Technocracy vs. A Tool-Using Culture

Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (New York & Toronto: Vintage Books, 1993), 28:

Nonetheless, after one acknowledges that no taxonomy ever neatly fits the realities of a situation, and that in particular the definition of a tool-using culture lacks precision, it is still both possible and useful to distinguish a tool-using culture from a technocracy. In a technocracy, tools play a central role in the thought-world of the culture. Everything must give way, in some degree, to their development. The social and symbolic worlds become increasingly subject to the requirements of that development. Tools are not integrated into the culture; they attack the culture. They bid to become the culture. As a consequence, tradition, social mores, myth, politics, ritual, and religion have to fight for their lives. 

Ignorance Of The Miseries Of Life; Life Made Too Easy; Worth Of Earthly Pleasures; Weltschmerz; Renunciation Of Life; & Living Over Knowing

Johan Huizinga, ‘‘The Worship of Life,’’ in The Shadow of Tomorrow (New York: The Norton Library, 1936), 108-111:

The obsession with life is to be viewed as a manifestation of excessive full-bloodedness, to remain in the terminology of the life-philosophy. Through the technical perfection of all comforts of life, the in every way increased security of life, the greater accessibility of all types of pleasure, and the vast and still lingering growth of material prosperity, society has got into a state which in the old pathology might have been called a “plethora.” We have been living in spiritual and material superabundance. We are so preoccupied with life because it is made so easy for us. The ever-growing power of observation and the facility of intellectual communication have made life strong and bold. Till well into the middle of the nineteenth century even the well-to-do section of European society was in much more direct and constant contact with the miseries of existence than we are to-day and think our due. Our own grandfathers were given only very limited possibilities of killing pain, healing wounds or fractures, shutting out cold, expelling darkness, communicating with others directly or indirectly, avoiding filth and stench. On all sides man was continually made to feel the natural limitations of earthly well-being. The efficient minis- tering of the technical, hygienic and sanitary appliances with which man has surrounded himself is spoiling him. He is losing the good-humoured resignation in the daily imperfections of human well-being which formed the discipline of earlier generations. But at the same time he runs the risk of losing the natural ability to take human happiness as it offers itself, as well. Life is made too easy. Mankind’s moral fibre is giving way under the softening influence of luxury.

In earlier civilizations, whether Christian, Moslem, Buddhist or any other, there was always this contrast: in principle the value of earthly happiness is deprecated relatively to celestial bliss or union with the All. As all these religions, however, do recognise a relative worth of earthly pleasures, and consider them as God-given, denial of the value of life meant ingratitude. It was the very realisation of the precariousness of every moment of human well-being which caused it to be appreciated at its true value. A steady orientation on the hereafter may lead to a renunciation of the terrestrial, but it does not permit of Weltschmerz. 

In the present there is a contrast also, but it is a very different one. The increase of security, of comfort, and of the possibilities of want-gratification, in short the greater ease of living, has had two results. On the one hand, it has prepared the soil for all forms of renunciation of life: philosophical denial of its value, purely emotive spleen or aversion from life; on the other, it has instilled the belief in the right to happiness. It has made people expect things from life. Related to this there is another contrast. The ambivalent attitude which wavers between the renunciation and the enjoyment of life is peculiar to the individual alone. The community, however, without hesitation and with more conviction than ever before, accepts earthly life as the object of all striving and action. It is indeed a true worship of life. Now it is a question for serious consideration whether any advanced culture can survive without a certain measure of orientation on Death. The great civilizations of the past have all had it. There are signs that the philosophical thought of to-day is also coming to it. It seems only logical, moreover, that a philosophy which rates “living” above “knowing” should also include the end of life in its vision.

The Evil Of Our Times, Permanent Adolescence, Slogans, & The Glorification Of Youth

Johan Huizinga, ‘‘Puerlism,’’ in The Shadow of Tomorrow (New York: The Norton Library, 1936), 177-182:

The most fundamental characteristic of true play, whether it be a cult, a performance, a contest, or a festivity, is that at a certain moment it is over. The spectators go home, the players take off their masks, the performance has ended. And here the evil of our time shows itself. For nowadays play in many cases never ends and hence is not true play. A far-reaching contamination of play and serious activity has taken place. The two spheres are getting mixed. In the activities of an outwardly serious nature hides an element of play. Recognised play, on the other hand, is no longer able to maintain its true play-character as a result of being taken too seriously and being technically over-organised. The indispensable qualities of detachment, artlessness and gladness are thus lost. 

