The Awful Risk Of The Modern Man

Carl Jung, The Practice of Pschotherapy, tr. R. F. C. Hull (Bollingen Series XX., 1954), pt. 2, II., Psychology of the Transference, 8: Purification, para. 491, p. 279:

The story of Faust shows how unnatural our condition is: it required the intervention of the devil—in anticipation of Steinach—to transform the ageing alchemist into a young gallant and make him forget himself for the sake of the all-too-youthful feelings he had just discovered! That is precisely the risk modern man runs: he may wake up one day to find that he has missed half his life.

Vanity

Samuel Johnson, The Vanity of Human Wishes 1749 (his own imitation of Juvenal's tenth satire, from which I quoted in the previous post):

        . . . New Sorrow rises as the Day returns, . . .
        Year chases Year, Decay pursues Decay, . . .

Old Age

Decimus Junius Juvenalis, Satires, 4.10, tr. G. G. Ramsay:

Give me length of days, give me many years. O Jupiter! Such is your one and only prayer, in days of strength or of sickness; yet how great, how unceasing, are the miseries of old age! Look first at the mis-shapen and ungainly face, so unlike its former self: see the unsightly hide that serves for skin; see the pendulous cheeks and the wrinkles like those which a matron baboon carves upon her aged jaws in the shaded glades of Thabraca. The young men differ in various ways: this man is handsomer than that, and he than another; one is stronger than another: but old men all look alike. Their voices are as shaky as their limbs, their heads without hair, their noses drivelling as in childhood. Their bread, poor wretches, has to be munched by toothless gums; so offensive do they become to their wives, their children, and themselves, that even the legacy-hunter, Cossus, turns from them in disgust. Their sluggish palate takes joy in wine or food no longer, and all pleasures of the flesh have been long ago forgotten. . . . [some lines omitted]

Another translation by Lewis Evans (1881), whose version is copiously annotated:

"Grant length of life, great Jove, and many years!" This is your only prayer in health and sickness. But with what unremitting and grievous ills is old age crowded! First of all, its face is hideous, loathsome, and altered from its former self; instead of skin a hideous hide and flaccid cheeks; and see! such wrinkles, as, where Tabraca extends her shady dells, the antiquated ape scratches on her wizened jowl! There are many points of difference in the young: this youth is handsomer than that; and he again than a third: one is far sturdier than another. Old mens faces are all alike—limbs tottering and voice feeble, a smooth bald pate, and the second childhood of a driveling nose; the poor wretch must mumble his bread with toothless gums; so loathsome to his wife, his children, and even to himself, that he would excite the disgust even of the legacy-hunter Cossus! His palate is grown dull; his relish for his food and wine no more the same; the joys of love are long ago forgotten; and in spite of all efforts to reinvigorate them, all manly energies are hopelessly extinct. Has this depraved and hoary lechery aught else to hope? Do we not look with just suspicion on the lust that covets the sin but lacks the power?

 A third one in verse by William Gifford's hand:

        "Life! length of life!" For this, with earnest cries,
        Or sick or well, we supplicate the skies.
        Pernicious prayer! for mark what ills attend,
        Still, on the old, as to the grave they bend:
        A ghastly visage, to themselves unknown,
        For a smooth skin, a hide with scurf o'ergrown,
        And such a cheek, as many a grandam ape,
        In Tabraca's thick woods, is seen to scrape.
        Strength, beauty, and a thousand charms beside,
        With sweet distinction, youth from youth divide;
        While age presents one universal face:
        A faltering voice, a weak and trembling pace,
        An ever-dropping nose, a forehead bare, 
        And toothless gums to mumble o'er its fare.
        Poor wretch, behold him, tottering to his fall,
        So loathsome to himself, wife, children, all,  
        That those who hoped the legacy to share,
        And flattered long—disgusted, disappear.
        The sluggish palate dulled, the feast no more  
        Excites the same sensations as of yore;    
        Taste, feeling, all, a universal blot,
        And e'en the rites of love remembered not:
        Or if—through the long night he feebly strives
        To raise a flame where not a spark survives;
        While Venus marks the effort with distrust,    
        And hates the gray decrepitude of lust.

There is another beautiful translation in verse by Charles Badham (London, 1814). The Latin text:

        ‘Da spatium vitae, multos da, Iuppiter, annos’: 
        hoc recto vultu, solum hoc, et pallidus optas,
        sed quam continuis et quantis longa senectus                190
        plena malis! deformem et taetrum ante omnia vultum
        dissimilemque sui, deformem pro cute pellem
        pendentisque genas et talis aspice rugas
        quales, umbriferos ubi pandit Thabraca saltus,
        in vetula scalpit iam mater simia bucca.                        195
        plurima sunt iuvenum discrimina; pulchrior ille
        hoc atque ille alio, multum hic robustior illo:
        una senum facies, cum voce trementia membra
        etiam leve caput madidique infantia nasi,
        frangendus misero gingiva panis inermi;                       200
        usque adeo gravis uxori natisque sibique,
        ut captatori moveat fastidia Cosso,
        non eadem vini atque cibi torpente palato
        gaudia, nam coitus iam longa oblivio, vel si
        coneris, iacet exiguus cum ramice nervus                      205
        et quamvis tota palpetur nocte, iacebit.
        anne aliquid sperare potest haec inguinis aegri
        canities? quid quod merito suspecta libido est
        quae venerem adfectat sine viribus?

A more literal tranlsation of the last lines of the satire is that of Paul Murgatroyd's (2017):

        Again, intercourse has by now long been forgotten, or,

        should you try, your little penis with its varicocele lies there

        and, despite being stroked all night long, will lie there.

        Can this sickly, white-haired phallus really hope for

        anything? What about the fact that lust which strives after sex

        without strength is quite rightly suspect?

No-one Is Left Unscathed

Isaac Disraeli, Curiosities of Literature, Sketches of Criticism:

Socrates, considered as the wisest and the most moral of men, Cicero treated as an usurer, and the pedant Athenæus as illiterate; the latter points out as a Socratic folly our philosopher disserting on the nature of justice before his judges, who were so many thieves. The malignant buffoonery of Aristophanes treats him much worse; but he, as Jortin says, was a great wit, but a great rascal.

Plato—who has been called, by Clement of Alexandria, the Moses of Athens; the philosopher of the Christians, by Arnobius; and the god of philosophers, by Cicero—Athenæus accuses of envy; Theopompus of lying; Suidas of avarice; Aulus Gellius, of robbery; Porphyry, of incontinence; and Aristophanes, of impiety.

Aristotle, whose industry composed more than four hundred volumes, has not been less spared by the critics; Diogenes Laertius, Cicero, and Plutarch, have forgotten nothing that can tend to show his ignorance, his ambition, and his vanity.

It has been said, that Plato was so envious of the celebrity of Democritus, that he proposed burning all his works; but that Amydis and Clinias prevented it, by remonstrating that there were copies of them everywhere; and Aristotle was agitated by the same passion against all the philosophers his predecessors.

Virgil is destitute of invention, if we are to give credit to Pliny, Carbilius, and Seneca. Caligula has absolutely denied him even mediocrity; Herennus has marked his faults; and Perilius Faustinus has furnished a thick volume with his plagiarisms. Even the author of his apology has confessed, that he has stolen from Homer his greatest beauties; from Apollonius Rhodius, many of his pathetic passages; from Nicander, hints for his Georgies; and this does not terminate the catalogue.

Horace censures the coarse humour of Plautus; and Horace, in his turn, has been blamed for the free use he made of the Greek minor poets.

The majority of the critics regard Pliny's Natural History only as a heap of fables; and Pliny cannot bear with Diodorus and Vopiscus; and in one comprehensive criticism, treats all the historians as narrators of fables. [. . .]

Should we proceed with this list to our own country, and to our own times, it might be curiously augmented, and show the world what men the Critics are! but, perhaps, enough has been said to soothe irritated genius, and to shame fastidious criticism. . . .

The Coming Of The Baroque & The «Too Much» To Italy, Nature, Rome, The Garden, & The Aristocrats

Jacques Élie Faure, History of Art, vol. III., Renaissance Art, tr. Walter Pach (Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1923), ch. II., Rome and the School, sect. iv., pp. 143-147:

The spectacle that we now witness is the contrary of the cue presented by the decadence of Greece, during which sources of life could be opened up here and there in new countries because the original organism, having developed more slowly and more universally, broke up with less rapidity; but in Italy there was no arresting the descent. The School, step by step, becomes a mere factory. Its principal founder at Bologna, Annibale Carracci, was still, if not a great painter, at least a man of noble will, of grave mind, and of conscience. He adapted intelligently the inventions of others, and ornamented the great melancholy palaces of the Italian princes who had now lost their independence. In his hollow but severely arranged pictures, the pagan divinities bend under his wealth of rhetoric. With Domenichino, the drama becomes completely external, the gestures break up and disperse the overstrained composition, and the mimicry turns into grimacing, though sometimes in a bare arm or in a bit of sky there vibrates the ethereal soul of Venice. The genuine grace of Albani is so sugary and sophisticated that one has difficulty in doing it justice. The bombast of Guido Reni and of Guercino is well-nigh intolerable. What with false sentiment, icy and waxen color, the organization of the picture prescribed by recipe and conventional drawing, the discord that reigns in the art factory of fallen Italy becomes more and more accentuated and develops that gesticulating character which, in the seventeenth century, will culminate in the disjointed and indefatigable grandiloquence of Bernini.

