‘‘Progress,’’ Hopelessness, France, And Flaubert

Karl Löwith, Meaning In History: Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1949), 96-97:

It took, however, only a few generations among the most enlightened nations to realize the hopelessness of all scientific progress toward a civilized barbarism. In the midst of frantic progress by means of scientific inventions in the middle of the nineteenth century, a mood of aimlessness and despair cast its first shadow upon Europe’s most advanced minds; for the very progress seemed to proceed toward nothingness. In France this nihilism found its most sophisticated expression in the writings of Flaubert and Baudelaire. Having exposed, in the Temptation of St. Anthony, all sorts of current beliefs and superstitions, Flaubert set about to disentangle and analyze the chaos of our modern, scientific culture. He made a list of human follies, intended as an ironical glorification of all that had passed for truth. The result of these absurd studies was the novel Bouvard et Pécuchet—the story of two Philistines, sincerely striving for their higher education; good-natured men of sense, who had been office clerks. In their happily acquired country seat they ramble through the entire maze of piled-up knowledge, from horticulture, chemistry, and medicine to history, archeology, politics, pedagogy, and philosophy—only to return to their copying, now making extracts from the books which they had perused in vain. The whole work leads to the conclusion that our entire scientific education is inane. Doctrines of age-long standing are expounded and developed in a few lines, then they are disposed of by other doctrines which are arraigned against them and then destroyed in turn with equal precision and passion. Page after page, line after line, some new kind of knowledge turns up; but at once another appears to knock the first one down, and then it, too, topples over, hit by a third. At the end of the unfinished sketch, Pécuchet draws a gloomy picture, Bouvard a rosy one, of the future of European mankind. According to the one, the end of the debased human race, sunk into general depravity, approaches. There are three alternative possibilities: (1) radicalism severs every tie with the past, entailing inhuman despotism; (2) if theistic absolutism is victorious, liberalism, with which mankind has been imbued since the French Revolution, will perish, and a revolutionary change will take place; (3) if the convulsions of 1789 continue, their waves will carry us away, and there will no longer be ideals or religion or morality: “America will conquer the world.” According to the second picture, Europe will be rejuvenated with the aid of Asia, and there will develop undreamed-of techniques of communication, U-boats, and balloons; new sciences will be born, enabling man to place the powers of the universe at the service of civilization and, when the earth is exhausted, to emigrate to other stars. Together with human wants, evil will cease, and philosophy will become religion.

The Dark Ages?

Auguste Comte, The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte, tr. Harriet Martineau (London: George Bell and Sons, 1896), vol. III., 123:

We shall see that the entire spiritual movement of modern times is referrible to that memorable season in human history, which Protestantism is pleased to call the dark ages. . . . It is an exaggeration also to attribute to the Germanic invasions the retardation of intellectual development during the Middle Ages; for the decline was taking place for centuries before the invasions were of any engrossing importance. . . .

Full Of Divinity

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, The System of Economic Contradictions; or, The Philosophy of Poverty, tr. Benjamin R. Tucker (1888), vol. I., Intro., pt. III.:

I need the hypothesis of God to justify my style.

In my ignorance of everything regarding God, the world, the soul, and destiny; forced to proceed like the materialist, — that is, by observation and experience, — and to conclude in the language of the believer, because there is no other; not knowing whether my formulas, theological in spite of me, would be taken literally or figuratively; in this perpetual contemplation of God, man, and things, obliged to submit to the synonymy of all the terms included in the three categories of thought, speech, and action, but wishing to affirm nothing on either one side or the other, — rigorous logic demanded that I should suppose, no more, no less, this unknown that is called God. We are full of Divinity, Jovis omnia plena; our monuments, our traditions, our laws, our ideas, our languages, and our sciences, all are infected by this indelible superstition outside of which we can neither speak nor act, and without which we do not even think.