To a certain extent something like this contamination has been present in all cultures as far back as we can see. But it is the dubious privilege of modern Western civilization to have given this diffusion of the two spheres of life its greatest intensity. With great numbers of both the educated and the ignorant, the play-attitude towards life of the adolescent has become permanent. At an earlier stage we have already alluded to the prevalence of a state of mind which might be called one of permanent adolescence. It is characterised by a lack of sense of decorum, a lack of personal dignity and of respect for others and the opinions of others, and an excessive concentra- tion on self. The general weakening of judgment and of the critical impulse has prepared the soil for the spread of this attitude.

Now it is both interesting and disquieting to note that the emergence of this state of mind is facilitated not only by a decreased desire for individual judgment, by the standardising effect of group organisations providing a set of ready-made opinions, and by the ever-available opportunities for trivial diversion, but also by the marvellous development of technical facilities. In his world full of wonders man is like a child in a fairy tale. He can travel through the air, speak to another hemisphere, have a continent delivered in his home by radio. He presses a button and life comes to him. Will such a life give him maturity? On the contrary. 

In making mention of the contamination of play and seriousness in modern life, we enter upon a fundamental problem of culture which cannot be investigated in this book. The phenomenon shows itself partly in a semi-serious attitude towards work, duty, fate and life, partly in the attribution of great importance to what a clear judgment would qualify trivial, and in the treatment of truly important things with the instincts and gestures of play. Political speeches of leading figures which should properly be described as mischievous pranks are not rare. 

It would be interesting to investigate how in the different languages the words for play continually overflow into the sphere of the serious. American English would offer an especially promising field for a study of this kind. The American reporter speaks of his profession as “the newspaper game.” The politician who, though by nature honest, finds himself forced to howl with the wolves of corruption, offers as his justification that he had “to play the game.” The customs official is implored to close his eyes to an infringement of the prohibition law with the words “be a good sport.” It is clear that far more is involved here than a mere question of popular speech. It is a fundamental change of a moral-psychological nature. [...]

The slogan belongs to the field of publicity, whether commercial or political. Now it is one of the fundamental features of all modern publicity, that hypertrophic product of our time, that it is based on this attitude of semi-seriousness characteristic of over-refined civilizations. It is perhaps to be viewed as a symptom of old age. Puerilism is the proper word for it. 

This widely prevalent attitude of semi-seriousness at once explains the close connection between heroism and puerilism. The moment the motto becomes “Let us be heroes” a great game has started. It could be a noble game if it were consummated entirely within the sphere of Spartan matches of youths, or the Olympic games. But as long as it is played in the form of political action, in parade and national drill, in oratorical bombast and “officially inspired” newspaper articles, and with all this yet takes itself seriously and demands to be taken seriously, it is truly puerilism. 

The confusion of play and seriousness which lies at the bottom of all that was here classified as puerilism, is no doubt one of the most important aspects of the malady of our time. There remains the question as to how far puerilism is connected with that other trait of modern life, the glorification of youth. The two should be clearly distinguished. Puerilism knows no ages, it attacks young and old alike. The adoration of youth, superficially a sign of fresh strength, may also be viewed as a symptom of old age, an abdication in favour of the coming heir. While most strong cultures have loved and honoured youth they never cajoled or exalted it, and they always demanded from it obedience and respect for its elders. Typically decadent and puerile were the quickly evaporated movements which called themselves Futurism. One cannot say that youth was to blame for them.

After All You Must Die

Erasmus, ‘‘The Abbot and the Learned Lady,’’ Colloquies (tr. Craig R. Thompson):

Learning costs immense toil, and after all you must die.

Said by Antronius to Magdalia. 

Truth Bitter & Unpleasant

Dio Chrysostom, Discourses 11.1-2 (tr. J. W. Cohoon):

[1] I am almost certain that while all men are hard to teach, they are easy to deceive. They learn with difficulty—if they do learn anything—from the few that know, but they are deceived only too readily by the many who do not know, and not only by others but by themselves as well. For the truth is bitter and unpleasant to the unthinking, while falsehood is sweet and pleasant. [2] They are, I fancy, like men with sore eyes—they find the light painful, while the darkness, which permits them to see nothing, is restful and agreeable. Else how would falsehood often prove mightier than the truth, if it did not win its victories through pleasure?

