Living Philosophies: A Series of Intimate Credos, 1931
Parerga and Paralipomena, (Essays and Aphorisms), Arthur Schopenhauer, 1851.
Living Biographies of Great Philosophers, Arthur Schopenhauer section, Doubleday, 1941
Studies in Pessimism, Further Psychological Observations, Arthur Schopenhauer, 18xx
The Story of Philosophy,Arthur Schopenhauer paraphrases, Will Durant, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1961
Thoughts Out of Season/The Use and Abuse of History, Friedrich Nietzsche, 1874
When Nietzsche Wept,Friedrich Nietzsche character, Irvin D. Yalom, New York: Basic Books,1992
Revolt of the Masses, Jose Ortega y Gasset, 1930
The Lessons of History, Will and Ariel Durant, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968
The Contemporary and His Soul, Erwin Edman, New York: Jonathan Cape & Harrison Smith, 1931
On the Nature of Things, Titus Lucretius, 65 BC
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Living Philosophies: A Series of Intimate Credos, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1931
"To make a goal of comfort or happiness has never appealed to me; a system of ethics built on this basis would be sufficient only for a herd of cattle." Albert Einstein, p4.
"Possessions, outward success, publicity, luxury - to me these have always been contemptible. I believe that a simple and unassuming manner of life is best for everyone, best both for the body and the mind." Albert Einstein, p4.
"I am a horse for single harness, not cut out for tandem or team work... Such isolation is sometimes bitter, but I do not regret being cut off from the understanding and sympathy of other men. I lose something by it, to be sure, but I am compensated for it in being rendered independent of the customs, opinions, and prejudices of others, and am not tempted to rest my peace of mind upon such shifting foundations." p4.
"I have pondered and even demanded of cosmic energy to know Why. But now I am told by the physicist as well as the biologist that there can be no Why but only a How, since to know How disposes finally of any Why." Theodore Dreiser, p55.
The racing man knows he cannot get a good racing stable by breeding from his slowest horses... we want good raw material in the form of children born from the best possible stock. Our unsentimental ancestors achieved this in a very simple way: they just allowed the weaker and less successful to go to the wall. Two hundred years ago 3/4 of the babies born in London died in infancy... Those few who survived must, on the whole, have been abnormally strong... Today we are heading in precisely the opposite direction... we save nearly all our babies indiscriminately... It would not be so bad if this meant that all types contribute equally to the future population... Unhappily it does not mean this: in actual fact the largest contribution comes from the most miserable and least successful classes. In the professional and other successful classes late marriages and small families are almost the rule... the result is that these classes... are on the road to extinction. ...Meanwhile, our present system of doles... makes ... parenthood less of a responsibility... In this way, it increases the population in precisely those classes which are... unable to find employment. It is in these classes that the birthrate is the highest today; it is from these classes that the majority of our criminals, paupers and ne'er-do-wells come. We.. are building... tomorrow... and I fear it will consist far too largely of hospitals, prisons and lunatic asylums. Its population will contain too many unemployed, and too many unemployables. This is the price our children will have to pay for our irresponsible humanitarianism and sentimentalism... I believe (a vigorous reaction against them) is yet to come. It will come with overwhelming force as soon as the average hard-working, self-respecting citizen begins to realize how great an incubus the unfit and defective, the unenterprising and incapable, form on the prosperity and wealth of the nation, how they make his wages lower, his food dearer, and the risk of unemployment greater. If we cannot strike a juster balance between the claims of sentimental humanitarianism and those of future generations, it seems to me that the average quality of our population must progressively deteriorate... For this reason I suspect that all democracies carry within them the seeds of their own destruction..." Sir James Jeans, pp 110-113.
"As for the 'spirit of a gentleman,' its decline is so obvious as scarcely to admit of argument. It has even been maintained that in America, the country in which the collapse of traditional standards has been most complete, the gentleman is at a positive disadvantage..." Irving Babbitt, p 126.
"...even the greatest men of science, although they may possess the intellects of giants, have still the hearts of children." Sir Arthur Kieth, p146.
"...if men believe, as I do, that this present earth is the only heaven, they will strive all the more to make heaven of it." Sir Arthur Kieth, p150.
"I feel quite satisfied simply to possess within my individual body this curious spark which has come to me through so many experiences, to accept it and the inheritance which it has accumulated from every forbear behind me. I firmly believe that my only obligation to myself and to society, and to the Great First Cause, whatever that may be, is to be myself as fully and completely and perfectly as I possibly can manage to be. I do feel a certain dignity in the fact that I am alive, while myriads of forms, less able to meet and adapt themselves to circumstances than my ancestors and I have been, have perished from the earth; for my being alive proves that I came from stock with a strong will to live and the hardiness to persist in living and in reproducing its kind. This is no mean inheritance, and even if my forbears made only a poor, groping, uncertain struggle to preserve the life within them, they succeeded, all of them, for a time. So here I am, along with the rest of their progeny, and all other progeny; for what is true of me is also true of every living creature." Julia Peterkin, p202.
"Happiness is the goal of every normal human being. As it is given to few men to die happy, the best that man can hope and strive and pray for is momentary happiness during life, repeated as frequently as the cards allow. Pleasure, whatever its species, is the drink in the desert. It is the beautiful, transient reward of travail and pain. There is no other reward, except for those still sufficiently aboriginal to believe in a hereafter. The ambrosia of the gods, the lovely angels, eternal blue skies and peace, the music of golden harps, are too far off and dubious so far as my own metaphysics goes. I prefer to trust to the more realistic and visible Grand Montrachet, pretty girls, Mediterranean coast and symphony orchestras of the here and now." George Jean Nathan, p224.
"I believe that one intelligent man is worth ten parcel of beautiful women, but I would rather spend an evening with the beautiful women." George Jean Nathan, p232.
"I believe, with Nietzsche, ...that so long as you are praised, believe that you are not yet on own
course but on that of another." George Jean Nathan (the origianl quote by Nietzsche is:
"I am for all religions equally, as all impress me as being equally hollow." George Jean Nathan
"But the wonder to me is that Man is not even more astounded and dumbfounded than he appears to be each hour of his presence here; that he is not more withdrawn from his so-called necessities than he really is, in order to sit beneath a tree, Buddha fashion, and gaze in wonder and astonishment upon the wholly inexplicable world about him." Theodore Dreiser
"I am flooded with happiness - divine, demoniac dreams. I am seized with the very sting and tang of energy and desire, however fateful. So motivated, I can front a universe that knows nothing of kindness, pity, wisdom." Theodore Dreiser.
Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, 1851 (Essays and Aphorisms, R. J. Hollingdale, trans., London Penguin Books, 1970).
"It is obvious that an animal possesses intellect only for the purpose of discovering and capturing its food; the degree of intellect it possesses is determined by this purpose. It is no different in the case of man." p59.
"...the act of generation is seen as ... a paradoxical anomaly offering plentiful material for humor. It might occur to us, however, that this is only a case of the Devil's concealing his game: for has it not been noticed that sexual desire, especially when concentrated into infatuation through fixation on a particular woman, is the quintessence of this noble world's imposture, since it promises so excessively much and performs so miserably little?" p 64.
"Christianity carries in its innermost heart the truth that suffering (the Cross) is the true aim of life: that is why it repudiates suicide, which is opposed to this aim, while antiquity from a lower viewpoint approved of and indeed honored it." p 78.
"The nobler and more perfect a thing is, the later and more slowly does it mature." p 81.
"In our monogamous part of the world, to marry means to halve one's rights and double one's duties." p 87.
"There are very many thoughts which have value for him who thinks them, but only a few of them possess the power of engaging the interest of a reader after they have been written down." p 93.
"Yet, all the same, only that possesses true value which you have thought in the first instance for your own instruction. Thinkers can be divided into those who think in the first instance for their own instruction and those who do so for the instruction of others. The former are genuine thinkers for themselves in both senses of the words: they are true philosophers. They alone are in earnest. The pleasure and happiness of their existence consists in thinking. The latter are sophists. They want to appear as thinkers and seek their happiness in what they hope to thereby get from others. This is what they are in earnest about." p 93.