God's Closet: Solitude

William Rounseville Alger, The Solitudes of Nature and of Man; or, The Loneliness of Human Life (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1867), 146-148:

To be ignorant of yourself, uneasy and exacting, is to be repulsive no less than miserable. Who would enjoy the world, must move through it detached from it, coming into it from a superior position. He must not be weakly dependent on his fellows, but say to himself, Cannot God, the Universe and I, make my life a rich, self-sufficing thing here in time? To command love we must not be dependent on it; a tragical truth for those who have most need of love. The way to self-sufficingness is the way to public conquest. Happy in the closet is winsome in the crowd. The king of solitude is also the king of society. The reverse, however, is not so true. Many an applauded domineerer of the forum, many a brilliant enchantress of the assembly, when alone, is gnawed by insatiable passions, groans restlessly under the recoil of disappointment. William von Humboldt wrote to his friend Charlotte, «There are few who understand the value of solitude, and how many advantages it offers, especially to women, who are more apt than men to wreck themselves on petty disquietudes.» Self-inspection, self-purification, self-subdual to the conditions of noble being and experience, these form the fitting occupation of our solitary hours. Yet, self must not be the conspicuous object of our contemplation, but great truths and sentiments, moral and religious principles, nature, humanity, and God, the perennial fountains of fresh and pure life. He who follows this course is best qualified to read and interpret the secrets of other souls. He is likewise best fitted to master the world, in the only sense in which a good man will wish to master it. There is no more efficacious mode of observing mankind, than as they are seen from the loop-holes of retreat, and mirrored in our own consciousness. In relation to what is deep and holy, as compared with each other, society is a concealer, solitude a revealer: much, hidden from us in that, is shown to us in this. Amidst a festival the moonlight streams on the wall; but it is unnoticed while the lamps blaze, and the guests crowd and chatter. But when the gossipers go, and the lights are put out then, unveiled of the glare and noise, that silvery illumination from heaven grows visible, and the lonely master of the mansion becomes conscious of the visionary companionship of another world. Solitude is God's closet. It is the sacred auditorium of the secrets of the spiritual world. In this whispering-gallery without walls, tender and reverential spirits are fond of hearkening for those occult tones, divine soliloquies, too deep within or too faintly far ever anywhere else to suffer their shy meanings to be caught. Given a suffciently sensitive intelligence to apprehend the revelations, and every moment of time is surcharged with expressiveness, every spot of space babbles ineffable truths. Silence itself is the conversation of God. We know that in the deepest apparent stillness sounds will betray themselves to those who have finer sense and pay keener attention than ordinary. On the Alps, when everything seems so deathly quiet in the darkness, place your ear at the surface of the ice, and you may catch the tinkle of rivulets running all through the night in the veins and hollows of the frozen hills. Has not the soul too its buried streams of feeling whose movements only the most absorbed listening, in the most hushed moments, can distinguish?

What is it to subject a thing, save to extricate yourself from it, rise apart, and command it from a higher position? To overcome the world it is indispensable first to overlook the world from some private vantage-ground quietly aloof. Would you lift the soul above the petty passions that pester and ravage it, and survey the prizes, the ills, and the frets of ordinary life in their proper perspective of littleness? Accustom yourself to go forth at night, alone, and study the landscape of immensity; gaze up where eternity unveils her starry face and looks down forever without a word. These exercises, their lessons truly learned, so far from making us hate the society of our fellow-creatures, or foolishly suffer from its annoyances, will fit us wisely to enjoy its blessings; be masters of its honors, not victims of its penalties. If to be alone breeds in us a sullen taciturnity, it is proof that we are already bad characters. The more a misanthrope is dissociated from men, the more he loathes them; the longer a pure and loving soul is kept from them, the intenser is his longing to be united with them. None are so bitter and merciless, so abounding in sneers and sarcasms about society and its occupants, as those most thoroughly familiarized and hardened in its routine.

Realms Of Peace And Love

From Georg Friedrich Händel's Jephtha, verses (libretto) by Rev. Thomas Morell:

        In gentle murmurs will I mourn,
        as mourns the mate‐forsaken dove:
        And sighing wish thy dear return
        to liberty and lasting love. [...]

        the sight of thee, my love,
        drives darkness and despair.
        Again I live; in thy sweet smiles I live,
        as in thy father’s ever‐watchful care
        our wretched nation feels new life, new joy.
        O haste, and make my happiness complete! [...]