With the contortions of his statues, with the battles and the romantic landscapes of Salvator Rosa, with the dregs of painting that we reach with the prestidigitation of Luca Giordano, the easy and questionable life of Naples invaded Italy and merged its troubled waters with the exhausted currents of the north. It contributed, at least, as much as was necessary to the Jesuit propaganda to mislead the tragic and passionate soul of Italy toward that baroque style in which passion turned to intrigue and tragedy to melodrama. We cannot deny that the style was lacking in abundance and in brilliancy. It had too much. Something of a Hindu exuberance puffed up the buildings and the pictures, and gave to the statues their convulsive appearance. But, within, there was none of the burning sap of India. Instead, there is a heavy look of vanity that inflates the forms with a desire to look well, to please, and to astonish. Under the dominion of bigoted and corrupt political organizations, the great Italian cities, from the sixteenth century onward, pay homage to their own wealth in extravagant churches, amiable and gilded, and in palaces ornamented, like the churches, with profuse decoration. Excepting Venice, where the atmosphere saves everything, this passion for building, for decorating, and for dazzling gave to certain of the cities, to Genoa, to Bologna, and especially to Rome, a character of obstinate power which approaches a kind of beauty; Genoa, however, is insolent, and Bologna pretentious. Rome, with her ruins overgrown with verdure, her red palaces whose reflection turns the fountains to blood, her enormous volumes of water—Rome haunts our memory with a monotonous heaviness. Through twenty centuries she has remained what she was, the place where nature, more than anywhere else in the world, has consented, with unwearying indifference, to take on the form of the will. Besides, in the eighteenth century, she, like Venice, has a moment of semi-awakening and lifts her stone shell to permit the entrance among her ruins of beautiful and princely villas surrounded by parks rich in sentiment. We cannot be sure as to the explanation of this, but it doubtless lies in the philosophic revolt that was taking place everywhere. Piranesi constructs his great staircases and dreams his terrible prisons; it is the last, deep sigh of Michael Angelo, a fantastic gleam in the shadow, the tragic spirit of Italy stifling under the crumbling walls and hidden behind the cellar bars, the violent and mysterious bound of her great heart which cannot be stilled. Rome is strange. Ugly when one comes to analyze it, the city preserves in its ensemble an artificial splendor which is garbed in living splendor by the people and the gardens.

In Italy, in England, and in France, as in the Orient, the garden is the only artistic expression that belongs to the aristocracies. It adapts itself to the most imperious needs of those beings who have been robbed of self-possession through idleness and wealth. It throws around them the solitude which they cannot seek within themselves. It is made to surround them with murmurs, with coolness and shade, the possession of which, amid the freedom of the earth, is the recompense of the poor. Even when it is amassed, shaped, and broken in, nature is never ugly. The trees remain the trees; the water remains the water; the flowers remain the flowers; and whatever artist arranges them, space and light retain the power of softening the contrasts, of organizing the values, and of orchestrating the colors.

The Pleasure Of Danger And Struggle

Jean-Marie Guyau, A Sketch of Morality Independent of Obligation or Sanction, tr. Gertrude Kapteyn (London, 1898), 2nd bk., ch. I., sect. II., pp. 120-22:

Primitive humanity lived in the midst of danger, hence there must still exist in many people a natural predisposition to face it. Danger was, so to speak, the sport of primitive men, as sport is to-day, for many people, a kind of sham danger. This taste for peril, faced for its own sake, is to be met with even among animals. We find on this subject a curious tale of a traveller in Cambodia.

As soon as a troup of monkeys notice a crocodile with its body sunk in the water, its mouth wide open, so as to seize anything which may pass within reach, they seem to plan together, approach little by little, and begin their sport, being by turns actors and spectators. One of the most agile, or of the most imprudent, passes from branch to branch, to within a respectful distance of the crocodile, suspends himself by a paw, and with the dexterity of his race advances, goes back, now striking its adversary with its paw, now merely pretending to hit him. Some of the others, amused by this game, want to be of the party; but, the other branches being too high, they form a chain by holding one another hanging by their paws. They balance themselves in that way, while he who is nearest the amphibious animal torments it as much as possible. Sometimes the dreadful jaw shuts itself, but without catching the audacious monkey. There are screams of joy and merry antics; but sometimes also a paw is caught in the vice, and the leaping monkey is drawn down under water with the quickness of lightning. The whole troup then disperses moaning and howling, which, however, does not prevent them beginning again the same sport several days, perhaps even several hours, later. [Mouhot, «Voyage dans le Royaume de Siam et de Cambodge.»]

The pleasure of danger is derived chiefly from the pleasure of victory. One likes to conquer, no matter whom, even an animal. We like to prove to ourselves our superiority. . . . Moreover, even after having lost the hope of conquest, one obstinately goes on struggling. Whosoever may be the adversary, every fight degenerates into a desperate duel. . . .

This need of danger and of victory, which carries away the soldier and the huntsman, is found also in the traveller, the colonist, the engineer. . . . The invincible attraction of the sea lies, to a great extent, in the constant danger which it presents. It tempts in succession each generation which is born on its shores, and if the English nation has acquired an intensity of life and force of expansion so great that it has spread itself over the whole world, we may say that this is due to its education by the sea—that is to say, to its education by danger.

Let us note that the pleasure of contest alters its form without disappearing, be it in the struggle with an animated being (war or chase), or in the struggle with visible obstacles (sea, mountain), or in the struggle with invisible things (illness to be cured, difficulties of all sorts to be conquered). The struggle always partakes of the same character—that of a passionate duel. In truth, the doctor who starts for Senegal has decided upon a kind of duel with the yellow fever. The struggle passes from the domain of things physical to the intellectual domain, without losing anything of its ardour or of its fascination. The struggle may also pass into the special domain of morals. There is an inward struggle between the will and the passions, as captivating as any other, and in which the victory brings an infinite joy, as was well understood by Corneille.

In short, man needs to feel himself great, in order now and again to have full consciousness of the sublimity of his will. This consciousness he gets in struggle—struggle with himself, with his passions, or with material and intellectual obstacles. 

Man And Mountains

Walther Kirchner, Mind, Mountain, and History, I. The Classical Spirit, Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 11, No. 4 (Oct., 1950), pp. 412-3:

For the Jews, as for Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Indians, and many other peoples, the early relations of man and nature must be traced against a religious background, and mountains must be considered within this general setting. They are the seats of the Gods. The Cedar Mountain of the Assyrians, the Caucasus of the Persians, the peaks of the Himalayas on India's northern border, from the heights of which, as the Rig Veda tells, the Gods look down—they all are understood as steps or ladders to what is immeasurable, unknown, and high above. Few would ever have thought of trying to grasp with mortal hands what might be dwelling on top of the mountains, close to heaven. Respect for the «holy» and fear of hidden terrors would forbid such an arrogant attempt. Not without cause were the mountains created arduous to approach, inaccessible on their flanks, and surrounded by clouds and storms. It was to separate man from the eternally holy which dwelt in solitude and serenity; and only he whose sincere longing to be close to God and whose own purity would be an armor against the dangers from above could dare set his foot on the heights. 

Essentially, each separate religion had «its own group of sacred mountains.» Even the Jews, who evolved a transcendental, monotheistic religion including a God whose image could not be conceived by man, have viewed mountains with special regard, lifting their eyes «unto the hills whence cometh my help.» Only Moses could undertake to ascend Horeb of Sinai, could dare stand face to face with his God and in storm and thunder receive a law from above for the impious crowd below. Likewise Mount Hor, Mount Nebo, the mountain from which Jesus preached his sermon, Mount Calvary and others bear witness to the fact that in an age when religious expression is paramount in man's life, he has to find a place in his mind for mountains—a place in harmony with his fundamental attitude. 

Looking down from Mount Nebo, found in today's Jordan. (Photos mine, taken in 2022)

Constant Sense Of Novelty

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals, 1841, Otober 9:

Life.  Is identity tedious? Not if we can see to the life. That always stupefies us with sweet astonishment. A million times since the rose have the words “I thank you” been spoken. Yet are they just as graceful and musical in my ear when spoken with living emotion as if now first coined.