"...the principle that the end justifies the means. I have no inclination for a compromise founded on that basis. Religion may be an excellent means of taming and training the perverse, obtuse and wicked biped race: but in the eyes of the friend of truth every fraud, however pious, is still a fraud. A pack of lies would be a strange means of inducing virtue. The flag to which I have sworn allegiance is truth: I shall stay faithful to it everywhere and, regardless of the outcome, fight for light and truth. If I see religion in the ranks of the enemy..." p 107.
"Truth, my friend, truth alone holds firm, endures and stays steadfast: truth's consolation is the only solid consolation: it is the indestructible diamond." p 108.
"To free a man from an error is not to deprive him of anything, but to give him something: for the knowledge that a thing is false is a piece of truth. No error is harmless: sooner or later it will bring misfortune to him who harbors it. Therefore, deceive no one, but rather confess ignorance of what you do not know, and leave each man to devise his own articles of faith for himself." p 108.
"Oh yes, princes use the Lord God as a bogey to get their grown-up children to bed when nothing else will any longer serve; which is why they value Him so highly... since that ultima ratio theologorum (final argument of theology), the stake, has gone out of use, the effectiveness of this means of government has much diminished. For, as you know, religions are like glow-worms: they need darkness in order to shine. A certain degree of general ignorance is the condition for the existence of any religion, the element in which alone it is able to live. Perhaps the day so often prophesied will soon come, when religions will depart from European man, like a nurse whose care the child has outgrown and which henceforth comes under the instruction of a tutor. For articles of faith, based on nothing but authority, miracles and revelation are beyond doubt short-term aids appropriate only to the childhood of mankind: and it must be admitted that a race which, according to all the indications provided by physical and historical data, is at present no older than one hundred times the life of a man of sixty, is still in its first childhood." p 109.
"Suppose a proclamation were suddenly made at this moment repealing all laws relating to crime: I fancy neither you nor I would have the courage even to go home alone under the protection of religious motives. If, on the other hand, all religions were in the same way proclaimed untrue, we should go on living as before under the protection of the law alone without any special precautions." p 112.
"...which explains... the poverty of the scribbling which in all nations passes itself off to its contemporaries as their literature, and on the other the fate that overtakes true and genuine men who appear among such people. All genuine thought and art is to a certain extent an attempt to put big heads on small people: so it is no wonder the attempt does not always come off. For a writer to afford enjoyment always demands a certain harmony between his way of thinking and that of the reader; and the enjoyment will be the greater the more perfect this harmony is; so that a great mind will fully and completely enjoy only another great mind..." p 126.
"Intellect is fundamentally a hard-working factory-hand whom his demanding master, the will, keeps busy from morn to night. But if this hard-working serf should once happen to do some of his work voluntarily during his free time, on his own initiative and without any object but the work itself, simply for his own satisfaction and enjoyment - then this (will be) a genuine work of art; indeed, if pushed to an extreme, a work of genius." p 127.
"...intellect arose merely in order to serve the will. ...Most men, to be sure, are incapable of any other employment of their intellect, because with them it is merely a tool in service of their will, and is entirely consumed by this service, without any remainder. ...their intellect subsides into inactivity the moment their will ceases to drive it." p 128.
"...this tendency towards a free and thus abnormal employment of the intellect, together with the capacity for it, attains in the genius the point at which knowledge becomes the main thing, the aim of the whole of life; his own existence, on the other hand, declines to a subsidiary thing, a mere means; so that the normal relationship is completely reversed." p 129.
"...genius ... is an impediment: for with this intensifying of the intellectual powers, intuitive comprehension of the outside world achieves so great a degree of objective clarity, and furnishes so much more than is requisite for serving the will, that such an abundance becomes a downright hindrance to this service, ... For the service of the will an entirely superficial contemplation of things suffices, a contemplation which furnishes no more than their bearing on whatever aims we may have..." p 130.
"The motive which moves genius to productivity is ... an instinct of a unique sort by virtue of which the individual possessed of genius is impelled to express what he has seen and felt in enduring works without being conscious of any further motivation. ...it is as if in such an individual the will to live, as the spirit of the human species, had become conscious of having, by a rare accident, attained for a brief span of time to a greater clarity of intellect, and now endeavors to acquire at any rate the results, the products of this clear thought and vision for the whole species, which is indeed also the intrinsic being of this individual, so that their light may continue to illumine the darkness and stupor of the ordinary human consciousness. It is from this that there arises that instinct that impels genius to labor in solitude to complete its work without regard for reward, applause or sympathy, but neglectful rather even of its own well being and thinking more of posterity than of the age it lives in, which could only lead it astray. To make its work, as a sacred trust and the true fruit of its existence, the property of mankind, laying it down for a posterity better able to appreciate it: this becomes for genius a goal more important than any other, a goal for which it wears the crown of thorns that shall one day blossom into a laurel-wreath. Its striving to complete and safeguard its work is just as resolute as that of the insect to safeguard its eggs and provide for the brood it will never live to see: it deposits its eggs where it knows they will one day find life and nourishment, and dies contented." p 131-132.
"...the world as will is the primary (world) and the world as idea the secondary world. The former is the world of desire and consequently that of pain and thousand-fold misery. The latter, however, is in itself intrinsically painless: in addition it contains a remarkable spectacle, altogether significant or at the very least entertaining. Enjoyment of this spectacle constitutes aesthetic pleasure." p 156.
"For what value can be possessed by a being which is no different from millions of his kind? Millions? an infinity rather, an endless number of beings ceaselessly spurted forth by nature out of its inexhaustible well in saecula saeculorum (to all eternity), as generous with them as the blacksmith is with sparks. ... The will ... is the common stuff of all beings, the universal element of things: consequently we possess it in common with each and every man, indeed with the animals, and even further down. ... every vehement emergence of will is common, i.e., it demeans us to a mere exemplar of the species, for we then exhibit only the character of the species. What is common therefore is all anger, unbounded joy, all hatred, all fear, in short every emotion... If he surrenders to such ... emotion(s) the greatest genius becomes equal to the commonest son of earth. He, on the other hand, who wants to be altogether uncommon... must be able to take note of the odious opinion of another without feeling his own aroused by it: indeed, there is no surer sign of greatness than ignoring hurtful or insulting expressions by attributing them without further ado, like countless other errors, to the speaker's lack of knowledge and thus merely taking note of them without feeling them." p 173/174.
"Oh for an Asmodeus of morals who would let his minions see not only through roofs and walls but also through the veil of pretense, falsity, hypocrisy, lies and deception which extends over everything, so that they would know how little true honesty there is in the world, and how often, even where one least suspects it, all the virtuous outworks merely conceal the fact that, secretly and in the innermost recess, dishonesty sits at the helm. For our civilized world is nothing but a great masquerade." p 137.
"Man is at bottom a dreadful wild animal. We know this wild animal only in the tamed state called civilization and we are therefore shocked by occasional outbreaks of its true nature: but if and when the bolts and bars of the legal order once fall apart, and anarchy supervenes, it reveals itself for what it is. For enlightenment on this matter, though, you have no need to wait until that happens: there exist hundreds of reports, recent and less recent, which will suffice to convince you that man is in no way inferior to the tiger or the hyena in pitilessness and cruelty... " p 138.
"...that by what we do we know what we are, just as by what we suffer we know what we deserve." p 143.
"As a botanist can recognize the whole plant from one leaf, as (a naturalist) can construct the whole animal from one bone, so an accurate knowledge of a man's character can be arrived at from a single characteristic action; and that is true even when this action involves some trifle - indeed this is often better for the purpose, for with important things people are on their guard, while with trifles they follow their own nature without much reflection." p 144.
"That anyone who no longer wishes to live for himself must go on living merely as a machine for others to use is an extravagant demand." p 148.