        Dull delay, in piercing anguish,
        bids thy faithful lover languish.
        While he pants for bliss in vain.
        Oh! With gentle smiles relieve me;
        let no more false hope deceive me,
        nor vain fears inflict a pain. [...]

        How dark, O Lord, are thy decrees!
        All hid from mortal sight!
        All our joys to sorrow turning,
        and our triumphs into mourning,
        as the night succeeds the day;
        no certain bliss, no solid peace,
        we mortals know on earth below.
        Yet on this maxim still obey:
        whatever is, is right.

        Farewell, ye limpid springs and floods,
        ye flow'ry meads and leafy woods;
        farewell, thou busy world, where reign
        short hours or joy, and years of pain.
        Brighter scenes I seek above,
        in the realms of peace and love.

Conversation With The Dead

Letter from Alexander Pope to Mr. Gay, October 1, 1730:

 

I AM something like the sun at this season, withdrawing from the world, but meaning it mighty well, and resolving to shine whenever I can again. But I fear the clouds of a long winter will overcome me to such a degree, that any body will take a farthing candle for a better guide, and more serviceable company. My friends may remember my brighter days, but will think (like the Irish-man) that the moon is a better thing when once I am gone. I do not say this with any allusion to my poetical capacity as a son of Apollo, but in my companionable one, (if you will suffer me to use a phrase of the Earl of Clarendon's,) for I shall see or be seen of few of you this winter. I am grown too faint to do any good, or to give any pleasure. I not only, as Dryden finely says, feel my notes decay as a poet, but feel my spirits flag as a companion, and shall return again to where I first began, my books. I have been putting my library in order, and enlarging the chimney in it, with equal intention to warm my mind and body, if I can, to some life. A friend (a woman friend, God help me!) with whom I have spent three or four hours a day these fifteen years, advised me to pass more time in my studies: I reflected, she must have found some reason for this admonition, and concluded she would complete all her kindnesses to me by returning me to the employment I am fittest for; conversation with the dead, the old, and the worm-eaten.

 

Desolating Loss

Herman Hooker, Uses of Adversity, and the Provisions of Consolation (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1850), 105-7, 109-10:

We had a friend loved and lovely. He had genius and learning. He had all qualities, great and small, blending in a most attractive whole—a character as much to be loved as admired, as truly gentle as it was great, and so combining opposite excellences, that each was beautified by the other. Between him and her who survives him there was a reciprocity of taste and sympathy—a living in each other, so that her thoughts seemed but the pictures of his—her mind but a glass that showed the very beauty that looked into it, or rather became itself that beauty—dying in his dying she did not all die. Her love, the heart's animation, lifted her up; her sense of loss was merged for a while in her love and confidence of his good estate. In strong and trusting thoughts of him as a happy spirit, and of God as his and her portion, she rested as in a cloud. A falling from this elevation was truly a coming to one's self from God—a leaving of heaven for earth. Let her tell the rest in words as beautiful as they are true to nature: «My desolating loss I realise more and more. For many weeks his peaceful and triumphant departure left such an elevating influence on my mind, that I could only think of him as a pure and happy spirit. But now my feelings have become more selfish, and I long for the period to arrive, when I may lie down by his side, and be reunited in a nobler and more enduring union than even that which was ours here.» [...]

If there is anything about us which good hearts will reverence, it is our grief on the loss of those we love. It is a condition in which we seem to be smitten by a Divine hand, and thus made sacred. It is a grief, too, which greatly enriches the heart, when rightly borne. There may be no rebellion of the will, the sweetest sentiments towards God and our fellow-beings may be deepened, and still the desolation caused in the treasured sympathies and hopes of the heart gives a new colour to the entire scene of life. The dear affections which grew out of the consanguinities and connexions of life, next to those we owe to God, are the most sacred of our being; and if the hopes and revelations of a future state did not come to our aid, our grief would be immoderate and inconsolable, when these relations are broken by death.

