Utilitarian Versus Humanist, And Pessimism

Frederick C. Beiser, Philosophy of Life: German Lebensphilosophie 1870-1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023), Ch. III., The Battle Against Pessimism, sect. 3, pp. 68-9:

This rejection of utilitarianism was decisive for Dilthey’s attitude toward pessimism, because he thought that the pessimist’s bleak assessment of the value of life was rooted in his utilitarian ethics. Indeed, in sections 57–8 of the fourth part of Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, Schopenhauer finds life not worth living because it involves so much suffering, the preponderance of pain over pleasure. All human existence, Schopenhauer argues, falls between willing and its satisfaction. The willing is suffering because we feel all too keenly a deficiency, the lack of something that we need; and the satisfaction, though it happens, is very fleeting, because new needs arise quickly and constantly. If we satisfy our needs too quickly, then we become bored, the mere absence of activity makes our existence a burden; but if we cannot satisfy them quickly, then we feel prolonged discomfort and distress. Schopenhauer further diminishes the prospects of happiness in life by insisting that pleasure is only negative in value: it is only the absence of pain. With arguments like these in mind, Schopenhauer concludes in section 59 that life is essentially suffering. Each person at the end of his life, he maintains, will not want to live it again.

Like many critics of pessimism, Dilthey could not accept these arguments because of the utilitarianism behind them. They all presupposed that the main goal of life is happiness, which is defined in terms of pleasure. But Dilthey believed that a person’s life could still be worth living even if he or she were unhappy, even if their life involved more pain than pleasure. Dilthey was an adherent of that humanist tradition of ethics which sees the goal of life not as happiness but as the development of character, the self-realization of personality. It was indifferent whether this process ended in more pleasure than pain; it would indeed often involve suffering, which was crucial to personal growth. The main champions of this tradition were Schiller, Schleiermacher, Herder, Wieland, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and, last but not least, Goethe.

Dilthey’s portrait of Goethe in Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung gives a very different rationale for life from that envisioned by the pessimists. Life is not a tale of woe and suffering but a story of self-creation. There is indeed some suffering involved in that story, but it has its meaning and purpose in being part of a broader narrative of self-fulfillment. Of course, that narrative might be cut short by accident or fate; but what matters is that we have found meaning in the narrative as long as it has lasted.

Things That Characterise The Philosopher

Friedrich Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, 3rd Essay, sect. 8 (Horace B. Samuel):

But a spirit who is sure of himself speaks softly; he seeks secrecy, he lets himself be awaited. 

A philosopher . . . shuns every glaring light: therefore he shuns his time and its «daylight.» Therein he is as a shadow; the deeper sinks the sun, the greater grows the shadow. As for his humility, he endures, as he endures darkness, a certain dependence and obscurity: further, he is afraid of the shock of lightning, he shudders at the insecurity of a tree which is too isolated and too exposed, on which every storm vents its temper, every temper its storm. His «maternal» instinct, his secret love for that which grows in him, guides him into states where he is relieved from the necessity of taking care of himself, in the same way in which the «mother» instinct in woman has thoroughly maintained up to the present woman's dependent position. After all, they demand little enough, do these philosophers, their favourite motto is, «He who possesses is possessed.» All this is not, as I must say again and again, to be attributed to a virtue, to a meritorious wish for moderation and simplicity; but because their supreme lord so demands of them, demands wisely and inexorably; their lord who is eager only for one thing, for which alone he musters, and for which alone he hoards everything—time, strength, love, interest. 

This kind of man likes not to be disturbed by enmity, he likes not to be disturbed by friendship, it is a type which forgets or despises easily. It strikes him as bad form to play the martyr, «to suffer for truth»—he leaves all that to the ambitious and to the stage-heroes of the intellect, and to all those, in fact, who have time enough for such luxuries (they themselves, the philosophers, have something to do for truth). They make a sparing use of big words; they are said to be adverse to the word «truth» itself: it has a «high falutin'» ring.