"All princes were no doubt in fact originally victorious commanders... having acquired standing armies, they regarded the people as a means of feeding themselves and their soldiers, that is to say as a herd which one looks after so that it may provide wool, milk and meat." p 151.
"Justice is in itself powerless: what rules by nature is force. To draw this over on to the side of justice, so that by means of force justice rules - that is the problem of statecraft." p 152.
"Hatred is a thing of the heart, contempt a thing of the head. ...hatred ... has no other source than a compelled respect for the superior qualities of some other person... True, genuine contempt ...stays hidden away in secret, and lets no one suspect its existence: for if you let a person you despise notice the fact, you thereby reveal a certain respect for him, inasmuch as you want him to know how low you rate him - which betrays not contempt but hatred, which excludes contempt and only affects it..." p 170.
"It has to be admitted that many a man possesses at least a tenfold greater degree of existence than another - exists ten times as much." p 172.
"There are no other revelations than the thoughts of the wise... To this extent, therefore, it is all one whether you live and die trusting in your own thoughts or those of others, for you are never trusting in anything but human thoughts and human opinion. Yet as a rule men have a weakness for putting trust in those who pretend to supernatural sources of knowledge rather than in their own heads; but if you bear in mind the tremendous inequality between man and man, then the thoughts of one may very well count with another as a revelation." p 181.
"...But this must have been foreseen by at any rate Him who firstly failed to make men better than they are and then set a trap for them into which he must have known they would fall, since everything was his work and nothing was hidden from him. According to this dogma, then, he called into existence out of nothing a weak and sin-prone race in order to hand it over to endless torment. There is finally the further fact that the God who prescribes forbearance and forgiveness of every sin, even to the point of loving one's enemy, fails to practice it himself, but does rather the opposite: since a punishment which is introduced at the end of things, when all is over and done with forever, can be intended neither to improve nor deter; it is nothing but revenge. Thus regarded, it seems that the entire race is in fact definitely intended and expressly created for eternal torment and damnation - all, that is, apart from those few exceptions which are rescued from this fate by divine grace, although one knows not why. These aside, it appears as if the dear Lord created the world for the benefit of the Devil - in which event he would have done better not to have created it at all. This is what happens to dogmas when you take them (literally)." p 184.
"On the other hand, if this Augustinian dogma of the tiny number of the elect and the great number of the eternally damned is understood merely (allegorically) and interpreted in the sense of our own philosophy, then it agrees with the fact that only very few achieve denial of the will and thereby redemption from this world... What, on the other hand, this dogma hypostatizes as eternal damnation is nothing other than this world of ours: this is what devolves upon all the rest. It is a sufficiently evil place: it is Purgatory, it is Hell, and devils are not lacking in it. Only consider what men sometimes inflict upon men, with what ingenious torments one will slowly torture another to death, and ask yourself whether devils could do more. And sojourn in this place is likewise eternal for all those who obdurately persist in affirming the will to live." p 186.
"Those who think the sciences can go on advancing and spreading wider and wider without threatening the continued existence and prosperity of religion are very much in error. Physics and metaphysics are the natural enemies of religion. To speak of peace and accord between them is very ludicrous: it is a (war of extermination). Religions are the children of ignorance, and they do not long survive their mother. Omar understood that when he burned the library at Alexandria: his reason for doing so - that the knowledge contained in the books was either also contained in the Koran or was superfluous - is regarded as absurd, but is in fact very shrewd if taken (with a grain of salt): it signifies that if the sciences go beyond the Koran they are enemies of religion and consequently not to be tolerated. Christianity would be in much better shape today if Christian rulers had been as wise as Omar. By now, however, it is a little late to burn all the books." p 196-197.
"Payment and reserved copyright are at bottom the ruin of literature. Only he who writes entirely for the sake of what he has to say writes anything worth writing. It is as if there were a curse on money: every writer writes badly as soon as he starts writing for gain. The greatest works of the greatest men all belong to a time when they had to write them for nothing or for very small payment..." p 199.
"The first rule, indeed by itself virtually a sufficient condition for good style, is to have something to say. p 203.
"The art of not reading is a very important one. It consists in not taking an interest in whatever may be engaging the attention of the general public at any particular time... you should remember that he who writes for fools always finds a large public. A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short." p 210.
"I wish someone would one day attempt a tragic history of literature, showing how the various nations which now take their highest pride in the great writers... (to show how they were) treated while they were alive. In such a history, the author would bring visibly before us that endless struggle which the good and genuine of all ages and all lands has to endure against the always dominant bad and wrong-headed... Show us how, with a few exceptions, they lived tormented lives in poverty and wretchedness, without recognition, without sympathy, without disciples, while fame, honour and riches went to the unworthy..." p 210-211.
"The beard, being a half-mask, should be forbidden by the police. It is, moreover, as a sexual symbol in the middle of the face, obscene: that is why it pleases women." p 223.
"To estimate a genius you should not take the mistakes in his productions, or his weaker works, but only those works in which he excels. For even in the realm of the intellect, weakness and absurdity cleave so firmly to human nature that even the most brilliant mind is not always entirely free of them..." p 223.
"Dilettantes! Dilettantes! - this is the derogatory cry (directed at) those who apply themselves to art or science for the sake of gain raise against those who pursue it for love of it and pleasure in it... The truth, however, is that to the dilettante the thing is the end, while to the professional as such it is the means; and only he who is diretly interested in a thing, and occupies himself with it from love of it, will pursue it with entire seriousness. It is from such as these, and not from wage-earners, that the greatest things have always come." p 227.
"Once when I was collecting specimens under an oak tree I found, among
the other plants and weeds, and of the same size as they, a plant of a
dark colour with contracted leaves and a straight, rigid stalk. When
I made to touch it, it said in a firm voice: 'Let me alone!
I am no weed for your herbarium, like these others to whom nature has given
a bare year of life. My life is measured in centuries: I am
a little oak tree.' - Thus does he whose influence is to be
felt across the centuries stand, as a child, as a youth, often still as
a man, indeed as a living creature as such, apparently like the rest and
as insignificant as they. But just give him time and, with time,
those who (will) know how to recognize him. He will not die like
the rest." p 236.
Arthur Schopenhauer, Living Biographies of Great Philosophers, Doubleday, 1941.
"The mind and body, then, are the instruments of the will {substitute for "will" the modern word "genes"}. It is the will that forms the grooves in the human embryo and builds the vessels for the circulation of the blood. It is the will that fashions the brain. It is the will to eat that shapes the mouth, the teeth and the throat; the will to reproduce that shapes the sexual organs; the will to grow that attracts the plant to the sun. Can the agitated struggle of men and mates and children be the work of reason? Not at all. It is the will. Life is the instinctive will to live. Rivalry and struggle and destruction are therefore the essentials of life. For the wills of all individuals wage a ceaseless war upon one another. The will itself has no motive, no aim, no purpose and no limit. It is a blind and endless and futile striving. Victory alternates with defeat, and life with death. The will to live drives everything ultimately to self-destruction. And finally, each man succumbs to the will of the worms." Paraphrase, , p226.
"The universal will to live conquers its eternal enemy, death, through the reproductive organs of the species. Nature doesn't care at all about the individual; she is concerned only with the type. As soon as the individual reproduces his kind he has lost all value for Nature. After he has completed his task man is ripe for the grave. Nature has deceived the individual into perpetuating the misery of his race. She has endowed woman for a few years with a wealth of charm... at the expense of the rest of her life, so that during those years of youth she may capture the fancy of some man to such a degree that he is hurried away into undertaking the honorable care of her... Then, just as the female ant, after fecundation, loses her wings, which are now superfluous... so, after giving birth to one or two children, a woman loses her beauty. Her mission has been accomplished. Time to make way for younger, healthier bodies to carry on the work of reproduction. What an irony, this perpetuation of the race. And how foolish we are to love!" p 233.
"...It is the will that rules. The mind is merely its servant. We do not want a thing because we reason. We find reasons for a thing because we want it. The mind is always inventing logic for the whims of the will." Paraphrase, p226.