Without You

A sonnet, Nature, by Luís de Camões (1524-1580), translated by William Baer (Selected Sonnets, University of Chicago Press, 2005, 40-41):

            The beauty of the sweet, fresh mountains here,
            the shade of the green chestnut trees, the pace
            of all the gently crawling streams, this place
            where all one's sadness seems to disappear.

            The hoarse sounds of the sea, the lands that lie
            below, the sun hiding near the hills, the last
            of the lingering cattle slowly moving past,
            the clouds still gently warring in the sky.

            But, finally, all these beauties of nature, pouring
            forth their various splendors, only create
            harsh fresh wounds since you're not here with me.

            Without you, everything is disgusting, and boring;
            without you, I feel, even within this great
            natural happiness, the greatest possible misery.

            A fermosura desta fresca serra
            e a sombra dos verdes castanheiros,
            o manso caminhar destes ribeiros,
            donde toda a tristeza se desterra;

            o rouco som do mar, a estranha terra,
            o esconder do sol pelos outeiros,
            o recolher dos gados derradeiros,
            das nuvens pelo ar a branda guerra;

            enfim, tudo o que a rara natureza
            com tanta variedade nos of'rece,
            me está, se não te vejo, magoando.

            Sem ti, tudo me enoja e me avorrece;
            sem ti, perpetuamente estou passando,
            nas mores alegrias, mór tristeza.

The Dilettante VS. The Artist Of Real Genius

Friedrich Schiller, Æsthetical and Philosophical Essays, ed. Nathan Haskell Dole (Boston: F. A. Niccolls & Company, 1902), 251-253:

I believe this to be the test to distinguish the mere dilettante from the artist of real genius. The seductive charm exercised by the sublime and the beautiful, the fire which they kindle in the young imagination, the apparent ease with which they place the senses under an illusion, have often persuaded inexperienced minds to take in hand the palette or the harp, and to transform into figures or to pour out in melody what they felt living in their heart. Misty ideas circulate in their heads, like a world in formation, and make them believe that they are inspired. They take obscurity for depth, savage vehemence for strength, the undetermined for the infinite, what has not senses for the super-sensuous. And how they revel in these creations of their brain! But the judgment of the connoisseur does not confirm this testimony of an excited self-love. With his pitiless criticism he dissipates all the prestige of the imagination and of its dreams, and carrying the torch before these novices he leads them into the mysterious depths of science and life, where, far from profane eyes, the source of all true beauty flows ever towards him who is initiated. If now a true genius slumbers in the young aspirant, no doubt his modesty will at first receive a shock; but soon the consciousness of real talent will embolden him for the trial. If nature has endowed him with gifts for plastic art, he will study the structure of man with the scalpel of the anatomist; he will descend into the lowest depths to be true in representing surfaces, and he will question the whole race in order to be just to the individual. If he is born to be a poet, he examines humanity in his own heart to understand the infinite variety of scenes in which it acts on the vast theatre of the world. He subjects imagination and its exuberant fruitfulness to the discipline of taste, and charges the understanding to mark out in its cool wisdom the banks that should confine the raging waters of inspiration. He knows full well that the great is only formed of the little—from the imperceptible. He piles up, grain by grain, the materials of the wonderful structure, which, suddenly disclosed to our eyes, produces a startling effect and turns our head. But if nature has only intended him for a dilettante, difficulties damp his impotent zeal, and one of two things happens: either he abandons, if he is modest, that to which he was diverted by a mistaken notion of his vocation; or, if he has no modesty, he brings back the ideal to the narrow limits of his faculties, for want of being able to enlarge his faculties to the vast proportions of the ideal. Thus the true genius of the artist will be always recognized by this sign—that when most enthusiastic for the whole, he preserves a coolness, a patience defying all obstacles, as regards details. Moreover, in order not to do any injury to perfection, he would rather renounce the enjoyment given by the completion. For the simple amateur, it is the difficulty of means that disgusts him and turns him from his aim; his dreams would be to have no more trouble in producing than he had in conception and intuition.