Philosophers And Taking Dicision

Friedrich Schiller, The Philosophers, tr. Edgar A. Bowring:

PUPIL.

 I am rejoiced, worthy sirs, to find you in pleno assembled;

   For I have come down below, seeking the one needful thing.

 ARISTOTLE.

 Quick to the point, my good friend! For the Jena Gazette comes

    to hand here,

  Even in hell,—so we know all that is passing above.

 PUPIL.

 So much the better! So give me (I will not depart hence without it)

  Some good principle now,—one that will always avail!

 FIRST PHILOSOPHER.

 Cogito, ergo sum. I have thought, and therefore existence!

  If the first be but true, then is the second one sure.

 PUPIL.

 As I think, I exist. 'Tis good! But who always is thinking?

  Oft I've existed e'en when I have been thinking of naught.

 SECOND PHILOSOPHER.

 Since there are things that exist, a thing of all things there must

    needs be;

  In the thing of all things dabble we, just as we are.

 THIRD PHILOSOPHER.

 Just the reverse, say I. Besides myself there is nothing;

  Everything else that there is is but a bubble to me.

 FOURTH PHILOSOPHER.

 Two kinds of things I allow to exist,—the world and the spirit;

  Naught of others I know; even these signify one.

 FIFTH PHILOSOPHER.

 I know naught of the thing, and know still less of the spirit;

  Both but appear unto me; yet no appearance they are.

 SIXTH PHILOSOPHER.

 I am I, and settle myself,—and if I then settle

  Nothing to be, well and good—there's a nonentity formed.

 SEVENTH PHILOSOPHER.

 There is conception at least! A thing conceived there is, therefore;

  And a conceiver as well,—which, with conception, make three.

 PUPIL.

 All this nonsense, good sirs, won't answer my purpose a tittle:

  I a real principle need,—one by which something is fixed.

 EIGHTH PHILOSOPHER.

 Nothing is now to be found in the theoretical province;

  Practical principles hold, such as: thou canst, for thou shouldst.

 PUPIL.

 If I but thought so! When people know no more sensible answer,

  Into the conscience at once plunge they with desperate haste.

 DAVID HUME.

 Don't converse with those fellows! That Kant has turned them all crazy;

  Speak to me, for in hell I am the same that I was.

 LAW POINT.

 I have made use of my nose for years together to smell with;

  Have I a right to my nose that can be legally proved?

 PUFFENDORF.

 Truly a delicate point! Yet the first possession appeareth

  In thy favor to tell; therefore make use of it still!

 SCRUPLE OF CONSCIENCE.

 Willingly serve I my friends; but, alas, I do it with pleasure;

  Therefore I often am vexed that no true virtue I have.

 DECISION.

 As there is no other means, thou hadst better begin to despise them;

  And with aversion, then, do that which thy duty commands.

Between Being On One's Own And Being With Others

Joseph-Marie baron de Gérando, Self-Education; or, The Means and Art of Moral Progress, (Boston, 1833), ch. III., Solitude and Society, pp. 302-305:

«Every time that I have been among men, I have returned more imperfect,» says a sage, who was too severe, perhaps, towards society and towards himself. He was a hermit. When a man goes from solitude into the world, he runs the danger of being drawn into too severe judgments upon the world and himself. We cannot find realized in society the images we have arbitrarily formed in a contemplation wholly ideal; we cannot apply rigorously the absolute rules which we had drawn up in the regions of abstraction. Thrown into the midst of society, we are struck by the contrast; we encounter a thousand obstacles, which we have not experienced or suspected in our solitary life. The dissipation of mind, alone, is a great trouble; having no longer our customary aids, we become disconcerted. It was easy to speculate on perfection in a state of tranquillity, and far from danger. We perhaps believed ourselves to have attained it, until we were put to the proof, till reality came, and the labor commenced; now we find fault with the world, from not remarking that we have doubtless carried into the world an imperfect and feeble virtue. Do not let us accuse other men of our own faults; but reflect, that we, perhaps, might have carried with us and preserved dispositions by which we might have escaped peril and gathered advantages.

The social inclination has something in it eminently moral; it puts in motion many precious faculties; it opens the soul, and makes it expand with many honorable sentiments. How solemn, touching, and noble is the impression which we receive of the dignity of human nature when we find ourselves in the midst of an assembly of men of different conditions, with whom we have no point of contact and no collision of interests. It is the same kind of impression, more extended but less vivid, that we receive in the midst of our own family. We are strengthened by the great alliance; and generous sentiments take the ascendency rapidly and surely. Such an impression is often received when we mingle with the crowd, on those days set apart to sacred rest. The impression is deepened, if this assembly is in the midst of the simple scenes of nature; if its attention is directed towards some grave and majestic work of art; if it is gathered round the statue of a great man; or if it fills a solemn temple: in short, if some moral or religious thought comes over all, the soul is penetrated with emotions of a strong and elevated character.1 This is the natural influence which we should constantly receive from social intercourse, if it were not adulterated by the hostile dispositions, which spring out of our rivalries, and our secret desire of invading and subduing others. But the hostilities of which we are the object do not so much interfere with it, as those of which we are the authors. The wounds that the first cause us, are envenomed by ourselves; we seem to take delight in inflaming them; we allow the envy that we might despise, to irritate us; the criticism that might enlighten, to wound us; and we are mortified even by indifference. Our self-love, especially, wages with the self-love of others a silent and concealed but continual and implacable war. We complain of being carried away by the influence of example: but we give it the power that it exercises over us. On examination, we shall find that the examples so easily followed, meet a secret propensity within, and that we have a secret interest in following the tracks of others: this happens, especially, in regard to those whom we would flatter; for there is no adulation more delicate.

We complain of the extreme corruption of the world, of the discouragement and sadness that it makes us feel; but we should guard against declamation, and appreciate things according to their just value. At our entrance into the world, we generally presume too much upon the goodness of other men, and so require too much; afterwards we fall into the opposite exaggeration, through the effect of the surprise which our mistake has made us experience. If we are sincere, we shall acknowledge that the vices with which we especially reproach the world, are those by which our vanity, our repose, or our pretensions have suffered: and that our judgment has a little the character of revenge. We are disconcerted with ourselves, and wreak this discontent upon others: we look at them through the medium of a chagrin, which springs from being ill at ease. We have hardly studied to discover and to note what society may contain of hidden virtues, of pure and just sentiments. Besides, how great is the weakness of our reason, if morality loses its authority in our eyes, because it loses its credit in the world! Is worldly success necessary, as its sanction or its proof? Does morality become an illusion, because some frivolous men misconceive it? If so, let us go upon the theatre of the world, as generous defenders of this miscon- cenceived cause, instead of flying, and yielding to pusillanimous fears.

1. These are certainly some fine lines; nonetheless, it is quite striking to me how such sentiments seem fully unattainable, at least in my case. I cannot recall once in my life when I experienced any similar sentiments. 

Human Nature And The Stoics

William Edward Lecky, History of European Morals From Augustus to Charlemagne, vol. I., (New York: 3rd edt., 1897), ch. 2, The Pagan Empire:

In truth, the Stoics, who taught that all virtue was conformity to nature, were, in this respect, eminently false to their own principle. Human nature, as revealed to us by reason, is a composite thing, a constitution of many parts differing in kind and dignity, a hierarchy in which many powers are intended to co-exist, but in different positions of ascendancy or subordination. To make the higher part of our nature our whole nature, is not to restore but to mutilate humanity, and this mutilation has never been attempted without producing grave evils. As philanthropists, the Stoics, through their passion for unity, were led to the extirpation of those emotions which nature intended as the chief springs of benevolence. As speculative philosophers, they were entangled by the same desire in a long train of pitiable paradoxes. Their famous doctrines that all virtues are equal, or, more correctly, are the same, that all vices are equal, that nothing is an evil which does not affect our will, and that pain and bereavement are, in consequence, no ills, though partially explained away and frequently disregarded by the Roman Stoics, were yet sufficiently prominent to give their teaching something of an unnatural and affected appearance. Prizing only a single object, and developing only a single side of their nature, their minds became narrow and their views contracted.