Modern Anti-Intellectualism

Johan Huizinga, ‘‘The Disavowal of the Intellectual Principle,’’ in The Shadow of Tomorrow (New York: The Norton Library, 1936), 102-104:

Have earlier generations ever renounced the intellectual principle in this way? It seems impossible to find historical parallels. Systematic philosophical and practical anti-intellectualism such as we are witnessing, appears to be something truly novel in the history of human culture. To be sure, the past has often known reactions of thought whereby a too exclusive primacy of the understanding was succeeded by a revindication of the will. This is what happened, for instance, when the thought of Duns Scotus took its place beside that of Thomas Aquinas. These spiritual reactions, however, were not concerned with practical life or the worldly order but with the Faith, the striving for the ultimate meaning of life. And this striving itself always remained an “apprehending,” however far reason was left behind. The modern mind too often confuses intellectualism with rationalism. Even those forms of approach which, transgressing the purely intellectual, were intended to attain through insight and contemplation what was inaccessible to the understanding, always remained directed towards knowledge of truth. The Greek or the Indian word for it, gnosis or jñāna, makes it clear enough that even the purest mysticism remains a “knowing.” It is always the spirit which moves in the world of the intelligible. To have truth was always the ideal. There are no instances known to me of cultures having forsaken Truth or renounced the understanding in its widest sense.

When earlier currents of thought repudiated allegiance to Reason it was always in favour of the super-rational. What parades as the culture of today does not only disavow Reason but also the knowable itself, and this in favour of the sub-rational, the passions and the instincts. It votes for the will, not in the sense of Duns Scotus, however, but for the will to worldly power, for “existence,” for “blood and soil,” instead of “understanding” and “spirit.” 

Tasting Life’s And Love’s Bliss & Pain

Winthrop H. Root, in his Introduction to: Poems and Letters of Nikolaus Lenau (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1964), 59-60:

Bearing the burden of his tumultuous heart and of his dedicated poethood, Lenau lived life fully; he drank gladly at the “forest pool” of life and love, tasting their bliss as well as their pain, and never hesitated to drink deeply. Although he suffered keenly, he embraced the suffering (and the joy) and with the magic of the creative artist transformed what he suffered (and enjoyed) into melodious verse. In spite of its tendency to focus on the shadows of human existence (to the point, as he himself puts it, of “monotony”) his poetry is not that of a victim of life, crushed by its burden, but that of a strong man who, turning his burden into a source of creativity, achieved his life’s purpose before his tragic breakdown overwhelmed him.

Reminescences Of The Former Paradise

Anonymous (A Lover of Flowers), The Lover’s Language of Flowers; Expressive of the Sentiments of the Heart (London: W. Nicholson & Sons, c. 1872), 11-12:

O lovely flowers, this world would be drear and desolate without you! Are you not the reminescences of the former paradise,—left unscathed by sin, to tell how much man has lost? . . .

Human Hearts Can Never Stay

Winthrop H. Root, in his Introduction to: Poems and Letters of Nikolaus Lenau (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1964), 39-41:

Lenau was haunted continuously by an all too vivid awareness of the transitory nature of existence, the evanescence of things physical and human, as the romantic poet so often is, seeing only “how life crumbles in time’s to-and-fro” (“The Sick in Heart”). The tumultuous heart experiences the changing and not the enduring, since it measures all things by its own violent beating. The breeze blowing over the ruined castle tells Lenau that

                All things pass and die.

The graveyard merely bears witness that the fickle human heart cannot keep alive even its memory of the dead. Though the heart vainly tries

               To keep its heaven in eternal holding,

its emotions are swept away in “the mad flood” of existence; the very self changes; “the joyful tones of childhood” have

     Died with love’s magic song on some far shore;

joy itself is fleeting; “its last tone fades and fading dies” (“Evanescence”). The tree under which he was once happy warns that

              Bliss and blooming, bloom and blisses
              All too quickly pass away.
                            —“The Tree of Memory”

He tries to retain his faith in love and happiness but the lesson the tree teaches is so obvious that his heart is filled with mourning. The distant tone of the post horn tells him that “human hearts can never stay,” that “onward never ceases,”

             Though the cruel lashes’ crack
             Tears our hearts to pieces.

The lovely night itself lasts but a moment (“The Post Horn”). Time cannot be held from its onward rush “by any human passion”; the bough sways only briefly as the raven leaves it, he tells his sorrowing love, and

             Thus soon will cease the brief laments you utter.
                              —“Parting”

Lenau knows that

            “... To mourn what cannot tarry
            Is man’s autumnal fate. .. .”
                            —“Song of Autumn”

In an early philosophical poem, “The Skeptics,” he creates an apocalyptic vision of transience: it floods all life’s labyrinth, drawing all streams into its whirlpool; no dam can protect against its flood which sweeps away every living creature and overwhelms the human heart. “And if I look with trembling yearning to the stars that they may rescue my spirit, I yield to an illusion; they hear the roaring flood, they have a presentiment that they are not safe in their courses; they see the flood grow and are affrighted, as their trembling flicker tells me. Some day their shining array will sink down like weary swallows from their rapid flight.” “And then over the ocean only night will brood; then death’s great work will have been accomplished.” At times the thought that all is transitory is a welcome one, for it means that pain and suffering are also transitory and that there is an escape from them (“The Forest Chapel’’). The final release is death.

