For all of their differences, Locke, Spinoza, and Kant ... share a common core in their conception of freedom, which we may justly characterize in ge… - D. C. Schindler

Instead of enjoyment, there is labor, instead of goods, there are uses, instead of substance, we have property, instead of property, we have money, instead of bonds, we have boundaries, instead of connection, we have contract, instead of order, we have regulation, and so forth. Locke's political theory represents a conquest of the ordering principle of human life, which then allows that principle to retain its rule only if it changes its meaning.

Nietzsche represents an attempt to recover the "self-diffusiveness" of the good in spite of the good itself, because the good itself cannot be separated from the Christian Neoplatonic tradition that lies at the roots of Western civilization. He thus ends up, as Heidegger has compellingly shown, with an emptiness of the will to power, sheer willing, which does not overcome modernity but rather consummates it.

This is the heart of the diabolical: an image that is not an image, but presents itself as the real thing—indeed, in a certain sense, as better than the real thing precisely because of the immediacy or the lack of transcendence that the dissemblance implies.