" You say that my article isn’t definite; I am ready to make it as clear as I can. Perhaps I am right in thinking you want me to; very well. I maintain that if the discoveries of Kepler and Newton could not have been made known except by sacrificing the lives of one, a dozen, a hundred, or more men, Newton would have had the right, would indeed have been in duty-bound… to eliminate the dozen or the hundred men for the sake of making his discoveries known to the whole of humanity. But it does not follow from that that Newton had a right to murder people right and left and to steal every day in the market. "
This passage raises an issue. Who is the moral man? Clearly, the ordinary man would experience no “long night of the soul” over such difficulties. Who is, then, the philosopher?
Accordingly, I must inform the reader, Justice Kennedy has said not without some power: “For all the record shows, this respondent was not a philosopher and perhaps did not even possess the ability to comprehend how repellent his statements must be to the Republic itself.” This is said about a man who burned the symbol of the country, the flag (who, himself, was likely not an ideological reader of Benjamin, or some such authority).
Ergo, suggesting a special characteristic which much contradicts the cold hand of science, i.e., of speech, from which all hobgoblins fly in fear. Is the philosopher, then, cold or hot?