The transient nature of existence, its inability to preserve intact what is, makes Lenau's relation to the present and the past problematic. The stream of time flows on and carries away with its flood our happy youth. The innocence of childhood and youth do not last; time robs us of our youthful joys, dreams and ideals, leaving in their place disillusionment, loss of faith and guilt. The youth lingers in a flowery garden, amid roses and singing birds, happy in the dawn, a lovely expectation lighting his face; the world is heaven, man is god. ‘‘Be quiet lest you drive away the fleeting guests from him; for know that these dreams of youth are the best thing granted him in this world. But, alas, with iron stride reality approaches him, the birds fly forth forever, and the youth feels fear as he sees them take farther and farther flight’’ (‘‘Youthful Dreams’’). A man, lost in sadness, sees a vision of his youthful playmates in the gaiety of innocence and among them his own youthful self ‘‘with its happy mien of a stranger to earth’s realm of pain;’’ he laments that he ‘‘trusted the sweet fairy tale of existence’’ and so lost his happiness. In the vision, his youthful beloved appears and again the nightingales of youth sing; but the vision fades and youth and the flowers wither; where he saw the happy vision, he now sees only the pale, bare stone (‘‘The Rock’’).

Women Being Relatively Uncivilized

H. L. Mencken, In Defense of Women (Garden City, New York: Garden City Publishing Co., 1922), II., 12. Honor, 51-2:

Perhaps one of the chief charms of woman lies precisely in the fact that they are dishonorable, i.e., that they are relatively uncivilized. In the midst of all the puerile repressions and inhibitions that hedge them round, they continue to show a gipsy spirit. No genuine woman ever gives a hoot for law if law happens to stand in the way of her private interest. She is essentially an outlaw, a rebel, what H. G. Wells calls a nomad. The boons of civilization are so noisily cried up by sentimentalists that we are all apt to overlook its disadvantages. Intrinsically, it is a mere device for regimenting men. Its perfect symbol is the goose-step. The most civilized man is simply that man who has been most successful in caging and harnessing his honest and natural instincts—that is, the man who has done most cruel violence to his own ego in the interest of the commonweal. The value of this commonweal is always overestimated. What is it at bottom? Simply the greatest good to the greatest number—of petty rogues, ignoramuses and poltroons.

The capacity for submitting to and prospering comfortably under this cheese-monger’s civilization is far more marked in men than in women, and far more in inferior men than in men of the higher categories. It must be obvious to even so pathetic an ass as a university professor of history that very few of the genuinely first-rate men of the race have been, wholly civilized, in the sense that the term is employed in newspapers and in the pulpit. Think of Caesar, Bonaparte, Luther, Frederick the Great, Cromwell, Barbarossa, Innocent III, Bolivar, Hannibal, Alexander, and to come down to our own time, Grant, Stonewall Jackson, Bismarck, Wagner, Garibaldi and Cecil Rhodes.

Bitterness On The Lips

Paolo Mantegazza, The Book of Love (New York: American-Neo-latin Library, 1917), ch. XVII, The Hell of Love, 191-92:

Neither the most patient and long observation of human phenomena nor the most lively imagination could enable us to divine all the petty tortures that lovers inflict upon themselves, perhaps to obey that cruel law which, according to some persons, has decreed that no one shall be happy on this planet

In this field of evil, temperament is everything; to some individuals the phrase of Linnæus concerning the loves of the cat may be applied: ‘‘Clamando misere amat.’’ For these unfortunates (we have already described them) love is imbued with so much bitterness and surrounded by so many nettles that it actually resembles a bramble, all thorns and wormwood. Suspicious, fastidious, melancholy, they fear everything, scrutinize everything; they pass everything through the sieve, they pulverize everything, looking for the mite or the poison. In the kiss they suspect ice, in the caress indifference; of the impulses they feel only the shock, only the blows. And then, even that little honey that love has for all they wish to keep under watch in so many tabernacles and under so many seals that they are very fortunate when they can find and relish it! From a jealous jeremiad they fall into an hysterical soliloquy, and have hardly emerged from a gloomy meditation on the infidelity of man when they fall into the autopsy of a love-letter. These creatures were certainly born under an unlucky star, and even if nature should make them a gift of a Venus draped by the Graces, or an Apollo with the brain of Jupiter, they would still be always unhappy, because bitterness is on their lips and not in the cup of love.