Athens, The Germans, Wincklemann, & Becoming Greeks

Frederick Beiser, Hegel, (Routledge, 2005), ch. II., Early Ideals, The Highest Good, p. 38:

The young Hegel and the romantics had a very idealistic conception of ancient Greek life. Their paradigm for unity of life was that of fifth-century Athens. They had their own theory about the ancient Greek: that he lived in harmony with himself, with others and with nature. We scarcely need to bother about the historical accuracy of such a fanciful theory: it is a myth whose value entirely lies in what it tells us about the Germans rather than the ancient Greeks. The romantic conception of Greek life came from several sources: from Rousseau, Wieland, Herder and Schiller. But its ultimate source was that Homer of German myth, ‘the divine’ J.J. Winckelmann. It was Winckelmann who taught the Germans that Greek culture was an aesthetic whole. Winckelmann’s constant refrain that Greek life was ‘natural’ stemmed from his political conviction that the Greeks were a free people who could express their humanity. The political message behind Winckelmann’s classicism was never lost on a public weary of absolutism: we could all become Greeks if we were only free.

Bibliomania For Its Own Sake

Isaac Disræli, his valuable Curiosities of Literature, The Bibliomania:

The Bibliomania, or the collecting an enormous heap of books without intelligent curiosity, has, since libraries have existed, infected weak minds, who imagine that they themselves acquire knowledge when they keep it on their shelves. Their motley libraries have been called the madhouses of the Human mind; and again, the tomb of books, when the possessor will not communicate them, and coffins them up in the cases of his library. It was facetiously observed, these collections are not without a Lock on the Human Understanding.

The Bibliomania never raged more violently than in our own times. It is fortunate that literature is in no ways injured by the follies of collectors, since though they preserve the worthless, they necessarily protect the good.

Some collectors place all their fame on the view of a splendid library, where volumes, arrayed in all the pomp of lettering, silk linings, triple gold bands, and tinted leather, are locked up in wire cases, and secured from the vulgar hands of the mere reader, dazzling our eyes like eastern beauties peering through their jalousies!

La Bruyère has touched on this mania with humour:—«Of such a collector, as soon as I enter his house, I am ready to faint on the staircase, from a strong smell of Morocco leather. In vain he shows me fine editions, gold leaves, Etruscan bindings, and naming them one after another, as if he were showing a gallery of pictures! a gallery, by-the-bye, which he seldom traverses when alone, for he rarely reads; but me he offers to conduct through it! I thank him for his politeness, and as little as himself care to visit the tan-house, which he calls his library.»

Wise Negligence

Attributed to Sir Joshua Reynolds, in: Frederick Hilles, The Literary Career Of Sir Joshua Reynolds, 1936, ch. I., Education, p. 3:

If you take too much care of yourself, Nature will cease to take care of you.

Hegel And The Romantic Legacy, & The Question Of Polemics

Frederick Beiser, Hegel, (Routledge, 2005), ch. II., Early Ideals, The Romantic Legacy, pp. 35-36:

Although the importance of the romantic legacy seems obvious, it has lately become unpopular even to associate Hegel with romanticism. Walter Kaufmann, Shlomo Avineri and Georg Lukács, to name a few, have argued strenuously against any conflation of Hegel with the romantics, even in his early years. There is an important element of truth to this. Hegel came into his own only in his later Jena years (1804–7) when he reacted against some of the central ideas of the romantic circle. The preface to the Phenomenology is his Abschiedsbrief, his settling of accounts with the romantics. We can see some of these critical tendencies even in the early fragments, so it would be a mistake to see Hegel as a romantic pure and simple even in his Frankfurt years. 

Nevertheless, it is also a mistake to treat Hegel as a figure apart, as if we can understand him without the romantics, or as if he were fundamentally opposed to them. This would be anachronistic for the early Hegel; but it would also be inaccurate about the later Hegel, who never entirely freed himself from romantic influence. His distinguishing features are still within a common genus. What seems to be a difference in quality is very often only one of quantity or emphasis. It is indeed a very common mistake of Hegel scholarship to regard ideas as distinctly Hegelian that are in fact common to the whole romantic generation. Hegel’s absolute idealism, his organic conception of nature, his critique of liberalism, his communitarian ideals, his vitalized Spinozism, his concept of dialectic, his attempt to synthesize communitarianism and liberalism–all these ideas are sometimes seen as uniquely Hegelian; but they were part of the common romantic legacy. 

Hegel scholars have often been led astray by Hegel’s own polemics. They accept these polemics as infallible, as if what Hegel says about his differences with the romantics had to be true simply because Hegel knew himself best. But sometimes the polemics distance Hegel from the romantics only at the cost of obscuring or disguising his own affinity with them. When, for example, in the preface to the Phenomenology Hegel states that his own view is that the absolute is not only substance but also subject, Hegel scholars take this as a distinguishing feature of Hegel’s philosophy over Schelling’s and the romantics. But what Hegel claimed as his own project–the attempt to combine substance and subject, Spinoza and Fichte–was a common enterprise of the romantic generation.

The reason many scholars have separated Hegel from the romantic generation is that they have a very anachronistic conception of Frühromantik that virtually equates it with the later more reactionary tendencies of Spätromantik. Their conception of Hegel’s intellectual context rests upon a neglect of the early philosophical works of the romantics, the unpublished fragments of Schleiermacher, Novalis, Friedrich Schlegel and Hölderlin, most of which have been accessible in critical editions only in the last fifty years. A careful study of these fragments is a fundamental desideratum of Hegel studies; it alone will allow us to locate him historically and to determine his individuality.

Health

Ariphron Pæan to Health (tr. J. M. Edmonds, Lyra Græca, vol. III., Loeb, 1927, pp. 401-2):

Health (Ὑγίεια), eldest of Gods, with thee may I dwell for the rest of my life and find thee a gracious house-mate. If there be any joy in wealth, or in children, or in that kingly rule that maketh men like to Gods, or in the desires we hunt with the secret nets of Aphroditè, or if there be any other delight or diversion sent of Heaven unto man, 'tis with thy aid, blessed Health, that they all do thrive and shine in the converse of the Graces; and without thee no man alive is happy.

May Health be evermore the eternal and faithful companion of those whom we love in life, and without whom life would be an endless night of woe and despair! 

Young Hegel On Love

Georg Wilhelm Hegel, On Love 1797, tr. T. M. Knox, 1970:

True union, or love proper, exists only between living things who are alike in power and thus in one another’s eyes living beings from every point of view; in no respect is either dead for the other. This genuine love excludes all oppositions. It is not the understanding, whose relations always leave the manifold of related terms as a manifold and whose unity is always a unity of opposites [left as opposites]. It is not reason either, because reason sharply opposes its determining power to what is determined. Love neither restricts nor is restricted; it is not finite at all. It is a feeling, yet not a single feeling [among other single feelings]. A single feeling is only a part and not the whole of life; the life present in a single feeling dissolves its barriers and drives on till it disperses itself in the manifold of feelings with a view to finding itself in the entirety of the manifold. This whole life is not contained in love in the same way as it is in this sum of many particular and isolated feelings; in love, life is present as a duplicate of itself and as a single and unified self. Here life has run through the circle of development from an immature to a completely mature unity: when the unity was immature, there still stood over against it the world and the possibility of a cleavage between itself and the world; as development proceeded, reflection produced more and more oppositions (unified by satisfied impulses) until it set the whole of man’s life in opposition [to objectivity]; finally, love completely destroys objectivity and thereby annuls and transcends reflection, deprives man’s opposite of all foreign character, and discovers life itself without any further defect. In love the separate does still remain, but as something united and no longer as something separate; life [in the subject] senses life [in the object].

Since love is a sensing of something living, lovers can be distinct only in so far as they are mortal and do not look upon this possibility of separation as if there were really a separation or as if reality were a sort of conjunction between possibility and existence. In the lovers there is no matter; they are a living whole. To say that the lovers have an independence and a living principle peculiar to each of themselves means only that they may die [and may be separated by death]. To say that salt and other minerals are part of the makeup of a plant and that these carry in themselves their own laws governing their operation is the judgment of external reflection and means no more than that the plant may rot. But love strives to annul even this distinction [between the lover as lover and the lover as physical organism], to annul this possibility [of separation] as a mere abstract possibility, to unite [with itself] even the mortal element [within the lover] and to make it immortal.

. . . love is indignant if part of the individual is severed and held back as a private property. This raging of love against [exclusive] individuality is shame. Shame is not a reaction of the mortal body, not an expression of the freedom to maintain one’s life, to subsist. The hostility in a loveless assault does injury to the loving heart itself, and the shame of this now injured heart becomes the rage which defends only its right, its property. If shame, instead of being an effect of love, an effect which only takes an indignant form after encountering something hostile, were something itself by nature hostile which wanted to defend an assailable property of its own, then we would have to say that shame is most of all characteristic of tyrants, or of girls who will not yield their charms except for money, or of vain women who want to fascinate. None of these love; their defense of their mortal body is the opposite of indignation about it; they ascribe an intrinsic worth to it and are shameless.