"The living present is constantly receding into the dead past. For what is the past but dead time? Life is a postponed death, just as walking is a postponed falling. Every breath we draw, every step we take, every meal we eat, is an attempt to fight off death. But to no avail. Death claims us at our birth." p229.
"One giant calls to another through the weary space of the centuries (referring to Kant and himself), and the myriads of pygmies who are crawling below can hear nothing but a faint sound overhead... These pygmies ape one another in an orgy of buffonery, adorn themselves with what the giants have dropped, and acclaim as their greatest heroes those who are pygmies like themselves..." p230.
"A friend in need is not a friend indeed but merely a borrower." p235.
Arthur Schopenhauer, Studies in Pessimism, Further Psychological Observations, 18xx
Philalethes: ..."Suppose I guarantee that after death you shall
remain an individual, but only on condition that you first spend three
months of complete unconsciousness."
Thrasymachos: "I shall give no objection to that."
Philalethes: "But remember, if people are completely unconscious,
they take no account of time. So, when you are dead. it's all the
same to you whether three months pass in the world of unconsciousness,
or ten thousand years. ...And if by chance, after those ten thousand
years have gone by, no one ever thinks of awakening you, I fancy it would
be no great misfortune. You would have become quite accustomed to
non-existence after so long a spell of it - following upon such a very
few years of life..."
"Indeed, the whole of our social arrangements may be likened to a perpetual comedy; and this is why a man who is worth anything finds society so insipid, while a blockhead is quite at home in it."
"What value can a creature have that is not a whit different from millions of its kind? Millions, do I say? nay, an infinitude of creatures which, century after century, in never-ending flow, Nature sends bubbling up from her inexhaustible springs; as generous with them as the smith with the useless sparks that fly around his anvil. ... Will, then, is that which we possess in common with all men, nay, with all animals, and even with lower forms of existence... On the other hand, that which places one being over another, and sets differences between man and man, is intellect and knowledge... Every violent exhibition of will is common and vulgar; in other words, it reduces us to the level of the species, and makes us a mere type and example of it... Contrarily, if a man desires to be absolutely uncommon, in other words, great, he should never allow his consciousness to be taken possession of and dominated by the movement of his will..."
Arthur Schopenhauer paraphrases, Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1961.
"...most of our suffering lies in retrospect or anticipation; pain itself is brief. How much more suffering is caused by the thought of death than by death itself."
"The total picture of life is almost too painful for contemplation; life depends on our not knowing it too well." p 246.
"The healthy man asks not so much for happiness as for an opportunity to exercise his capacities; and if he must pay the penalty of pain for his freedom and this power, he makes the forfeit cheerfully; it is not too great a price." p261.
"Let men recognize the snare that lies in women's beauty, and the absurd
comedy of reproduction will end. ... How long shall we be lured into
this much-ado-about-nothing, this endless pain that leads only to a painful
end?" p258.
Will and Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History, New York: Simon and Schuster,1968.
"Under the complex strains of city life we sometimes take imaginative refuge in the supposed simplicity of pre-civilized ways; but in our romantic moments we know that this is a flight reaction from our actual tasks, and that the idolizing of savages, like many other young moods, is an impatient expression of adolescent maladaptation, of conscious ability not yet matured and comfortably placed. The ‘friendly and flowing savage' would be delightful but for his scalpel, his insects, and his dirt."
"...only the man who is below the average in economic ability desires equality; those who are conscious of superior ability desire freedom..." p 20.
"History in the large is the conflict of minorities; the majority applauds the victor and supplies the human material of social experiment." p 35.
"Does history support a belief in God? If by God we mean not the creative vitality of nature but a supreme being intelligent and benevolent, the answer must be a reluctant negative... Nature and history do not agree with our conceptions of good and bad; they define good as that which survives, and bad as that which goes under; and the universe has no prejudice in favor of Christ as against Gengis Khan." p 46.
"As long as there is poverty there will be gods." p 51.
"If progress is real despite our whining, it is not because we are born any healthier, better or wiser than infants in the past, but because we are born to a richer heritge, born on a higher level of that pedestal which the accumulation of knowledge and art raises as the ground and support of our being."
"Normally and generally men are judged by their ability to produce - except in war, when they are ranked according to their ability to destroy." p54.
"Since practical ability differs from person to person, the majority of such abilities, in nearly all societies, is gathered in a minority of men. The concentration of wealth is a natural result of this concentration of ability, and regularly occurs in history. The rate of concentration varies... Despotism may for a time retard the concentration; democracy, allowing the most liberty, accelerates it... In progressive societies the concentration may reach a point where the strength of numbers in the many poor rivals the strength of ability in the few rich; then the unstable equilibrium generates a critical situation, which history has diversely met by legislation redistributing wealth or by revolution distributing poverty." p55.
"...internal liberty varies inversely as external danger." p61.
"Education has spread, but intelligence is perpetually retarded by the fertility of the simple." p78.
"Since inequality grows in an expanding economy, a society may find itself divided between a cultured minority and a majority of men and women too unfortunate by nature or circumstance to inherit or develop standards of excellence and taste. As this majority grows it acts as a cultural drag upon the minority; its ways of speech, dress, recreation, feeling, judgement, and thought spread upward, and internal barbarization by the majority is part of the price that the minority pays for its control of edcational and economic opportunity." p92.
Our capacity for fretting is endless, and no matter how many difficulties we surmount, how many ideals we realize, we shall always find an excuse for being magnificently miserable..." p97.
"We should ... define what progress means to us. If it means increase
in happiness its case is lost almost at first sight. ... It
seems silly to define progress in terms that would make the average child
a higher, more advanced product of life than the adult or the sage - for
certainly the child is the happiest of the three." p97.
Nietzsche,Thoughts Out of Season/The Use and Abuse of History, 1874
"Every one has noticed that a man's historical knowledge and range of feeling may be very limited, his horizon as narrow as that of an Alpine Valley, his judgements incorrect ... and yet in spite of all the incorrectness and falsity he may stand forth in unconquerable health and vigor, to the joy of all who see him; whereas another man with far more judgement and learning will fail in comparison ..." F. Nietzsche, Thoughts Out of Season/The Use and Abuse of History, 1874.
"The best works are produced in such an ecstacy of love that they must
always be unworthy of it, however great their worth otherwise." F.
Nietzsche, Thoughts Out of Season/The Use and Abuse of History,
1874.
Friedrich Nietzsche character, Irvin D. Yalom, When Nietzsche Wept, New York: Basic Books,1992.
"He who does not obey himself is ruled by others."
"Lust, arousal, voluptuousness - they are the enslavers! The rabble spend their lives like swine feeding in the trough of lust."
"Do you know what the real question for a thinker is? The real question is: How much truth can I stand?"
"...one can't love a woman without blinding oneself to the ugliness beneath the fair skin: blood, veins, fat, mucous, feces - the physiological horrors. The lover must put out his own eyes, must forsake truth. And for me, an untrue life is a living death!"
"This moment exists forever, and you, alone, are your only audience."
"..we are each composed of many parts, each clamoring for expression. We can be held responsible for only the final compromise, not for the wayward impulses of each of the parts."
"There is a basic division in the ways of men: those who wish for peace of soul and happiness must believe and embrace faith, while those who wish to pursue truth must forsake peace of mind and devote their life to inquiry. ... You must choose between comfort and true inquiry! If you choose... to be liberated from the soothing chains of the supernatural, if... you choose to eschew belief and embrace godlessness, then you cannot in the same breath yearn for the small comforts of the believer! ...If you choose to be one of those few who partake of the pleasure of growth and the exhilaration of godless freedom, then you must prepare yourself for the greatest pain. They are bound together and cannot be experienced apart! If you want less pain, then you must shrink, as the stoics did, and forgo the highest pleasure."
"When a friend needs a resting place, it is best to offer a hard cot!"
