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.