The Gods Taught Us Silence

Plutarch, ‘‘Of Garrulity, or Talkativeness,’’ tr. John Philips (in Plutarch’s Essays And Miscellanies, Boston: Little, Brown, & Co., 1911, vol. IV.), §8, 230:

For never any word spoken did so much good, as many locked up in silence. Thus at one time or other a man may utter what heretofore has been kept a secret; but when a secret is once blurted forth, it can never be recalled; for it flies abroad, and spreads in a moment far and near. And hence it is that we have men to teach us to speak, but the Gods are they that teach us silence; silence being the first thing commanded upon our first initiation into their divine ceremonies and sacred mysteries. And therefore it is that Homer makes Ulysses, whose eloquence was so charming, to be the most silent of men; and the same virtue he also attributes to his son, to his wife, and also to his nurse. For thus you hear her speaking:

                Safe, as in hardened steel or sturdy oak,
                Within my breast these secrets will I lock.

And Ulysses himself, sitting by Penelope before he discovered himself, is thus brought in:

                His weeping wife with pity he beheld,
                Although not willing yet to be revealed.
                He would not move his eyes, but kept them fast,
                Like horn or steel within his eyebrows placed.

Giving Life To Things

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Autobiography of Goethe. Truth and Poetry: From my Own Life, tr. John Oxenford, bks. I-XX (London: George Bell and Sons, 1897), 478-9:

My capacity of giving life to things, and rendering them present to me out of their real connexion, put me in the position that I could be perfectly at home in a certain century or in a department of science, without being in any degree instructed as to what preceded or what followed. Thus a certain theoretico-practical sense had been awakened in me, by which I could give account of things, rather as they should be than as they were, without any proper philosophical connection, but by way of leaps. To this was added a very easy power of apprehension, and a friendly reception of the opinions of others, if they did not stand in direct opposition to my own convictions.

Faithful And Silent Priests Of The Vanished God

Paolo Mantegazza, The Book of Love (New York: American-Neo-latin Library, 1917), ch. XVII, The Hell of Love, 186-189:

Pain, so rich in afflictions and tortures, in its varieties as infinite as the grains of sand in the ocean, and as deep as the ocean’s abysses, has reserved its greatest bitterness, its most cruel torments for love. And so it was to be; the warmest passion was to turn into the most inflexible frigidity; the deepest was to precipitate itself into the somberest depths; the richest in joys to be the most fecund in sorrows. From the fleeting breeze of a suspicion more rapid than the lightning, more evanescent than a word written in the soft sand of the seashore, to the certain consciousness of an unexpected betrayal; from the impatience of him who for one instant awaits his beloved, to the prolonged desperation of him who can no longer wait, love evinces all the notes of affliction, all the torments of the senses, all the tortures of sentiment. Of the bones which are scattered every day on the long path through which the human family passes on this planet, many were left by love; and suicide, homicide and insanity count in cemeteries and hospitals a much greater number of victims than are reckoned in the summary statistics of our sociologists. All this, of course, is for those who love with heart and mind and not with senses only. He who sees in love a question only of régime and hygiene recovers from the loss of his sweetheart with a tear and a new conquest; cures betrayal with betrayal, and with licentiousness heals every malady of the heart and drowns all his sorrows in his libertinism. . . .

If you wish to open just a little the door of this hell, if you want to sound its abysses with a passing glance, imagine on one side all the hopes, all the voluptuousness, all the riches of love, and on the other all the fears, all the bitternesses, all the miseries. And after this cruel exposition of the joys and sorrows of love, you will not have ended yet, because the fields of sufferance are a hundred times larger than those where joy is sown. The physical possession of a woman is one; the tortures of a man beholding the fruit near without his being able to touch it are thousands; and this example will suffice for all.