The Love Of The Country And Of Nature

William Hazlitt, Letures on the English Poets and the English Comic Writers (London: Geroge Bell and Sons, 1884), Lectures on the English Poets, On Writers of Pastoral, pp. 132-137:

    The love of the country has been sung by poets, and echoed by philosophers; but the first have not attempted, and the last have been greatly puzzled to account for it. I do not know that any one has ever explained, satisfactorily, the true source of this feeling, or of that soothing emotion which the sight of the country, or a lively description of rural objects hardly ever fails to infuse into the mind. Some have ascribed this feeling to the natural beauty of the objects themselves; others to the freedom from care, the silence and tranquillity which scenes of retirement afford; others to the healthy and innocent employments of a country life; others to the simplicity of country manners, and others to a variety of different causes; but none to the right one. All these, indeed, have their effect; but there is another principal one which has not been touched upon, or only slightly glanced at. I will not, however, imitate Mr. Horne Tooke, who after enumerating seventeen different definitions of the verb, and laughing at them all as deficient and nugatory, at the end of two quarto volumes does not tell us what the verb really is, and has left posterity to pluck out «the heart of his mystery.» I will say at once what it is that distinguishes this interest from others, and that is its abstractedness. The interest we feel in human nature is exclusive, and confined to the individual; the interest we feel in external nature is common, and transferable from one object to all others of the same class. Thus:

    Rousseau in his Confessions relates, that when he took possession of his room at Annecy, he found that he could see "a little spot of green" from his window, which endeared his situation the more to him, because, he says, it was the first time he had had this object constantly before him since he left Boissy, the place where he was at school when a child. Some such feeling as that here described will be found lurking at the bottom of all our attachments of this sort. Were it not for the recollections habitually associated with them, natural objects could not interest the mind in the manner they do. No doubt, the sky is beautiful, the clouds sail majestically along its bosom; the sun is cheering; there is something exquisitely graceful in the manner in which a plant or tree puts forth its branches; the motion with which they bend and tremble in the evening breeze is soft and lovely; there is music in the babbling of a brook; the view from the top of a mountain is full of grandeur; nor can we behold the ocean with indifference. Or, as the Minstrel sweetly sings,

         «Oh, how canst thou renounce the boundless store
        Of charms which Nature to her votary yields!
         The warbling woodland, the resounding shore,
        The pomp of groves, and garniture of fields;
         All that the genial ray of morning gilds,
        And all that echoes to the song of even,
         All that the mountain's sheltering bosom shields,
        And all the dread magnificence of heaven,
         Oh, how canst thou renounce, and hope to be forgiven!»

It is not, however, the beautiful and magnificent alone that we admire in Nature; the most insignificant and rudest objects are often found connected with the strongest emotions; we become attached to the most common and familiar images, as to the face of a friend whom we have long known, and from whom we have received many benefits. It is because natural objects have been associated with the sports of our childhood, with air and exercise, with our feelings in solitude, when the mind takes the strongest hold of things, and clings with the fondest interest to whatever strikes its attention; with change of place, the pursuit of new scenes, and thoughts of distant friends; it is because they have surrounded us in almost all situations, in joy and in sorrow, in pleasure and in pain; because they have been one chief source and nourishment of our feelings, and a part of our being, that we love them as we do ourselves.

 