A pure heart is not ashamed of love; but it is ashamed if its love is incomplete; it upbraids itself if there is some hostile power which hinders love’s culmination. Shame enters only through the recollection of the body, through the presence of an [exclusive] personality or the sensing of an [exclusive] individuality. It is not a fear for what is mortal, for what is merely one’s own, but rather a fear of it, a fear which vanishes as the separable element in the lover is diminished by his love. Love is stronger than fear. It has no fear of its fear, but, led by its fear, it cancels separation, apprehensive as it is of finding opposition which may resists it or be a fixed barrier against it. It is a mutual giving and taking; through shyness its gifts may be disdained; through shyness an opponent may not yield to its receiving; but it still tries whether hope has not deceived it, whether it still finds itself everywhere. The lover who takes is not thereby made richer than the other; he is enriched indeed, but only so much as the other is. . . . This wealth of life love acquires in the exchange of every thought, every variety of inner experience, for it seeks out difference and devises unifications ad infinitum; it turns to the whole manifold of nature in order to drink love out of every life. What in the first instance is most the individual’s own is united into the whole in the lovers’ touch and contact; consciousness of a separate self disappears, and all distinction between the lovers is annulled. The mortal element, the body, has lost the character of separability, and a living child, a seed of immortality, of the eternally self-developing and self-generating [race], has come into existence. What has been united [in the child] is not divided again; [in love and through love] God has acted and created. . . .

Vide, too: Jens Lemanski (2018): An Analogy between Hegel's Theory of Recognition and Ficino's Theory of Love, British Journal for the History of Philosophy.

The Need For Opposition

Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Pedagogy 1803, tr. Robert B. Louden, p. 443, in: Anthropology, History, and Education (Cambridge, 2007):

But a tree which stands alone in the field grows crooked and spreads its branches wide. By contrast, a tree which stands in the middle of the forest grows straight towards the sun and air above it, because the trees offer opposition.

The Cultivation Of Tastes

William Edward Lecky, The Map of Life: Conduct and Character (Longmans, Green, and Co., 1917), ch. XII., The Management of Character, pp. 243-5:

In the selection of pleasures and the cultivation of tastes much wisdom is shown in choosing in such a way that each should form a complement to the others; that different pleasures should not clash, but rather cover different areas and seasons of life; that each should tend to correct faults or deficiencies of character which the others may possibly produce. The young man who starts in life with keen literary tastes and also with a keen love of out-of-door sports, and who possesses the means of gratifying each, has perhaps provided himself with as many elements of happiness as mere amusements can ever furnish. One set of pleasures, however, often kills the capacity for enjoying others, and some which in themselves are absolutely innocent, by blunting the enjoyment of better things, exercise an injurious influence on character. Habitual novel-reading, for example, often destroys the taste for serious literature, and few things tend so much to impair a sound literary perception and to vulgarise the character as the habit of constantly saturating the mind with inferior literature, even when that literature is in no degree immoral. Sometimes an opposite evil may be produced. Excessive fastidiousness greatly limits our enjoyments, and the inestimable gift of extreme concentration is often dearly bought. The well-known confession of Darwin that his intense addiction to science had destroyed his power of enjoying even the noblest imaginative literature1 represents a danger to which many men who have achieved much in the higher and severer forms of scientific thought are subject. Such men are usually by their original temperament, and become still more by acquired habit, men of strong, narrow, concentrated natures, whose thoughts, like a deep and rapid stream confined in a restricted channel, flow with resistless energy in one direction. It is by the sacrifice of versatility that they do so much, and the result is amply sufficient to justify it. But it is a real sacrifice, depriving them of many forms both of capacity and of enjoyment.

The same pleasures act differently on different characters, especially on the differences of character that accompany difference of sex. I have myself no doubt that the movement which in modern times has so widely opened to women amusements that were once almost wholly reserved for men has been on the whole a good one. It has produced a higher level of health, stronger nerves, and less morbid characters, and it has given keen and innocent enjoyment to many who from their circumstances and surroundings once found their lives very dreary and insipid. Yet most good observers will agree that amusements which have no kind of evil effect on men often in some degree impair the graces or characters of women, and that it is not quite with impunity that one sex tries to live the life of the other.

1. Seems like I've been nourishing such a danger within me for years. 

Unity And The Yearn For It

Karl Rahner, Theological Investigations, vol. VI., tr. Karl-H. and Boniface Kruger (New York, 1982), pt. 1, ch. I., The Man of Today and Religion, pp. 3-4:

Man has an infinitely profound yearning for unity. And rightly so. This is why he is always in danger of oversimplifying, in danger of wanting to design everything in his life from one single angle and of wanting to determine everything as a function of one single, definite entity which is familiar to him and controllable by him. This is true not only in the theoretical sphere but also in the realm of practical action. Thus contemporary man is in danger of wanting to be nothing but a man of today. What, for instance, we call the «manager type», is not from a more profound point of view the person who works himself to death, for there has always been this type of person either of necessity or by choice. At a closer look, one will find the «manager» in an existentially ontological and really ethical sense wherever someone can no longer think of anything in his life except as a derived function of his enterprises, whenever he simply identifies his life and his enterprises. This must inevitably lead to a perversion of the remaining realisations of his life, even when they are still present in a material sense and even when there still remains everything belonging to the life of man. Thus, for example, marriage, art, even religion, friendship and everything else in the life of man can become the means of the representational forms of an enterpriser's existence; they can be lived, consciously or not, as the continuation of business life as such; the person can become quite blind to the meaning of these other realities of human existence and all these other realisations can come to bear no more pregnant and justifying meaning in themselves than the limits of what they signify for business and its undertakings. When this happens and when it is really true that an individual «lived completely for his business»—as is often stated in death notices in this or some such stupid phrase—then there occurs a narrowing, a disappearance of the meaning of human life which becomes fatal for man. To be sure life today, constructed as it is through and through in a technological and scientific way, can presumably provide more in terms of total human fulfilment of existence than was possible in many occupations in the past; for it demands more in total human realisation—in other words, more in the creative, artistic and political fields, wider horizons, more understanding for new research—than most previous occupations. Yet it remains true that man precisely as he is today and man as such cannot be simply equated. The courage necessary to put up with this pluralism and to accept it quite naturally, the courage not to think (in the words of an old mystic) that one can attain everything «in one go»—this belongs to the basic conditions of an authentic and healthy human existence. Since the part always lives by the whole and yet never is the whole, the modernity of a man always exists by reason of the total human fulfilment of life. In this way, the will or the desire to be nothing but precisely a man of today and tomorrow, is not only truly inhuman but actually—whatever may be the judgement of short-sighted experience—harms a man's authentic «being-a-man-of-today.» It is simply a characteristic of the mysteries of a finite existence that every part of it is different from every other and yet cannot exist without the other and remains dependent on it. 

Greek Philosophy

Søren Kierkegaard, Prefaces & Writing Smapler, edt. & tr. Todd W. Nichol (Princeton University Press, 1997), VII., p. 42:

. . . Although Greek philosophy is consequently very uplifting, diffused over it there is also a pensive sadness in which it is reconciled with the earthly. It knows full well its noble ancestry and does not deny it either, yet takes no vain delight in dissimilarity and thus accommodates itself to the everyday. It is like a god who walks about in human form and at every moment works a miracle with the humble everyday phrase, although in everything he still resembles an ordinary human being except insofar as that sadness, now as a faint touch of depression, bows down his figure and now transfigures itself as a divine jest that rejuvenates his figure almost to the point of jocularity.

The Dreamy Ear Of The 18th Century, & Conjuring Up The Spirit Of Past Ages

Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl, The Musical Ear 1852 (which became a part of his Kulturstudien aus drei Jahrhunderten, 1859), tr. Frances H. King, vol. VIII. of Masterpieces of German Literature, 1914, pp. 461-464:

The concert music of the first half of the eighteenth century was in its trivial entirety a «diversion of the mind and wit.» In the same way that we now write «popular musical text-books,» they wrote, in that day, directions «how a galant homme could attain complete comprehension of and taste in music,» and Matheson says, not satirically, but in earnest: «Formerly only two things were demanded of a composition, namely, melody and harmony; but nowadays one would come off badly if one did not add the third thing, namely, gallantry, which, however, can in no wise be learned or set down in rules but is acquired only by good taste and sound judgment. If one wished for an example, and were the reader perhaps not gallant enough to understand what gallantry means in music, it might not come amiss to use that of a dress, in which the cloth could represent the so necessary harmony, the style, the suitable melody, and then perhaps the embroidery might represent the gallantry.»

With such tailor-like artistic taste prevalent in the gallant world of that day, it is all the more astonishing that a solitary great spirit like Sebastian Bach dared to develop his best thoughts and most peculiar forms also in concert music. To be sure, as a natural consequence he had to remain solitary. 

