honed into little half-hour or so reads.

An amazing resource!

I named this site ‘Fallible Ideas’ to emphasize that we all make mistakes. It's important to always be learning, challenging ourselves, and trying to improve. By an effort, we can make fewer mistakes. Perhaps you can learn something if you read on.