First Affections

William Wordsworth, Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood:

         [...] High instincts before which our mortal Nature
                Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised:
                      But for those first affections,
                      Those shadowy recollections,
                Which, be they what they may
                Are yet the fountain-light of all our day,
                Are yet a master-light of all our seeing;
                    Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make
                Our noisy years seem moments in the being
                Of the eternal Silence: truths that wake,
                    To perish never;
                Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavour,
                      Nor Man nor Boy,
                Nor all that is at enmity with joy,
                Can utterly abolish or destroy! [...]
                    Though nothing can bring back the hour
                Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;
                      We will grieve not, rather find
                      Strength in what remains behind;
                      In the primal sympathy
                      Which having been must ever be;
                      In the soothing thoughts that spring
                      Out of human suffering;
                      In the faith that looks through death, [...]
                Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
                Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
                To me the meanest flower that blows can give
                Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

So Stainless And So Calm

George W. Bethune (1805-1862), Hymn to Night:

                    YES! bear them to their rest;
                The rosy babe, tired with the glare of day,
                The prattler, fallen asleep e’en in his play;
                    Clasp them to thy soft breast,
                                        O night!
                Bless them in dreams with a deep, hushed delight.

                    Yet must they wake again,
                Wake soon to all the bitterness of life,
                The pang of sorrow, the temptation strife,
                    Aye to the conscience pain:
                                        O night!
                Canst thou not take with them a longer flight?

                    Canst thou not bear them far
                E’en now, all innocent, before they know
                The taint of sin, its consequence of woe,
                    The world’s distracting jar,
                                        O night!
                To some ethereal, holier, happier height?

                    Canst thou not bear them up
                Through starlit skies, far from this planet dim
                And sorrowful, e’en while they sleep, to Him
                    Who drank for us the cup,
                                        O night!
                The cup of wrath, for hearts in faith contrite?

                    To Him, for them who slept
                A babe all holy on his mother’s knee,
                And from that hour to cross-crowned Calvary,
                    In all our sorrow wept,
                                        O night!
                That on our souls might dawn Heaven’s cheering light.

                    Go, lay their little heads
                Close to that human heart, with love divine
                Deep-breathing, while his arms immortal twine
                    Around them, as he sheds,
                                        O night!
                On them a brother’s grace of God’s own boundless might.

                    Let them immortal wake
                Among the deathless flowers of Paradise,
                Where angel songs of welcome with surprise
                    This their last sleep may break,
                                        O night!
                And to celestial joy their kindred souls invite.

                    There can come no sorrow;
                The brow shall know no shade, the eye no tears,
                Forever young, through heaven’s eternal years
                    In one unfading morrow,
                                        O night!
                Nor sin nor age nor pain their cherub beauty blight.

                    Would we could sleep as they,
                So stainless and so calm,—at rest with Thee,—
                And only wake in immortality!
                    Bear us with them away,
                                        O night!
                To that ethereal, holier, happier height.

Melancholy Bird

Charlotte Smith, Sonnet III., To A Nightingale:

            Poor melancholy bird—that all night long
            Tell’st to the Moon thy tale of tender woe;
            From what sad cause can such sweet sorrow flow,
            And whence this mournful melody of song?
            Thy poet’s musing fancy would translate
            What mean the sounds that swell thy little breast,
            When still at dewy eve thou leav’st thy nest,
            Thus to the listening night to sing thy fate!
            Pale Sorrow’s victims wert thou once among,
            Tho’ now releas’d in woodlands wild to rove?
            Say—hast thou felt from friends some cruel wrong,
            Or died’st thou—martyr of disastrous love?
            Ah! songstress sad! that such my lot might be,
            To sigh and sing at liberty—like thee!

In Yourself Encased

Fyodor Tyutchev, Silentium, tr. Anatoly Liberman (in his On the Heights of Creation):

                Speak not, lie deep, do not reveal
                Things that you wish or things you feel;
                Within your soul's protected mine
                Let them ascend and then decline
                Like silent stars in heaven bleak:
                Admire their sheen—but do not speak.