The above mentioned music «for the diversion of the mind and wit» loved short pieces, concise composition, minor measures, frequent repetitions of the same thought. The intellectual ear grasps all that easily, and amuses itself with the comparison of themes which are repeated in the same or in changed forms. We, on the contrary, nearly always listen to music with a dreamy, seldom with an intellectually comparative ear; therefore modern music is much more influential, but also much more dangerous, than the old. Musical pieces increase in length from year to year, in order that, during the performance of them, one may have the requisite time to dream. The composition has become infinitely more complicated. Formerly four measures sufficed for a simple melodic phrase, then six, then eight, now twelve and sixteen are hardly enough. Worthy old Schicht called young Beethoven a musical pig when he first learned to know the broad architectonic composition in the latter's works. He listened to the man of the future with the ear of his own past age, and in so far was quite right. To the people of the earlier period of the eighteenth century Beethoven's works would certainly have seemed unspeak-ably confused and bombastic, indeed like the products of musical insanity and, moreover, swarming with the worst kind of stylistic and grammatical blunders, as they did indeed appear at times even to the older contemporaries of the master. Little by little, however, it has grown to be rather risky to assert this fact, for every musical ass now argues that because his works please nobody, therefore he must be a Beethoven. 

The concise thoughts and phrases of the old masters are disturbing to our dreamy musical ear—they are disquieting, they wake us up. Modern musicians are very seldom able to perform impressively this all too concise style of composition because they are no longer accustomed to interchange forte and piano and melodic expression in such short musical sentences; they only have ear and hand for very broad periods, yard-long fortes, pianos and crescendos. By far the greater part of the older chamber-music of the eighteenth century has for our ear something soberly rationalistic. Such imitative music in that age compares with modern imitative music as the painted allegories of the Pigtail age compare with the symbolical paintings of Kaulbach. Johann Jacob Frohberger, court organist to the Emperor Ferdinand III., portrayed the dangers which he incurred crossing the Rhine in an—allemande. To the ear of his contemporaries this portrayal sounded absolutely plain and intelligible. Dietrich Buxtehude described the nature of the planets in seven suites for the piano. The Hamburg organist, Matthias Weckmann, set the sixty-third chapter of Isaiah to music, and the then celebrated missionary to the Jews, Edzardi, bore him witness that in the bass he had painted the Messiah as plainly as if he had seen Him with his own eyes. We have no longer any ear for the comprehension of such rationalistically allegorized music; indeed, we can understand the ear which a former age possessed for it just as little as we can understand the euphony which the ear of the Middle Ages found in Guido's fourth-harmonies, which now even the dogs cannot put up with. . . .

There is certainly a wonderful charm in conjuring up the spirit of past ages from yellowed sheets of music, and, with the help of historical study, in quiet cozy hours, to tune one's own ear anew, so that it may once more hear in spirit the harmonies which were listened to by generations long since deceased, just as they sounded to the ear of the latter. There is a wonderful charm in searching after the most secret instinctive tones of the emotional life of a bygone world, the natural sounds of their souls, which are so entirely different from our own and which would be lost for us—since picture and word stand too far off—had they not found fixed expression in musical composition. The character-picture of the last century, as portrayed by the historian of culture, is lacking in that peculiar soulful lustre, that mysterious little luminous point which shines upon the beholder from the eye of a well-painted portrait, if such things as the knowledge of the eye for natural scenery and the ear for music of the age are not included among the features of the character-picture. 

Clearly more of Riehl should be read.

Becoming An Author

Søren Kierkegaard, Prefaces & Writing Smapler, edt. & tr. Todd W. Nichol (Princeton University Press, 1997), VII., p. 35:

To write a book is the easiest of all things in our time, if, as is customary, one takes ten older works on the same subject and out of them puts together an eleventh on the same subject. In this way one gains the honor of being an author . . .

Kierkegaard does certainly have the wit; and, at quite numberless occasions, he can be genuinely jolly and humorous in such writings of his. But, God! he is so indulged in writing and then writing again, that much of it comes out as dispensable nonsense. 

Victory Over Things

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals, July, 1841: 

Facts. All is for thee; but thence results the inconvenience that all is against thee which thou dost not make thine own. Victory over things is the destiny of man; of course, until it be accomplished, it is the war and insult of things over him. He may have as much time as he pleases, as long as he likes to he a coward, and a disgraced person, so long as he may delay to fight, but there is no escape from the alternative. I may not read Schleiermacher or Plato, I may even rejoice that Germany and Greece are too far off in time and space than that they can insult over my ignorance of their works, I may even have a secret joy that the heroes and giants of intellectual labor, say, for instance, these very Platos and Schleiermachers are dead, and cannot taunt me with a look: my soul knows better: they are not dead, for the nature of things is alive, and that passes its fatal word to me that these men shall yet meet me and shall yet tax me line for line, fact for fact, with all my pusillanimity. 

All that we care for in a man is the tidings he gives us of our own faculty through the new conditions under which he exhibits the common soul. I would know how calm, how grand, how playful, how helpful, I can be. 

Yet we care for individuals, not for the waste universality. It is the same ocean everywhere. . . .

The Waning Greek And Roman World

Ernest Renan, Origins of Christianity, vol. II., The Apostles (New York, 1866), ch. XVIII., pp. 287-289

. . . The lawyers who built up the Roman jurisprudence, so eminent in legal science, displayed their ignorance of human nature by opposing in every way, even with the menace of death, and by hedging in with all sorts of odious and puerile restrictions an everlasting need of the soul of man. Like the authors of the “Code Civil,” they regarded life with a wintry glance. If man’s life consisted in amusing himself under the orders of his superiors, in munching his crust and tasting his puny pleasures in his rank under the eye of a taskmaster, all this would be well devised. But the retribution awarded to social systems which follow this false and contracted view, is first a melancholy disgust, and next a violent triumph of religious partisans. Never will man consent to breathe that icy air. He needs the little circle, the brotherhood where he may live and die amongst his fellows. Our vast abstract social organizations are not sufficient to supply all the social instincts which exist in man. Let him alone to attach his heart to something, to seek consolation where it may be found, to make brothers to himself, and to draw closer the ties of affection. Let not the cold arm of the state break into this kingdom of the soul, which is also the realm of liberty. True life and happiness will not spring up again in this world until that sad heritage left us by Roman law, our inveterate distrust of the private assembly (collegium), shall have disappeared. Association independent of the state, without injury to the state, is the great question of the future. The laws to be made in regard to associations will determine whether or not modern society will tend to the same destiny as ancient. One example should suffice. The Roman empire bound its own existence to the law relating to unlawful assemblages. Christians and barbarians, accomplishing in this respect the task of human conscience, broke down that law, and the empire having planted itself thereon, went down with it.

The Greek and Roman world, a secular and profane world, which possessed not the true conception of a minister of religion, which had neither divine law nor a revealed word, had here stumbled upon a problem which it was unable to solve. And we may add that if it had possessed a body of consecrated priests, a severe theology, and a strongly organized system of religion, it would not have created the secular state, or inaugurated the idea of a social system founded merely on reason, and on the human wants and natural relations of individuals. The religious inferiority of the Greeks and Romans was the result of their political and intellectual superiority. The religious superiority of the Jews, on the contrary, has proved the cause of their political and philosophical inferiority. Judaism and primitive Christianity comprised the negation of the civil authority, or perhaps we may more accurately say the putting it under guardianship. Like the system of Mahomet, they established social order upon the basis of religion. When human affairs are controlled from that direction, great and universal proselytisms are made, apostles traverse the world from end to end, reforming and converting it; but in that manner are not constructed political institutions, national independence, a dynasty, a code, or a homogeneous people.

The original French (Les Apôtres, La Libraire Nouvelle, 1866,  ch. XVIII., pp. 363-365):

. . . Les légistes qui ont constitué le droit romain, si éminents comme jurisconsultes, donnèrent la mesure de leur ignorance de la nature humaine en poursuivant de toute façon, même par la menace de la peine de mort, en restreignant par toute sorte de précautions odieuses ou puériles un éternel besoin de l'âme. Comme les auteurs de notre «Code civil», ils se figuraient la vie avec une mortelle froideur. Si la vie consistait à s'amuser par ordre supérieur, à manger son morceau de pain, à goûter son plaisir en son rang et sous l'œil du chef, tout cela serait bien conçu. Mais la punition des sociétés qui s'abandonnent à cette direction fausse et bornée, c'est d'abord l'ennui, puis le triomphe violent des partis religieux. Jamais l'homme ne consentira à respirer cet air glacial; il lui faut la petite enceinte, la confrérie où l'on vit et meurt ensemble. Nos grandes sociétés abstraites ne sont pas suffisantes pour répondre à tous les instincts de sociabilité qui sont dans l'homme. Laissez-le mettre son cœur à quelque chose, chercher sa consolation où il la trouve, se créer des frères, contracter des liens de cœur. Que la main froide de l'État n'intervienne pas dans ce royaume de l'âme, qui est le royaume de la liberté. La vie, la joie ne renaîtront dans le monde que quand notre défiance contre les collegia, ce triste héritage du droit romain, aura disparu. L'association en dehors de l'État, sans détruire l'État, est la question capitale de l'avenir. La loi future sur les associations décidera si la société moderne aura ou non le sort de l'ancienne. Un exemple devrait suffire: l'empire romain avait lié sa destinée à la loi sur les cœtus illiciti, les illicita collegia. Les chrétiens et les barbares, accomplissant en ceci l'œuvre de la conscience humaine, ont brisé la loi; l'Empire, qui s'y était attaché, a sombré avec elle.

