A paragraph that I read often, from Luc Ferry’s A Brief History of Thought [Kindle]:
It was Kant, in the wake of Rousseau, who first launched the notion of ‘enlarged thought’ to make sense of human life. Enlarged thought was for Kant the opposite of a narrow-minded spirit; it was a way of thinking which managed to disregard the subjective private conditions of the individual life so as to arrive at an understanding of others. To give a simple example, when you learn a foreign language you come to establish some distance both from yourself and from your particular point of origin – that of being English, for example. You enter into a larger and more universal sphere, that of another culture, and, if not a different humanity, at least a different community from that to which you belonged formerly, and which you are now learning not to renounce but to leave behind. By uprooting ourselves from our original situation, we partake of a greater humanity. By learning another language, we can communicate with a greater number of human beings, and we also discover, through language, other ideas and other kinds of humour, other forms of exchange with individuals and with the world. You widen your horizon and push back the natural confines of the spirit that is tethered to its immediate community – this being the definition of the confined spirit, the narrow mind. – Luc Ferry
Hope everyone’s off to a great 2019. I’d love to hear from you: Twitter and increasingly IG are the best way.