Thus, as the antithesis of life is death, in its presence all the arrows of our pride lose their sharpness, all our hopes are torn, all our joys shattered. In the delirium of passion and pride we all repeat hundreds of times: ‘‘I would have her dead rather than belonging to another—a thousand times buried, but not unfaithful.’’ And frequently the man who utters this blasphemy, his lips livid and his hair standing on end, stains his hands with blood by plunging them into the bosom of a victim. Folly and delirium! Hurricanes of the heart where love and hatred, pride and love, crime and torture clash and blend in the tumult of a dreadful storm. But love, which truly loves, infinite love which transforms man into the half of a creature that suffers and desires, ideal love that few feel and few see dimly in the twilight of a suprasensible region which their hands cannot reach, recognizes no greater torture than the death of the beloved. Oh, yes; let indifference, contempt, hatred, betrayal come, but that the dear one may live. Let others have this creature whom we have believed to be ours, into whose veins we have poured our blood; let this temple, perfumed with the incense of our thoughts, with the durable love of all our passions, become the temple of another god; let our flowers be trampled upon, our crowns broken, ourselves driven away by the rough broom of the sexton, but let the god live who sojourns there, let the idol of our life shine on the altar. Dejected like a fugitive, despised like a criminal, vituperated like a spy, in the cold and distant solitude we drink drop by drop a bottomless cup of gall, and every drop is bitterer than the last; but we know that she breathes the air of our planet, which we too breathe; we know that she is inebriated by the same sun that warms us; we know that among the numberless shadows that wander through the spaces of the invisible there is a creature around whom the air becomes mellower and the light brighter; that there are certain clods of earth which yield to the weight of a body that we love. No; as long as the woman we love lives, hope does not lose all its feathers, and far, far away, less tangible than a dream, more invisible than the regions of heaven, more inconceivable than eternity, it still soars on our horizon, perhaps not believed, not confessed, but it still lives and keeps us alive.

But when we still live and she is dead; when we are still so cowardly as to live, to breathe, to eat, and she is buried in the humid miasma of a wooden coffin; when all the world still exists and she is dead; when the joy of a thousand flowers that blossom in every ray of light, the trills of a thousand birds that sing of love, the groups of the fortunates who embrace each other, and the benedictions of so many happy creatures are nothing but a frame to a gelid void, a dark world; when we remain suspended between an infinity of joy that was ours and an infinity of sorrow that is ours and shall be ours tomorrow and as long as we are so cowardly as to live,—then we may look upon suicide as the supreme joy of life, as the most sublime of human prides; then we may understand how man can in a flash dream of the great voluptuousness of mingling his bones with those of another creature; then we can understand how imagination can smile at the idea of the embrace of two corpses, of the fusion of two ashes, of the resurrection of two existences extinguished in the perfume of two flowers grown upon a human grave and which the wind blandly brings together that they may kiss again.

In the silence of the cemeteries there are some flowers that kiss each other and to which, perhaps, from under the earth responds the quivering of certain bones; there are certain lips on our planet, which closely pressed against each other one day, which death cruelly separated and which a second death has reunited forever. And when we survive, it is because a new organism has been created in us, and today we are no longer what we were yesterday. The thoughts of the past, the limbs of the past, all that we were yesterday is dead, dead forever; from the withered trunk of our existence, science, duty, friendship, paternal or maternal or filial love cause a new branch to shoot forth, which reproduces the ancient tree; and the common passer-by, seeing the same leaves, the same flowers, the same fruits, believes that only one corpse is buried there—but he is in error. We can survive certain sorrows on one condition only: to accomplish the miracle of dying today in order to be born anew tomorrow with the same name, but with a new life. And for the honor of human nature, these survivors remain the faithful and silent priests of the vanished god, like those Peruvians who, on the summits of the Andes, amidst the eternal glaciers of the Sorata or of the Illimani, still worship the god of their fathers. To understand certain sorrows is the proof of a lofty mind; to have experienced them is the glory of a martyr which exalts and purifies us.

The World Of Manly Business

Josiah Royce, ‘‘Tennyson and Pessimism,’’ in Studies of Good and Evil: A Series of Essays upon Problems of Philosophy and of Life (New York & London: D. Appleton & Co., 1915), 87-88:

One hears nowadays, very often, of youthful pessimism, prevalent, for instance, among certain clever college students. When I hear of these things, I do not always regret them. On the contrary, I think that the best man is the one who can see the truth of pessimism, can absorb and transcend that truth, and can be nevertheless an optimist, not by virtue of his failure to recognize the evil of life but by virtue of his readiness to take his part in the struggle against this evil. Therefore, I am often glad when I hear of this spread of pessimistic ideas among studious but undeveloped youth. For I say to myself, if these men are brave men, their sense of the evil that hinders our human life, will some day arouse them to fight this evil in dead earnest, while, if they are not brave men, optimism can be of no service to cowards. But in any case I like to suggest to such brave and pessimistic youth where the solution of their problem must lie. It surely cannot lie in any romantic dream of a pure and innocent world, far off somewhere in the future, in Heaven, or in Isles of the Blessed. These things are not for us. We are born for the world of manly business, and if we are worthy of our destiny, we may pos sibly have some good part in the Wars of the Lord. For nothing better have we any right to hope, and to an honest man that is enough.