Le monde grec et romain, monde laïque, monde profane, qui ne savait pas ce que c'est qu'un prêtre, qui n'avait ni loi divine, ni livre révélé, touchait ici à des problèmes qu'il ne pouvait résoudre. Ajoutons que, s'il avait eu des prêtres, une théologie sévère, une religion fortement organisée, il n'eût pas créé l'État laïque, inauguré l'idée d'une société rationnelle, d'une société fondée sur les simples nécessités humaines et sur les rapports naturels des individus. L'infériorité religieuse des Grecs et des Romains était la conséquence de leur supériorité politique et intellectuelle. La supériorité religieuse du peuple juif, au contraire, a été la cause de son infériorité politique et philosophique. Le judaïsme et le christianisme primitif renfermaient la négation ou plutôt la mise en tutelle de l'état civil. Comme l'islamisme, ils établissaient la société sur la religion. Quand on prend les choses humaines par ce côté, on fonde de grands prosélytismes universels, on a des apôtres courant le monde d'un bout à l'autre et le convertissant; mais on ne fonde pas des institutions politiques, une indépendance nationale, une dynastie, un code, un peuple.

To Have No Name

Søren Kierkegaard, Journals, IA 126, March, 1836, tr. Howard V. Hong & Edna H. Hong:

It is the tragedy of not having anyone to whom one can make himself intelligible, which is so beautifully expressed in Genesis, where Adam gives all the animals names but finds none for himself. 

Genius And Its Signs

Johann Gottlieb Fichte, De Moribus Eruditorum or The Vocation of the Scholar, lect. III., p. 165, in: Johann Gottlieb Fichte's Popular Works with a Memoir, tr. William Smith (London, 1873).

. . . self-contemplation, and self-admiration, and self-flattery, although the last may remain unexpressed, and even carefully shrouded from the eye of every beholder,—these, and the indolence and disdain of the treasures already gathered together in the storehouses of learning which spring from these, are sure signs of the absence of true Genius; whilst forgetfulness of self in the object pursued, entire devotion to that object, and inability to entertain any thought of self in its presence, are the inseparable accompaniments of true Genius. It follows that true Genius in every stage of its growth, but particularly during its early development, is marked by amiable modesty and retiring bashfulness. Genius knows least of all about itself; it is there, and works and rules with silent power, long before it comes to consciousness of its own nature. Whoever is constantly looking back upon himself to see how it stands with him, of what powers he can boast, and who is himself the first discoverer of these,—in him truly there is nothing great. 

The Beautiful And The Sublime

Friedrich Schiller, Essays: Æsthetical and Philosophical, (London: George Bell & Sons, 1875), On the Sublime, pp. 132-34: 

Nature has given to us two genii as companions in our life in this lower world. The one, amiable and of good companionship, shortens the troubles of the journey by the gayety of its plays. It makes the chains of necessity light to us, and leads us amidst joy and laughter, to the most perilous spots, where we must act as pure spirits and strip ourselves of all that is body, on the knowledge of the true and the practice of duty. Once when we are there, it abandons us, for its realm is limited to the world of sense; its earthly wings could not carry it beyond. But at this moment the other companion steps upon the stage, silent and grave, and with his powerful arm carries us beyond the precipice that made us giddy.

In the former of these genii we recognize the feeling of the beautiful, in the other the feeling of the sublime. No doubt the beautiful itself is already an expression of liberty. This liberty is not the kind that raises us above the power of nature, and that sets us free from all bodily influence, but it is only the liberty which we enjoy as men, without issuing from the limits of nature. In the presence of beauty we feel ourselves free, because the sensuous instincts are in harmony with the laws of reason. In presence of the sublime we feel ourselves sublime, because the sensuous instincts have no influence over the jurisdiction of reason, because it is then the pure spirit that acts in us as if it were not absolutely subject to any other laws than its own.

The feeling of the sublime is a mixed feeling. It is at once a painful state, which in its paroxysm is manifested by a kind of shudder, and a joyous state, that may rise to rapture, and which, without being properly a pleasure, is greatly preferred to every kind of pleasure by delicate souls. This union of two contrary sensations in one and the same feeling proves in a peremptory manner our moral independence. For as it is absolutely impossible that the same object should be with us in two opposite relations, it follows that it is we ourselves who sustain two different relations with the object. It follows that these two opposed natures should be united in us, which, on the idea of this object, are brought into play in two perfectly opposite ways. Thus we experience by the feeling of the beautiful that the state of our spiritual nature is not necessarily determined by the state of our sensuous nature; that the laws of nature are not necessarily our laws; and that there is in us an autonomous principle independent of all sensuous impressions.

The sublime object may be considered in two lights. We either represent it to our comprehension, and we try in vain to make an image or idea of it, or we refer it to our vital force, and we consider it as a power before which ours is nothing. But though in both cases we experience in connection with this object the painful feeling of our limits, yet we do not seek to avoid it; on the contrary we are attracted to it by an irresistible force. Could this be the case if the limits of our imagination were at the same time those of our comprehension? Should we be willingly called back to the feeling of the omnipotence of the forces of nature if we had not in us something that cannot be a prey of these forces. We are pleased with the spectacle of the sensuous infinite, because we are able to attain by thought what the senses can no longer embrace and what the understanding cannot grasp. The sight of a terrible object transports us with enthusiasm, because we are capable of willing what the instincts reject with horror, and of rejecting what they desire. We willingly allow our imagination to find something in the world of phænomena that passes beyond it; because, after all, it is only one sensuous force that triumphs over another sensuous force, but nature, notwithstanding all her infinity, cannot attain to the absolute grandeur which is in ourselves. We submit willingly to physical necessity both our well-being and our existence. This is because the very power reminds us that there are in us principles that escape its empire. Man is in the hands of nature, but the will of man is in his own hands.

Nature herself has actually used a sensuous means to teach us that we are something more than mere sensuous natures. She has even known how to make use of our sensations to put us on the track of this discovery—that we are by no means subject as slaves to the violence of the sensations. And this is quite a different effect from that which can be produced by the beautiful; I mean the beautiful of the real world, for the sublime itself is surpassed by the ideal. In the presence of beauty, reason and sense are in harmony, and it is only on account of this harmony that the beautiful has attraction for us. Consequently, beauty alone could never teach us that our destination is to act as pure intelligences, and that we are capable of showing ourselves such. In the presence of the sublime, on the contrary, reason and the sensuous are not in harmony, and it is precisely this contradiction between the two which makes the charm of the sublime—its irresistible action on our minds. Here the physical man and the moral man separate in the most marked manner; for it is exactly in the presence of objects that make us feel at once how limited the former is that the other makes the experience of its force. The very thing that lowers one to the earth is precisely that which raises the other to the infinite.

Man's First Vision

Heinrich Von Kleist, from a letter written in September 5, 1800, To Wilhelmine von Zenge, in: An Abyss Deep Enough, edt. & tr. Philip B. Miller (New York, 1982), p. 53:

I am on the right path, I feel this in my ever more serene self-awareness, and the contentment that warms me within. Could I otherwise speak to you with such self-assurance, call you my own with such inward joy, find such delight and gladness and calm in the beauties of nature that now surround me? Yes, dear girl, this last is decisive. Solitude in nature's great openness: that is the touchstone of one's true moral worth. In society, on city streets, in theaters, our moral judgment is silent, things there work only on the intellect, and one has no need of the heart. But when we see the spacious, more noble, more sublime Creation before us, why, then one has need of a heart. Astir in our breast, its beating awakens the conscience. Man's first vision was of external nature, his second turns furtively inward to his innermost consciousness. If we find ugliness there, there alone, of all places, in the ideal beauty of nature, why then, no more can we know peace of mind, all pleasure and joy in life evaporate. We are oppressed within, we cannot grasp what is high and divine, we wander mute and senseless like slaves in the palaces of their masters. In the quiet of the forests we are anxious, startled by the babbling of a spring; God's presence is burdensome to us; we plunge into the hurry and bustle to lose ourselves in throngs, and wish we may never, never find ourselves again. 