Erwin Edman, The Contemporary and His Soul, New York: Jonathan Cape & Harrison Smith, 1931.
"It is not simply that the glitter of false gods is distracting the contemporary from his characteristic intellectual and aesthetic interests, but that the currency of these themselves is being debased. The very essence of intelligence is discrimination.." p 13.
"Poets, beginning with Ecclesiastes, have bewailed the devouring mouth of time which consumes all things..." p 13.
"Time, by whose indeterminate future we were to save ourselves, turns out to be the river in which those constantly vanishing moments we call ourselves must drown. From these and similar awarenesses the contemporary, though he would shun the expression, is looking about to be saved." p 14.
"There is one embittered or ensoured group who have indeed thought themselves beyond the traps of any new scheme of salvation. The modernists in cynicism, scepticism and despair have thought that by a complete disillusion they could at least save themselves from ever again being taken in. 'We prefer' writes Mr. Joseph Wood Krutch at the conclusion of his The Modern Temper - 'to die as men rather than to live as animals.'" p 18.
"...there has grown up the remarkable faith that what men once left to God they can now attain of their own disciplined and controlled action." p 20.
There are those ... who despairing of the world that the war has left us, bemoaning the change in a civilization that seems ultimately to consist in nothing but change, have tried to retreat to some indefeasible realm, as snug and sure as a protected harbour, as certain and eternal as a traditional Paradise. These have to go back to Plato or to Hindu philosophy for their salvation. ... Only by giving up the whole world of existence may they save their own souls, become the pure disinterested spectators of what always is and ever has been. ... There are others who will not thus retreat to Platonism, but the Platonists cannot feel happy in the contemporary world. They are homesick for what is dead, nostalgic for a heaven of which the cultures, languages and traditions of the past are echoes and memories." p 20.
"Man is a puny accident in a meaningless machine of a world, and at the very highest he can enjoy the grim business of nursing in his samll corner of a careless cosmos a set of ideals which, though generated by that system, that system does not care in the least about. Man can at best warm himself for a brief moment at the fated small fires of his own ideal amidst the cold, gloomy and universal, of the solar system. And what ever little achievement of the beauty that is form, of the insight that is truth, of the harmony of living that is goodness man may achieve and incarnate in matter and in life, all this (this is the chilling guarantee of even the latest astronomers) is doomed to an ultimate extinction, a final cataclysm of a heatless planet, when the sun's vanished heat will have ceased to warm the race whose achievements these cherished things are." p 30.
"More distressing still is the fact that there cannot be detected in it a presence, eternal in its duration and always contemporary in its sympathies, that once, for previous generations - and a forgotten large number in the present - went by the name of God. It is clear enough that most sophisticated writers have not much direct concern with God or any remote belief in his existence. But they are, nonetheless, in an inverted way, concerned with him. They are subterraneously obsessed with the fact of his absence and all that absence implies." p 31.
There comes a certain time in the life of a child when he sees an adult cry for the first time, or first perceives that a grown-up can be wrong or helpless or stupid. He discovers, in short and in fact, that there are no adults to be respected or adored, or, what is more to the point, depended upon. Something not dissimilar is the situation of the children of the 19th Century grown up into the 20th. They find that this God whom they have read out or presumed to be read out of the universe has carried with him into oblivion any discernible direction of things, any significance of life or any logic of destiny. Along with the incubus of religion they have rid themselves of its sanctions and consolations. They do not long for God but they look for something to fill the black spaces that his departure has created. They are atheists troubled by the consequences of their atheism, unbelievers wishing there were at least at least something else to believe. One of the reasons that disillusion has become a cult is that where there is nothing credible left, one can at least vaunt one's own unswerving disillusion." p 31
"It is assumed with, I think, demonstrable falsity, that to be free of traditions, is to be exhilarated. But to be free is to be not simply liberated from bonds but robbed of comforts, and purloined of supports. To have a fixed, though humble place in an established order, to be able to act calmly with reference to one code assumed (because one has never known or dreamed of another) to be reasonable and good, these are the rewards of acceptance. They are rewards which few moderns know. ... Emanicpation has brought them perpetual unrest, not perpetual freedom " p 35.
"Quarrel as one will with the herd, one needs some herd, however small, for moral warmth. And the small herd of disillusionists have nothing but doubt to offer each other." p 36.
"...it has come to be the astringent fashion to see even less in the admirable actions or in the images of contemporaries than in those of our predecessors. It is as if there were a gritting of teeth and a sardonic determination not to be taken in. It need not be argued nor need cases be cited to prove that there are, both among the obscure and the famous, instances of genius, of insight, or suffering, endurance and courage in our time equal to those of any past generation. For it is the ironic belief of a by no means negligible portion of the contemporary intellectual class that the case is rather to be reversed. Did we but have all the facts, we should find that the greatness of the past is but the sentimentalism of distance and the pathos of ignorance." p 39.
"It is easy enough as a parlor trick of dialectic to dissolve the human ego into nothingness, a moment of sensation which in itself may be an illusion. ... The psyche may be a myth, but practically speaking, one can act as if the self were real, and one does." p 40.
"It is impossible to take oneself very seriously if one's most ambitious and generous undertakings are reduced to the lecheries of a monkey or the pulings of a child." p 42.
"It is the last word in intellectual nonchalance to believe that 'not many fine, not many learned, not many noble' exist in the world or ever have existed. ... Nobody will ever be able to say to them that they had been fooled...If they expect nothing, then nothing can surprise or impress or depress them." p 43.
"The disillusionist smiles when he is told that if he were properly absorbed he would not be unhappy. He takes that to mean simply that he would be too busy to think, but that thinking would lead him inevitably to his lugubrious conclusions." p 44.
"In the patriarchal society of the last two thousand years, a man's life was ... defined by his place as a son or a father... The family, the city, the country, and... the church... helped determine the contours of life and give it continuity, richness and depths. One by one those supports have vanished. Men are still husbands, fathers or sons in biological fact; they are still technically citizens, ... But the vital energizing that comes from these relationships ... has vanished. The springs of emotion and of action from these deep traditional sources have dried up. Men have attained individuality [my emphasis], they have broken away from the family, the city, the state and the church. Man has grown into an an individual, and the individuality has turned out to be meaningless, futile, bare and confused. The modern soul has, as it were, become an old bachelor, uninspired by ties of family, without any country or creed and not even the waning excitement of the senses or of a career to stimulate, encourage and refresh him." p 48.
"There is no cult to celebrate the efficacy of human action, human will and human deliberation upon the course of natural events..." p 53.
"With freedom from old prejudices has risen a crop of new complexes; one has been released simply from old dogmas to new uncertainties. ... The soul has escaped into the open sea, and the first result is that it has become seasick." p 67.
"The faith in the technique of intelligence has been reduced from the hopeful engineering toward a regenerated earth to a fevered technique for relief from the unbearable strain of an unregenerated one. It is the beginning of the end of the belief in the perfectibility of mankind. Retrospectively considered, then, each of the great fields in which the faith in intelligence has flourished has successively been found wanting. Its naivest form was the assumption that mastery of things, resulting in comfort, luxury, variety of goods and quick communication, could produce individual and universal happiness. It had been forgotten that long ago Marcus Aurelius desperately remarked that even in a palace it was possible to live well." p 68.
"No one loved life more than the Greeks of the great period nor is there any literature that is so impatient and so sad at the inevitability of death. We, like the Greeks, have no hopes of another life, and there is nothing in the promise of creative intelligence to bring us a victory... over extinction." p 70.
"It has been said endlessly and patiently that the discovery that the universe has no purpose need not prevent a human being from having one, or indeed many, as many as his own life, circumstances and impulses generate." p 74.
"To exist is to be doomed first to corruption and ultimately to extinction." p 79.
"Only those who are completely absorbed or completely happy or very young, forget time." p 80.
"To be born is to be on the road to dying... To be at all in the sphere of space and time is to be fated to extinction." p 93.
"The Platonist has a ... prejudice against all that is and all that changes. To the lover of truth..., form is necessarily set, fixed and timeless." p 93.