Suffering From The Unrealised Ideal

Jean-Marie Guyau, A Sketch of Morality Independent of Obligation or Sanction, tr. Gertrude Kapteyn (London, 1898), 190-1:

Although the elements of remorse and of inward joy thus springing from the sensibility are generally variable, there is, however, one which presents a certain fixity, and which may exist in all elevated minds; we mean that satisfaction which an individual always feels in being classed with superior beings—beings conformable with the normal type of his species, and adapted, so to speak, to his own ideal. This satisfaction corresponds to the intellectual pain of feeling himself fallen from his rank and his species, sunk to the level of inferior beings. Unfortunately, this kind of satisfaction and this kind of intellectual remorse only clearly manifest themselves m philosophic minds. Moreover, this sanction, limited to a small number of moral beings, admits of a certain provisional antinomy. In fact, the pain caused by the contrast between our ideal and our real state must be all the greater to us, as we are more fully conscious of the ideal; for in that case we get a clearer perception of the distance separating us from it. Susceptibility of conscience, therefore, increases in proportion to the development of conscience, and the vividness of remorse is a measure of our very efforts towards morality. In the same way, as superior organisms are always more sensitive to all kinds of pain coming from outside . . . so is the more highly organized beings are morally more exposed than others to that suffering arising from inward causes, whose cause is always in action—the suffering from the unrealized ideal. True remorse, with its subtlety, its painful scruples, its inward tortures, may strike men, not in inverse, but in direct, ratio to their perfection.

Alone In The Company Of Many

Ramon Llull, The Book of the Lover and the Beloved, tr. E. Allison Peers (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1923), §§228-9, 73:

The Lover went into solitude; and his heart was accompanied by thoughts, his eyes by tears, and his body by fasts and afflictions. But when the Lover returned to the companionship of men, these things went no longer with him, and the Lover remained quite alone in the company of many people. 

Love is an ocean, its waves troubled by the winds; it has no port or shore. The Lover perished in this ocean, and with him perished his trials . . .

Arise!

John Milton, Paradise Lost, 1.330:

Awake, arise, or be for ever fall’n.

A Piece Of The Sun’s Gold

Maria von Wedemeyer to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Pätzig, 23 August, 1943 (in Love Letters from Cell 92, tr. John Brownjohn (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1995)), 70:

Will you be writing to me today? I seem to see you as vividly as if I were sitting beside you. Your whole surroundings, your gestures, your hands and eyes. You'll write me the nicest letter, and—whatever it’s like—it will bring me a sunny day. No, not just a day. It will bring me a piece of the sun’s gold, one that I can absorb deep inside—one that outlasts any rain or storm and warms every little part of me with its radiant light. Thank you now and always, just for wanting to write to me. 

The Pretense Of Vice; Sentimentalism & The Passionate; The Aristocratic vs. The Populace; Romanticised Biography; History & Literature; & Heroic Sincerity

Johan Huizinga, ‘‘The Task of Cultural History (1926 [1929]),’’ in The Course of Civilizations, tr. James S. Holmes & Hans van Marie (Providence: Cluny, 2018), 39-43 (footnotes omitted):

Permit me to digress for a moment on that extraordinary trait of our age, the pretense of vice. It is in a certain sense a modern repetition of the sentimentalism of the eighteenth century, but in a completely different form. The old sentimentalism felt itself to be intimately bound to the respect for virtue. It tended to balance passion and virtue in what was often a neck-breaking fashion. Nowadays this is no longer necessary. Passion alone, or what figures for it, is enough. In every depiction of reality in either word or image (I am here speaking of literature in general) the element of passion must be played up. Moral norms definitely may not be praised. Virtuous people assure themselves of their halo of the modern by means of a eulogy of immorality. Such a eulogy is as much a form of cultural hypocrisy as a sancti monious display of virtue was ever able to be.

Sentimentalism and the passionate are both nurtured in the soil of the plebeian intellectual attitude that captured the fields of literature and culture in the course of the eighteenth century. If one removes the sting of disdain from the word ‘‘plebeian,’’ the term ‘‘democratic’’ can be reserved for political and social fields, and the concept plebeian (including ‘‘bourgeois’’) can be placed in antithesis to aristocratic in the field of culture. An aristocratic culture does not advertise its emotions. In its forms of expression it is sober and reserved. Its general attitude is stoic. In order to be strong it wants to be and needs to be hard and unemotional, or at any rate to allow the expression of feelings and inclinations only in elegant forms. Ernest Seillière has repeatedly expounded these things excellently.