How grateful I am that at least one person in the world understands me. If not for Brockes there might be no serenity for me, perhaps not even the strength necessary for my undertaking. For, to be thrown back entirely on one's own self-confidence, never to receive an encouraging look from another pair of eyes—and still to do what is right, that of course, as they say, is virtue of heroic dimension. But who knows whether Christ on the cross would have done as he did unless, among the raging tormentors about him, he could also see his mother and disciples casting moist glances of rapture. . . . 

Living Your Truth

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals, October 9, 1832:

I will not live out of me.
I will not see with others' eyes;
My good is good, my evil ill.
I would be free; I cannot be
While I take things as others please to rate them.
I dare attempt to lay out my own road.
That which myself delights in shall be Good,
That which I do not want, indifferent;
That which I hate is Bad. That's flat. 

Henceforth, please God, forever I forego
The yoke of men's opinions.
I will be Light-hearted as a bird and live with God.
I find him in the bottom of my heart, 

I hear continually his Voice therein,
And books, and priests, and worlds, I less esteem.
Who says the heart's a blind guide? It is not. . . .

That What's Within Is Shown Without

John Flaxman, Lectures on Sculpture (London, 1865), Lecture V., Beauty, 130-1:

Every passion, sentiment, virtue, or vice, have their corresponding signs in the face, body, and limbs, which are understood by the skilful physician and physiognomist, when not confused by the working of contrary affections or hidden by dissimulation.

In the formation and appearance of the body, we shall always find that its beauty depends on its health, strength, and agility, most convenient motion and harmony of parts in the male and female human figure, according to the purposes for which they were intended; the man for greater power and exertion, the woman for tenderness and grace. If these characteristics of form are animated by a soul in which benevolence, temperance, fortitude, and the other moral virtues preside, unclouded by vice, we shall recognize in such a one perfect beauty, and remember that «God created man in His own image.»

We know that sickness destroys the complexion and consumes the form, until that which was once admired for grace and attractive loveliness becomes a ghastly spectre; and is it not equally evident that brutal ferocity, revenge, hypocrisy, or any other of the malignant passions, still more effectually destroy the very traces of beauty by reducing man to a savage beast in his most degraded state?

The most perfect human beauty is that most free from deformity either of body or mind, and may be therefore defined—

    The most perfect soul, in the most perfect body.

Society And Truthfulness

Henry David Thoreau, Journal, March 14th, 1838:

The mass never comes up to the standard of its best member, but on the contrary degrades itself to a level with the lowest. As the reformers say, it is a levelling down, not up. Hence the mass is only another name for the mob. The inhabitants of the earth assembled in one place would constitute the greatest mob. The mob is spoken of as an insane and blinded animal; magistrates say it must be humored; they apprehend it may incline this way or that, as villagers dread an inundation, not knowing whose land may be flooded, nor how many bridges carried away.

. . . He goes to a commencement thinking that there at least he may find the men of the country; but such, if there were any, are completely merged in the day, and have become so many walking commencements, so that he is fain to take himself out of sight and hearing of the orator, lest he lose his own identity in the nonentities around him.

. . . But you are getting all the while further and further from true society. Your silence was an approach to it, but your conversation is only a refuge from the encounter of men; as though men were to be satisfied with a meeting of heels, and not heads.

Nor is it better with private assemblies, or meetings together, with a sociable design, of acquaintances so called,—that is to say of men and women who are familiar with the lineaments of each other’s countenances, who eat, drink, sleep, and transact the business of living within the circuit of a mile.

With a beating heart he fares him forth, by the light of the stars, to this meeting of gods. But the illusion speedily vanishes; what at first seemed to him nectar and ambrosia, is discovered to be plain bohea and short gingerbread. . . .

After all, the field of battle possesses many advantages over the drawing-room. There at least is no room for pretension or excessive ceremony, no shaking of hands or rubbing of noses, which make one doubt your sincerity, but hearty as well as hard hand-play. It at least exhibits one of the faces of humanity, the former only a mask.

The utmost nearness to which men approach each other amounts barely to a mechanical contact. As when you rub two stones together, though they emit an audible sound, yet do they not actually touch each other. . . .

Let ours be like the meeting of two planets, not hastening to confound their jarring spheres, but drawn together by the influence of a subtile attraction, soon to roll diverse in their respective orbits, from this their perigee, or point of nearest approach.

Let not society be the element in which you swim, or are tossed about at the mercy of the waves, but be rather a strip of firm land running out into the sea, whose base is daily washed by the tide, but whose summit only the spring tide can reach.

But after all, such a morsel of society as this will not satisfy a man. But like those women of Malamocco and Pelestrina, who when their husbands are fishing at sea, repair to the shore and sing their shrill songs at evening, till they hear the voices of their husbands in reply borne to them over the water, so go we about indefatigably, chanting our stanza of the lay, and awaiting the response of a kindred soul out of the distance.

Despising When Lacking

Charles Louis de Secondat, Montesquieu, Persian Letters, tr. John Davidson (London & New York, undated), Letter CXLV., p. 335:

When a man lacks a particular talent, he indemnifies himself by despising it: he removes the impediment between him and merit; and in that way finds himself on a level with those of whose works he formerly stood in awe.

Un homme à qui il manque un talent se dédommage en le méprisant: il ôte cet obstacle qu'il rencontroit entre le mérite et lui; et, par là, se trouve au niveau de celui dont il redoute les travaux.

Teaching Oneself

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals, October 14, 1832:

Would it not be the text of a useful discourse to young men, that every man must learn in a different way? How much is lost by imitation! Our best friends may be our worst enemies. A man should learn to detect and foster that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within far more than the lustre of [the] whole firmament without. Yet he dismisses without notice his peculiar thought because it is peculiar. The time will come when he will postpone all acquired knowledge to this spontaneous wisdom, and will watch for this illumination more than those who watch for the morning. For this is the principle by which the other is to be arranged. This thinking would go to show the significance of self-education; that in reality there is no other; for, all other is nought without this. 

A man must teach himself because that which each can do best, none but his maker can teach him. No man yet knows what it is, nor can, till that person has exhibited it. Where is the master that could have taught Shakspeare? Where is the master that could have instructed Franklin, or Washington, or Bacon, or Newton? Every great man is an unique. The Scipionism of Scipio is just that part he could not borrow. . . . Every man comes at the common results with most conviction in his own way. But he only uses a different vocabulary from yours; it comes to the same thing. 

An imitation may be pretty, comical, popular, but it never can be great. Buonaparte mimicked Themistocles. If anybody will tell me who it is the great man imitates in the original crisis when he performs a great act,—who Muley Molok imitated, or Falkland, or Scipio, or Aristides, or Phocion, or Fox, or More, or Alfred, or Lafayette, I will tell him who else can teach him than himself. A man has got to learn that he must embrace the truth, or shall never know it; that to be thankful for a little is the way to get more. He is to work himself clear of how much nonsense and mischief. He is to learn, like the Persian, to speak the truth. 

Moulding One's Own Character

William Edward Lecky, The Map of Life: Conduct and Character (Longmans, Green, and Co., 1917), ch. XII., The Management of Character, pp. 235-6:

Of all the tasks which are set before man in life, the education and management of his character is the most important, and, in order that it should be successfully pursued, it is necessary that he should make a calm and careful survey of his own tendencies, unblinded either by the self-deception which conceals errors and magnifies excellences, or by the indiscriminate pessimism which refuses to recognise his powers for good. He must avoid the fatalism which would persuade him that he has no power over his nature, and he must also clearly recognise that this power is not unlimited. Man is like a card-player who receives from Nature his cards—his disposition, his circumstances, the strength or weakness of his will, of his mind, and of his body. The game of life is one of blended chance and skill. The best player will be defeated if he has hopelessly bad cards, but in the long run the skill of the player will not fail to tell. The power of man over his character bears much resemblance to his power over his body. Men come into the world with bodies very unequal in their health and strength; with hereditary dispositions to disease; with organs varying greatly in their normal condition. At the same time a temperate or intemperate life, skilful or unskilful regimen, physical exercises well adapted to strengthen the weaker parts, physical apathy, vicious indulgence, misdirected or excessive effort, will all in their different ways alter his bodily condition and increase or diminish his chances of disease and premature death. The power of will over character is, however, stronger, or, at least, wider than its power over the body. There are organs which lie wholly beyond its influence; there are diseases over which it can exercise no possible influence, but there is no part of our moral constitution which we cannot in some degree influence or modify.