"The Platonist is indeed today what he always has been, an Epicurean hugging his selected immediate sensations and intuitions and trying to promote them to eternity. All we are ever given in experience, he reflects, is the sharp cutting edge of the present, and these successive presents always vanish into irrevocable pasts. Then surely he has the temptation, and in his own eyes the logical right, to save of each present what can never be lost, its eternal quality, its indestructible because purely timeless form. It is upon this realm of essences that the Platonizing imagination in our time has come to brood. What is there, is there forever, subject to no vicissitude of change, of history or prophecy. Shining and implacable, each essence is forever what it is. ... But even the time-enslaved mind in a shifting society may behold eternities, and immortality may, for a brief span, be experienced even by mortal man." p 95
"The ancient Platonist knew fairly definitely ... what forms and essences constituted the Heaven of Ideas. They were varieties of Truth, Goodness and Beauty... But contemporary Platonism has escaped from even such a noble narrowness in eternity. The realm of essences for the modern Platonist is the realm of all, of infinite, possibility. Not only all that has ever been incarnate or apprehended, but all that may be conceived or imagined has inhabited, will inhabit, eternally inhabits, this timeless domain. This constitutes its glory, its beauty, and, what is from the point of view of these studies in contemporary salvation most important, its consolation. What matter those vicissitudes and transformations which trouble those spirits intent upon the enterprises at once precarious and futile of this confused and hasty age? There is a blessed infinity of possibilities residing still untouched and unspoilt and perhaps never to be realized in that calm expanse of the infinitely possible. Here the imagination can travel widely and serenely, for nothing can ever happen in those Elysian fields beyond events. What does it matter how limited and mean appear the changes and chances of the actual present to those who always have recourse to the infinite that mind can explore or poetry imagine? Here there is neither success nor failure, disappointment nor surprise, only a still unravished field of intuition. This mess of contemporaneity, so soiled, so fluttering and vain, is but one of the incarnations, poor and infinitesimal, of those innumerable worlds which might just as well have been realized had the order of nature, the structure of man, the course of history been a little different. Here is at once Nirvana and fulfilment. Here by one device one can attain emancipation and peace. The emancipation is from a slavish submission to things as they happen to be. The peace is that of absorption in forms, lovely, strange or terrible, but immutably and aseptically what they are. Contemporary Platonism yields at once the joy of sight and the resignation of insight. In the realm of essence, the mystic and aesthete are one.
It may indeed be said that this new Platonism is a new and austere kind of aestheticism. Stoicism and Epicureanism become one. Its psychotherapeutic value lies first in that it is, or gives the appearance of being, a complete escape from time. To it a thousand years or a single day are one, and one of the chief stings of contemporaneity, that it is contemporary, vanishes. One exists here and now, but the Heaven of Ideas is one's home. The new Platonist lives in the intuition of an essence, or a form; whether it exist or be merely imagined makes no difference. Life becomes for him a listenmg to an eternal music. His listening may be disturbed by the tawdry noises of the world about him, but he knows the music is always there to be heard or to be played. And while he is listening, he is one with that melodious eternity, and completely oblivious of the discords of the present, the sadness of the past or the ominousness of the future. Life is like a perfect chord perfectly sustained and accurately heard.
We may be the witnesses of the twilight of a civilization, but here it no gotterdammerung, only the clear and calm language of the gods, engraved for everlasting. Among these half proud, half melancholy Olympians even the pleasures of the senses and the enjoyments of society are valued as instances of immortal essences, as lyric moments in mortal time.
There is about all this a high and pure enjoyment, an Epicureanism singularly fastidious and clean. But there is about it also a Stoicism, not unmingled with irony and pity. Even the best of worlds or the happiest of lives must vanish, and we are not living in the best of worlds or leading the happiest of lives. But by giving up the love of the actual, always crass, slavish and compromising, and always bound to be disappointing, we become free men, sure at least of a quietistic happiness, and insured against any possible frustration, 'loving too much to be ever imprisoned, understanding too much to be ever in love.'
Our standpoint is not that of now or even of ourselves, but that of eternity. It is quality, not duration, the essence and not the accidental power or even existence of things by which we are impressed. The present is loved only for what, disappointedly beheld, it reveals, the past for such memorial forms as we may now behold in it, the future for such patterns as it suggests to this given moment of vision. Whether we live briefly or at length, we may live as if we were living forever. And though we are hemmed into this narrow nook of time, we can see with the eyes of all those who in any age saw beyond it, sharing eternity with those who have anywhere or in any century shared it. We are one with Buddha, Plato, Dante, Emerson and Shelley.
Next to this lofty abdication of the actual, there seems, especially to the Platonist, a vulgarity about those preoccupied with the present order of things... and with a future which in its turn, too, must be a present and doubtless a disappointing one. Science and the Machine, Progress, Evolution, Nature - they are all grand enterprises or grand words, but they are nothing to the realm of infinity, and will vanish to nothing in the realm of eternity.
Half of this flight is the flight of the aesthetic, half of it that of the ascetic. Schopenhauer long ago found in the still Palace of Art a salvation, though a temporary one, from the restless claims of the will. And Art meant for him, too, a realm of eternal forms. It is enough, and, it would appear, true enough, to suggest that the sources of this flight lie where they have always lain in such enterprises, in a discontent with and a contempt for the actual. It is sweet to dream of possible, impossible and indestructible worlds, when the present one is a nightmare, as awful as it is temporary.
It is also easy enough and possibly equally true to suggest that the escape is a Pickwickian one. At least the actual remains actual and still importunate, the future with its tantalizing possibilities and hopes and threats lies as insistently there as ever, the past is not simply a vision to be held but a heritage to be reckoned with, utilized, and modified, but inexorably there.
There is hardly any fear that Platonism will become a very widespread philosophy or practice. It demands too great sensitiveness and too great disinterestedness to become a very popular mystery religion, though Christian Science and Mind Cure are ragged versions of it. Its sole danger is that it will delude its own votaries. As long as it is realized that the intuitions of eternal things are the subtle preoccupations of an animal and mortal creature in an actual and changing world, the preoccupation has its own austere recompenses and justifications. It is releasing to dwell on that realm of possibility which the mind may ingenuously discover or the imagination glamorously invent. But these possibilities are purely speculative and metaphysical. They do not affect, the Platonist would be first to admit it, the course of the actual, though their contemplation may take away its sting. It is emancipating in a society given over to romanticism and subjectivism to have a philosophy arise once more that asks to behold things not with reference to ourselves or to the future but under the perspective of eternity. But the contemplation and the release have a human origin and a social condition. It may be well to withdraw and see things, however anguished, tempting or exciting, as mere examples of eternity. But that withdrawal is a withdrawal and a momentary soliloquy. The skylark, however high it flies, however heavenly its song, has a mortal body from which its song arises and an earthly home to which it may and must return. Its song occurs, moreover, always in a present moment of time. The Platonist sings of his essences, bodiless, gleaming and eternal, here in the third decade of the twentieth century, and Western civilization as it now is, is his home. He may fly from it, as others have fled in imagination from other civilizations. That flight may constitute his own self-hypnotic salvation. But it will not save many, and if ability to face the actual is a part of salvation, it leaves the Platonist himself unsaved." pp 95-101.
"Get out of the way of Justice. She is blind."
"The safest refuge from the present is the past." p 105.
"What is one to make of an age or to do in it when there is nothing in the miscellany of schools of art and winds of doctrine to depend on but one's own taste, one's own judgement and, if at all possbile, one's own intelligence?" p 128.
"The essence of modern thinking has been said to be inquiry. Nut the modern, like the ancient, has peace not in resstless seeking but in finding once and for all." p 130.
"The day of life seems still short and frosty, and the brief sunlight of the senses still the one indubitable good. Simple people seem still to know that good, and complex people now try to recapture it." p 141.
"'Let us go,' said Walt Whitman, 'and live like the animals, not one of whom is respectable or unhappy.' But it is possible only for an animal to live like one." p 142.