                How can a heart be put in words?
                By others—how can one be heard?
                Will people know what you live by?
                A thought expressed becomes a lie.
                Don't muddy springs that are unique:
                Drink from their depth—but do not speak.

                Live only in yourself encased;
                Your soul contains a world of chaste,
                Mysterious thoughts, which outside noise
                Robs of their magic and destroys;
                The rays of morning make them weak—
                Enjoy their song—but do not speak!

Unseen, Unknown

Alexander Pope, Ode to Solitude:

                Thus let me live, unseen, unknown,
                Thus unlamented let me die,
                Steal from the world, and not a stone
                Tell where I lie.

Only True Glory

Giacomo Leopardi, Letters, letter to Pietro Giordani (Recanati, 21st November 1817; tr. Prue Shaw):

. . . love glory: but, first, only true glory: and so not only do not accept undeserved (let alone insincere) praise, but reject it – not only do not love it, but loathe it; second, be quite sure that in this age you will be praised by very few people for doing good, and try always to please these few, leaving other people to please the crowd and be smothered in praise; third, pay no more attention to criticism, malicious talk, insults, ridicule, or unjust persecution than you do to things which do not exist; when it is justified, be distressed only at having deserved it; fourth, do not envy men greater and more famous than you, but respect and praise them as best you can, and love them sincerely and strongly besides. If these conditions are observed, the love of glory does not seem dangerous to me.

The Lonely Road

Lermontov, Alone I Pass Along the Lonely Road (tr. John Pollen):

            Alone I pass along the lonely road,

            Thro’ gathering mist the pebbly pathway gleams;

            The night is still;—the void remembers God,

            And star vibrates to star with speaking beams.

            A wondrous glory moves across the sky;

            Soft sleeps the earth in dove-grey azure light.

            Why aches my heart? Why troubled thus am I?

            What wait I for, what grieve I for, this night?

            No more from life can I expect to gain,

            And for the “has been” it were vain to weep;

            I simply seek repose, release from pain,

            And fain would rest, forgetting all, in sleep.

            But not the sleep which the cold tomb implies;

            But rather would I rest for ages so

            That in my breast the strength of life might rise

            In gentle wavelets, heaving to and fro.

            The while that in my ears by night and day,

            A sweet voice sang of ceaseless love to me;

            And o’er me leaned, greening in every spray

            And faintly whispering, my dark cedar tree.

Ancient Way Of Philosophising

Georginna Anne Hinnebusch, A Philosophy to Live by: Goethe's Art of Living in the Spirit of the Ancients, (The University of Chicago Press, 2018), Intro., p. 1: 

For the ancients, a man was deemed a philosopher by virtue of electing to lead a life conforming to specific values daily exhibited in his ordinary conduct. The mark of a philosophical pedigree was not the espousal of a particular mode of thinking but the evincement of an exemplary way of being. That this characterization of living rather than thinking philosophically has become obsolete, proving alien to prevailing intuitions about the philosopher's defining features, attests to modernity's fateful partitioning of thinker and liver into two mutually exclusive forms of life. The tendency to confine inquiry about a philosopher almost exclusively to his mode of thought, whether through his extant works, his exegesis of authoritative texts, or the re-appropriation of his methods by later philosophical movements, is symptomatic of the marginalization of the ancient conception of philosophy as a fundamental way of life in which the philosopher's lived existence rather than his written works served as an ideal standard for emulation.

History, Autobiography, Self-Reflection, And Fantasia

Wilhelm Dilthey, The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences (Selected Works, Volume III), edt. Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi (Princeton University Press 2002), pt. III., sect. 4, Autobiography, p. 222:

Here we approach the roots of all historical comprehension. Autobiography is merely the literary expression of the self-reflection of human beings on their life-course. Such self-reflection re-news itself to some extent in every individual. It is always there and expresses itself in ever new forms. It is found in the verses of Solon as well as in the introspection of Stoic philosophers, in the meditations of the saints and in the modern philosophy of life. It alone makes historical insight possible. The power and scope of our own lives and the energy with which we reflect on them pro- vide the basis of historical vision. Self-reflection alone enables us to give a second life to the bloodless shadow of the past. In combination with a boundless need to surrender to, and lose oneself in, the existence of others, it makes the great historian.