The populace is always anti-stoic. Great waves of emotion, floods of tears, and excesses of feeling have always been breaks in the dikes of the popular soul, which then usually swept along the spirit of the upper classes. With Rousseau, ‘‘the bitter plebeian,’’ as Faguet called him, the anti-stoic intellectual attitude triumphed for good. Its name is romanticism. With it came that immodest interest in the grimaces of love and hatred which was to find uncurbed expression in the film. The intellectual difference between the literary display of vice and the conversation of two wenches talking about a sickness in a back alley is small. 

History may become democratic, but it must remain stoic. Jules Laforgue says somewhere in his letters that he cannot look upon all history as anything but one endless series of misery. But he was a poet. If the historian yielded to his sympathy with all the misery in the world he would be rendered unsuitable for his task.

 Soberness, restraint, a certain skeptical reserve in investigating the deepest emotions of the heart—all of which are the duty of true historical writing—do not please the contemporary reader. At this point enters the second genre of historical belles-lettres we have in mind. The romanticized biography has in recent years become an international fashion as a genre. It frequently appears as one in a series under a general title. This indicates the role played in the phenomenon by publishing interests. There is a demand for a new sort of Vitæ, based on a thorough knowledge of the sources and half meant as genuine history, but with the express intention that that history should be exaggerated, prepared for a market primarily literary. If the author is of a sober turn, the demand gives rise to works that exceed the bounds of history only slightly, such as Andre Maurois’s Disraeli. At other times the literary is completely dominant, as in Joseph Delteil’s Jeanne a’Arc. Emil Ludwig has become world famous in a few short years. Wilhelm Hausenstein instructs us in the conjugal secrets of Rembrandt and Saskia. And last year Dutch literature was given a remarkable specimen of the genre from the hand of Felix Timmermans: Pieter Brueghel, zoo heb ik U uit Uw werken geroken [literally, ‘‘Pieter Brueghel: Thus Have I Smelled You in Your Works’’]. In it a well-known writer lent his name to a double novelty: the vocative book-title and olfactory historiography (though the latter had already been practiced by others before him).

More striking than all these names is the fact that the scholar most at home in French history of the fifteenth century, Pierre Champion, felt called upon, after his excellent works Charles d’Orléans, François Villon, and Histoire poétique du XVie siècle, to follow the path of romantic biography and literary effect in his Louis XI.

Anyone with the true historical spirit, whether he is the most academic scholar or the simplest cultured reader, reacts negatively to this whole genre, for the same reason that a connoisseur despises crusted wine. He can taste the adulteration. No literary effect in the world can compare to the pure, sober taste of history. He does not want his history dry, but he does want it sec. For him the first authentic historical document that comes to hand—whether a chronicle or a verdict, a deed, a letter, or a resolution—will be enough to wash away the scented taste of the hybrid genre.

The writer of historical belles-lettres will retort: But do you historians not recognize the strongly subjective element in all historical cognition—in the formulation of the question, in the selection and sifting of the material, in the interpretation and synthesis of the data ascertained? What is the difference between my work and yours, except the liveliness and the ingeniousness of the fantasy, which is also indispensable for you? The answer is that the difference lies in the intellectual preoccupation from which the work derives. Take one of the best representatives of the form I am objecting to, Guy de Pourtalès’s life of Liszt, the first volume in the series of Vie des hommes illustres. What the author provides from the very first page is literature, not history. Everything he describes the historian will only suspect, and everything the historian would like to have described is obscured by the literary image. The utterly sincere need to understand the past as well as possible without any admixture of one’s own is the only thing that can make a work history. Judgment has to rest on an absolute conviction that what is described must have been that way. And as soon as the past is converted into the language of the novel, into the form of an imaginative literary work, the sacred essence of history has been adulterated, although the author may still believe that he is writing history. In this way one abandons the form of perception natural to one’s sustaining culture, and smothers in the well-meaning reader the genuine historical sense.

No borders can be defined. It is a question of conscience, humility, and subservience. Goethe said to Eckermann: ‘‘When eras are on the decline, all tendencies are subjective; but on the other hand, when matters are ripening for a new epoch, all tendencies are objective. . . .’’ If this is true, our time must ask itself where it stands. ‘‘The retreat of historical knowledge in the last decade,’’ is, according to Rothacker, ‘‘certainly not accidental.’’

. . . Carlyle saw as the fundamental characteristics of his heroes their utter seriousness, their deep sincerity toward themselves and the world. Not everyone can be a hero, but everyone can strive toward a heroic sincerity.