"The sexual climax may be the 'only bright page in the thin biography of many a human animal.'" p 144.
"The cult of sex is the protest of the complicated trying to be simple, of those made spiritual and delicate. ... It needs only be to be recalled that the body itself is a multiplicity of impulses, that life is a variety of interests and enterprises, to see the pathetic futility of this new phalic fanaticism." p 145.
"We are breathing,, eating, sexual animals. But we are laughing and thinking and imaginative animals, too." p 146.
"Only simple people can lead simple lives. For others simplicity is itself a complex fraud that fools and hurts those who attempt it." p 159.
"They are those who having found all pathways blind alleys, decide to pursue them no longer, but to repose at length upon the bosom of God, to be one with the One, alone with the Alone. True ecstasy is absolute oblivion. It is a loss of self in a large and comforting whole. It is an intense peace, a crowded solitude, all doubts becoming meaningless, all distinctions transcended or forgotten. The child in his mother's womb could not be more completely satisfied than the mystic lost - and saved - in the absolute." p 161.
"Most neo-mystics are not approaching the love of God so much as relpsing into the vast and vague confusions of infancy." p 162.
"It would be, of course, not simply a hazardous but an insolent enterprise to offer a therapeutic program after having examined with dismissive criticism those schemes of moral salvation now offered by any number of serious and honest and competent leaders of contemporary reflection. The history of thought upon these issues has indeed made it sufficiently clear that any version of salvation is largely the wishful operation of a fantasy, rather than the responsible functioning of thought. ... It is a fairy tale told in a crumbling civilization or a disordered life to help the teller of the tale to keep up his courage. It is an imperious whistling in the moral dark. ... It is no use telling certain dreamers that they are merely living a dream. They may have known it all along and not regarded it, therefore, as any the less beautiful and preferable." P. 167.
"For the born philosopher indeed in any age, comtemplation is the only happiness." P. 168.
"No crop was ever disdained because it was manure that helped produce it." p 170.
"We work in the twentieth century and dream in the twelfth; we are neighbors to the dynamo and we escape to a marble temple shining on an ancient Mediterranean hill." p 177.
"The good citizen and the good father have sources of vital restoration at which the libertine and the intellectual may both scoff, but which they scoff at in vain. When, with the passage of youth, the senses have lost their tang, and when the mind has uncovered the loneliness of those eternities among which it wanders, the father and the citizen will have the inarticulate best of the argument. No lofty Platonism, no cynical or fastidious Epicureanism can rob them of what they have and what they know. They will probably regard as superogatory all discussion of the soul and its salvation. As far as they are concerned they will be right." p 181.
"It is possible as occasional instances even in our society would appear to indicate, to find salvation in this world and in this present age of the world. The elements of happiness are precisely what they always have been. They range from the youthful pleasures of the senses to the wide sweep and contemplations of the mind. The chief value of the senses, and particularly of sex, may be said to be the glow they shed on the whole of experience and the stimulation they give to the least sensual of enterprises or absorptions. ... To be aware of the "sensuous surface of experience" is with acute appreciation to have become aware of the present." p 183.
"For most men and women, even those who pride themselves on being intellectual, the whole colour of life becomes intensified and the meanings of life become more clear and enriched, when they are shared..." p 186.
Jose Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses, 1930.
"...the most radical division that is possible to make of humanity is that which splits it into two classes of creatures: those who make great demands on themselves, piling up difficulties and duties; and those who demand nothing special of themselves, but for whom to live is to be every moment what they already are, without imposing on themselves any effort towards perfection; mere buoys that float on the waves." Ch. 1.
"As we shall see, a characteristic of our times is the predominance, even in groups traditionally selective, of the mass and the vulgar." Ch. 1.
"I may be mistaken, but the present-day writer, when he takes his pen in hand to treat a subject which he has studied deeply, has to bear in mind that the average reader, who has never concerned himself with this subject, if he reads does so with the view, not of learning something from the writer, but rather, of pronouncing judgement on him when he is not in agreement with the commonplaces that the said reader carrires in his head." Ch. 1.
"The characteristic of the hour is that the commonplace mind, knowing itself to be commonplace, has the assurance to proclaim the right of the commonplace and to impose them wherever it will." Ch. 1.
"The history of the Roman Empire is also the history of the uprising of the Empire of the Masses, who absorb and annul the directing minorities [elite] and put themselves in their place." Ch. 2.
"The tempo at which things move at present, the force and energy with which everything is done, cause anguish to the man of archaic mould, and this anguish is the measure of the difference between his pulse-beats and the pulse-beats of the time." Ch. 3.
"What appearance did life present to that multitudinous man who in ever-increasing abundance the 19th Century kept producing? To start with, an appearance of universal ease. Ch. 5.
What before would have been considered one of fortune's gifts, inspiring humble gratitude towards destiny, was converted into a right, not to be grateful for, but to be insisted on." Ch. 6.
"...the common man, finding himself in a world so excellent, technically and socially, believes that it has been produced by nature, and never thinks of the personal efforts of highly-endowed individuals which the creation of this new world presupposed. ... This leads us to note down in our psychological chart of the mass-man of today two fundamental traits: the free expansion of his vital desires, and therefore, of his personality; and his radical ingratitude towards all that has made possible the ease of his experience.. These traits together make up the well-known psychology of the spoilt child. ... To spoil means to put no limit on caprice, to give one the impression that everything is permitted to him and that he has no obligations." Ch. 6.
"Thus is explained and defined the absurd state of mind revealed by these masses; they are only concerned with their own well-being, and at the same time they remain alien to the cause of that well-being. As they do not see, behind the benefits of civilization, marvels of invention and construction, which can only be maintained by great effort and foresight, they imagine that their role is limited to demanding these benefits peremptorily, as if they were natural rights. In the disturbances caused by scarcity of food, the mob goes in search of bread, and the means it employs is generally to wreak the bakeries." Ch. 6.
"Let us recall that at the start we distinguished the excellent man from the common man by saying that the former is the one who makes great demands on himself, and the latter the one who makes no demands on himself, but contents himself with what he is, and is delighted with himself. Contrary to what is usually thought, it is the man of excellence, and not the common man, who lives in essential servitude. Life has no savour for him unless he makes it consist in service to something transcendental. ... This is life lived as a discipline - the noble life. Nobility is defined by the demands it makes on us - by obligations, not by rights. ... It is annoying to see the degeneration suffered in ordinary speech by a word so inspoiring as 'nobility.' ... "nobility' does not appear as a formal expression until the Roman Empire, and then precisely in opposition to the hereditary nobles, then in decadence. For me, then, nobility is synonymous with a life of effort, ever set on excelling oneself, in passsing beyond what one is to what one sets up as a duty and an obligation. In this way the noble life stands opposed to the common or inert life, which reclines statically upon itself, condeemned to perpetual immobility, unless an external force compels it to come out of itself. Hence we apply the term mass to this kind of man - not so much because of his multitude as because of his inertia. ... In order to define the actual mass-man, who is as much 'mass' as ever, but who wishes to supplant the 'excellent,' it has been necessary to contrast him with the two pure forms which are mingled in him: the normal masss and the genuine noble or man of effort." Ch 7.
"...the world as organized by the 18th Century, when automatically producing a new man, has infused into him formidable appetites and powerful means of every kind for satisfying them. ... The simple process of preserving our present civilization is supremely complex, and demands incalculably subtle powers. Ill-fitted to direct it is this average man who has learned to use much of the machinery of civilization, but who is characterized by root-ignorance of the very principles of that civilization." Ch. 7.