 

But, before this which Dilthey writes, there was the fantasia of Vico, the very capacity he found undervalued under the hands of the narrow-minded philosophes. I quote Isaiah Berlin in: Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas, edt. Henry Hardy, intro. Roger Hausheer (Princeton University Press, 2013, 2nd edition), The Divorce between the Sciences and the Humanities, p. 135

. . . fantasia–Vico’s term for imaginative insight, which he accuses the French theorists of undervaluing. This is the capacity for conceiving more than one way of categorising reality, like the ability to understand what it is to be an artist, a revolutionary, a traitor, to know what it is to be poor, to wield authority, to be a child, a prisoner, a barbarian. Without some ability to get into the skin of others, the human condition, history, what characterises one period or culture as against others, cannot be understood. The successive patterns of civilisation differ from other temporal processes–say, geological–by the fact that it is men–ourselves–who play a crucial part in creating them. This lies at the heart of the art or science of attribution: to tell what goes with one form of life and not with another cannot be achieved solely by inductive methods.

 

From The Barbarism Of The Savage To The Barbarism Of Decay

Giambattista Vico, The New Science, tr. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (New York: Cornell University Press, 1948), Conclusion of the Work, §1106, p. 381:

For such peoples, like so many beasts, have fallen into the custom of each man thinking only of his own private interests and have reached the extreme of delicacy, or better of pride, in which like wild animals they bristle and lash out at the slightest displeasure. Thus in the midst of their greatest festivities, though physically thronging together, they live like wild beasts in a deep solitude of spirit and will, scarcely any two being able to agree since each follows his own pleasure or caprice. By reason of all this, providence decrees that, through obstinate factions and desperate civil wars, they shall turn their cities into forests and the forests into dens and lairs of men. In this way, through long centuries of barbarism, rust will consume the misbegotten subtleties of malicious wits, that have turned them into beasts made more inhuman by the barbarism of reflection than the first men had been made by the barbarism of sense. For the latter displayed a generous savagery, against which one could defend oneself or take flight or be on one's guard; but the former, with a base savagery, under soft words and embraces, plots against the life and fortune of friends and intimates.

To Philosophise

Immanuel Kant, Introduction to Logic, tr. Thomas Kingsmill Abbott (London, 1885), p. 16:

Two things, chiefly, are required in a philosopher—1. Cultivation of talents and of skill, so as to use them for various ends. 2. Readiness in the use of all means to any ends that may be chosen. Both must be united; for without knowledge one can never become a philosopher; yet never will knowledge alone constitute a philosopher, unless there is added a fitting combination of all his knowledge and skill into unity, and an insight into the harmony of the same with the highest ends of human reason. 

No one can call himself a philosopher who cannot philosophize. Now, it is only by practice and independent use of one’s reason that one can learn to philosophize. 

How, indeed, can Philosophy be learned? Every philosophical thinker builds his own work on the ruins, so to speak, of another; but nothing has ever been built that could be permanent in all its parts. It is, therefore, impossible to learn philosophy, even for this reason, that it does not yet exist. But even supposing that there were a philosophy actually existing, yet no one who learned it could say of himself that he was a philosopher, for his knowledge of it would still be only subjectively historical. [...]

He who desires to learn to philosophize must, on the contrary, regard all systems of philosophy only as a history of the use of reason, and as objects for the exercise of his philosophical ability.

The true philosopher, therefore, must, as an independent thinker, make a free and independent, not a slavishly imitative, use of his reason. Nor must it be dialectical, that is, a use which aims only at giving to his knowledge an appearance of truth and wisdom. This is the business of the mere Sophist; but thoroughly inconsistent with the dignity of the philosopher, as one who knows and teaches Wisdom.