"For although my opinion turn out erroneous, there will always remain the fact that many of those dissentient readers have never given five minutes' thought to this complex matter. How are they going to think as I do? But by believing that they have a right to an opinion on the matter without previous effort to work one out for themselves, they prove patently that they belong to that absurd type of human being which I have called the 'rebel mass.'" Ch. 8
"...We find ourselves, then , met with the same difference that eternally exists between the fool and the man of sense. The latter is constantly catching himself within an inch of being a fool; hence he makes an effort to escape from the imminent folly, and in that effort lies his intelligence. The fool, on the other hand, does not suspect himself; he thinks himself the most prudent of men, hence the enviable tranquility with which the fool settles down, installs himself in his own folly. Like those insects which it is impossible to extract from the orifice they inhabit, there is no way of dislodging the fool from his folly, to take him away for awhile from his blind state and to force him to contrast his own dull vision with other keener forms of sight." Ch 8.
"... the characteristic of our time; not that the vulgar believes itself super-excellent and not vulgar, but that the vulgar proclaims and imposes the rights of vulgarity, or vulgarity as a right." Ch. 8.
"At least in European history up to the present, the vulgar had never believed itself to have 'ideas' on things. It had beliefs, traditions, experiences, proverbs, mental habits, but it never imagined itself in possession of theoretical opinions on what things are or ought to be... Today, on the other hand, the average man has the most mathematical 'ideas' on all that happens or ought to happen in the universe. Hence, he has lost the use of his hearing. Why should he listen if he has within him all that is necessary? There is no reason now for listening, but rather for judging, pronouncing, deciding. There is no question concerning public life in which he does not intervene, blind and deaf as he is, imposing his 'opinions.'" Ch 8.
"Whoever wishes to have ideas must first prepare himself to desire truth and to accept the rules of the game imposed by it." Ch 8.
"...there appears for the first time in Europe a type of man who does not want to give reasons or to be right, but simply shows himself resolved to impose his opinions. This is the new thing: the right not to be reasonable, the 'reason of unreason.' ... To have an idea means believing one is in possession of the reasons for having it, and consequently means believing that there is such a thing as reason, a world of intelligible truths. To have ideas, to form opinions, is identical with appealing to such an authority, submitting oneself to it, accepting its code and its decisions, and therefore believing that the highest form of intercommunion is the dialogue in which the reaasons for our ideas are discussed. But the mass-man would feel himself lost if he accepted discussion, and instinctively repudiates the obligation of accepting that supreme authority lying outside himself." Ch 8
"Restrictions, standards, courtesy, indirect methods, justice, reason! Why were these invented, why all these complications created? They are all summed up in the word civilization... By means of all these there is an attempt to make possible the city, the community, common life. Hence, if we look into all these constituents of civilization just enumerated, we shall find the same common basis. All, in fact, presuppose the radical progressive desire on the part of each individual to take others into consideration. Civilization is before all the will to live in common. A man is uncivilized, barbarian, in the degree to which he does not take others into account. Barbarism is the tendency to disassociation. Accordingly, all barbarous epochs have been times of human scattering, ...of tiny groups, separate from and hostile to one another." Ch. 8.
"The political doctrine which has represented the loftiest endeavor
towards common life is liberal democracy. ... Liberalism
is that principle of political rights, according to which the public authority,
in spite of being all-powerful, limits itself and attempts, even at its
own expense, to leave room in the State over which it rules for those to
live who neither think nor feel as it does... Liberalism ... is the
supreme form of generosity; it is the right which the majority concedes
to minorities and hence it is the noblest cry that has ever resounded in
the planet. It announces the determination to share existence with
the enemy; more than that, with an enemy that is weak. It was incredible
that the human species should have arrived at so noble an attitude, so
paradoxical, so refined, so acrobatic, so anti-natural. Hence, it
is not to be wondered at that this same humanity should soon appear anxious
to get rid of it. ... The mass ... does not wish to share life with those
who are not of it. It has a deadly hatred of all that is not itself."
Ch. 8.
Lucretius, On the Nature of Things
[Titus Lucretius, 98 to 55 BC, was a Roman poet who sustained the heritage of the Greek philosophers Democritus and Epicurus through his poetry, notably On the Nature of Things. My source for the following quotations is a book by the translater Cyril Bailey, Lucretius: On the Nature of Things, 1910, London: Oxford University Press. Most of the quotes that follow are from the translater's Introduction. Although his prose is sometimes convoluted, it nevertheless is easier to understand than Lucretius snippets taken out of context. Also, it is important to understand the kind of society that must have motivated Lucretius to write as he did. Bailey's description of Roman life is recognizeable to us in the 21st Century, which illustrates "human universals." For this reason I shall quote extensively from the authors introduction. These will be attributed to Bailey with the initials CB. The reader should also note the strongly left-brained style of Lucretius' thinking. Bailey's summary of the Lucretian way paints an amazingly modern rendition of "reductionism" and "individualism" - treated at length elsewhere on this web site.]
"A fierce hatred of conventional siperstitions and a yearning for intellectualliberty coupled with a sense of awe ... in the presence of nature, a strong desire for scientific method and accuracy of observation combined with a profound feeling of the beauty of the world and its works, an unswerving consciousness of natural law and the sewuence of cause and effect countered by an equal stubborness in defence of man's moral freedom - these are qualities which may engage attention , but cannot at all times awaken a vital sympathy." CB
"We must endeavor to understand Lucretius ... as an Epicurean of the last century B. C. It was eminently a period of disturbance and dissolution, intellectually as well as socially and politically. ... The genuine Roman religion - the belief in the ... countless little impersonal 'spirits', always 'about man's path and about his bed', mostly hostile by instinct, but capable of pacification by simple gifts and easy acts of worship - had ... lingered on here and there in the old-fashioned piety of a household cult. ...Magistrates and priests duly sacrificed the appropriate victims, augurs watched for omens and blessed ... proceedings. ...but little real religious feeling remained, except a vague sense of the insecurity of life owing to the malevolent interference of divine beings, and an abiding fear of death and the punishments of a life to come." CB
"Religion was his enemy and he could have no truce with it, for he saw it as the cause of the greater part of the sorrows and even the crimes of human life. The whole theological view must be eradicated from men's minds before they could even begin to live a life 'worthy of the gods.' ...like Epicurus, he had the same battle to fight. ...he was the real god, who had taught that the power of the gods over the world was nought. In the philosophy of Epicurus, Lucretius had found his own rest, and it was the purpose of his life to put that philosophy at the service of his countrymen and so deliver them too from the tyranny of religion." CB
"The long debate of the pre-Socrateic physical philosophers as to the ultimate constitution of the universe had led up to the hypothesis, first propounded by Leucippus and greatly strengthened and elaborated by Democritus of Abdera (cica 430 BC), that the physical basis of the world was infinite atoms, tiny, eternal, indivisible particles of matter, posessing and differing in size, shape and weight, and moving in infinite space. ...the atomic system, capable of being worked out in detail throughout the whole realm of the universe, can show how every phenomenon is bu the result of natural causes. ...Nature, acting by law, and yet without purpose - 'for not by design did the first-beginningsof things place themselves each in their order with forseeing mind ... but by trying movements and unions of every kind, at last they fall into such dispositions as those, whereby our world of things is created' - acting indeed blindly and occasionally with a kind of spontaneity which seems like chance, Nature made all the worlds and 'all that in them is.' There is no need for the aid of the gods, there is not even room for their interference." CB
"...at death the soul is dissolved just like the body, and it can have nothing to fear for all time to come. Nature then has freed man alike from the tyranny of the gods and the fear of death, and in the knowledge of nature he will find not only the guarantee of his freedom, but the highest pleasure of his free life." CB
"But is man 'free'? The exclusion of the gods from the workings of the universe has been accomplished... Is man then alone exempt from this chain of causation? Has he the power to direct his own actions, or is he too ruled by this inexorable destiny, so that his smallest act is but the inevitable outome of all that has preceded? Democritus had already been confronted with this problem and had boldly answered it with an absolute determinism: man's actions are no exception to the universal law, free-will is but a delusion." CB
"[According to Lucretius] the highest pleasure of the mind is the acquisitionof
that knowledge which will incidentally free us from its pains." CB
This site opened: February 6, 1999. Last Update: August 7, 2005