There is, generally speaking, the same foundation for our love of Nature as for all our habitual attachments, namely, association of ideas. But this is not all. That which distinguishes this attachment from others is the transferable nature of our feelings with respect to physical objects; the associations connected with any one object extending to the whole class. Our having been attached to any particular person does not make us feel the same attachment to the next person we may chance to meet; but, if we have once associated strong feelings of delight with the objects of natural scenery, the tie becomes indissoluble, and we shall ever after feel the same attachment to other objects of the same sort. I remember when I was abroad, the trees, and grass, and wet leaves, rustling in the walks of the Thuilleries, seemed to be as much English, to be as much the same trees and grass, that I had always been used to, as the sun shining over my head was the same sun which I saw in England; the faces only were foreign to me. Whence comes this difference? It arises from our always imperceptibly connecting the idea of the individual with man, and only the idea of the class with natural objects. In the one case, the external appearance or physical structure is the least thing to be attended to; in the other, it is every thing. The springs that move the human form, and make it friendly or adverse to me, lie hid within it. There is an infinity of motives, passions, and ideas, contained in that narrow compass, of which I know nothing, and in which I have no share. Each individual is a world to himself, governed by a thousand contradictory and wayward impulses. I can, therefore, make no inference from one individual to another; nor can my habitual sentiments, with respect to any individual, extend beyond himself to others. A crowd of people presents a disjointed, confused, and unsatisfactory appearance to the eye, because there is nothing to connect the motley assemblage into one continuous or general impression, unless when there is some common object of interest to fix their attention, as in the case of a full pit at the play-house. The same principle will also account for that feeling of littleness, vacuity, and perplexity, which a stranger feels on entering the streets of a populous city. Every individual he meets is a blow to his personal identity. Every new face is a teasing, unanswered riddle. He feels the same wearisome sensation in walking from Oxford Street to Temple Bar, as a person would do who should be compelled to read through the first leaf of all the volumes in a library. But it is otherwise with respect to nature. A flock of sheep is not a contemptible, but a beautiful sight. The greatest number and variety of physical objects do not puzzle the will, or distract the attention, but are massed together under one uniform and harmonious feeling. The heart reposes in greater security on the immensity of Nature's works, «expatiates freely there,» and finds elbow-room and breathing-space. We are always at home with Nature. There is neither hypocrisy, caprice, nor mental reservation in her favours. Our intercourse with her is not liable to accident or change, suspicion or disappointment: she smiles on us still the same. A rose is always sweet, a lily is always beautiful: we do not hate the one, nor envy the other. If we have once enjoyed the cool shade of a tree, and been lulled into a deep repose by the sound of a brook running at its foot, we are sure that wherever we can find a shady stream, we can enjoy the same pleasure again; so that when we imagine these objects, we can easily form a mystic personification of the friendly power that inhabits them, Dryad or Naiad, offering its cool fountain or its tempting shade. Hence the origin of the Grecian mythology. All objects of the same kind being the same, not only in their appearance, but in their practical uses, we habitually confound them together under the same general idea; and whatever fondness we may have conceived for one, is immediately placed to the common account. The most opposite kinds and remote trains of feeling gradually go to enrich the same sentiment; and in our love of nature, there is all the force of individual attachment, combined with the most airy abstraction. It is this circumstance which gives that refinement, expansion, and wild interest, to feelings of this sort, when strongly excited, which every one must have experienced who is a true lover of nature.

It is the same setting sun that we see and remember year after year, through summer and winter, seed-time and harvest. The moon that shines above our heads, or plays through the checquered shade, is the same moon that we used to read of in Mrs. Radcliffe's romances. We see no difference in the trees first covered with leaves in the spring. The dry reeds rustling on the side of a stream—the woods swept by the loud blast—the dark massy foliage of autumn—the grey trunks and naked branches of the trees in winter—the sequestered copse, and wide-extended heath—the glittering sunny showers, and December snows—are still the same, or accompanied with the same thoughts and feelings: there is no object, however trifling or rude, that does not in some mood or other find its way into the heart, as a link in the chain of our living being; and this it is that makes good that saying of the poet—

   «To me the meanest flower that blows can give
       Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.»

Thus nature is a kind of universal home, and every object it presents to us an old acquaintance with unaltered looks; for there is that consent and mutual harmony among all her works, one undivided spirit pervading them throughout, that to him who has well acquainted himself with them, they speak always the same well-known language, striking on the heart, amidst unquiet thoughts and the tumult of the world, like the music of one's native tongue heard in some far-off country.

   «My heart leaps up when I behold
       A rainbow in the sky:
       So was it when my life began,
       So is it now I am a man,
       So shall it be when I grow old and die.
       The child's the father of the man,
       And I would have my years to be
       Linked each to each by natural piety.»

Rarity's Charm

Martial or Marcus Valerius Martialis, The Epigrams of Martial translated into English Prose (London: George Bell and Sons, 1904), bk. IV., Ep. XXIX., To Pudens, p. 190:

The number of my books, dear Pudens, forms an objection to them; the ever-recurring toil fatigues and satiates the reader. Rarity gives a charm: thus early fruits are moat esteemed; thus winter roses obtain a higher price; thus coyness sets off an extravagant mistress; and a door ever open attracts no young suitor. Persius is oftener noticed on account of one book, than the empty Marsus for the whole of his Amazonid. For yourself, when you are reading any one of my little books, imagine it to be the only one; it will then be of more value in your eyes.

          The number of my books does them much wrong,
          The reader's tired and glutted with their throng;
          Scarce things take most, first fruits please those are nice,
          Roses in winter bear the highest price:
          Persius' one book's more celebrated far
          Than Marsus' bulky Amazonian War.
          Reading a book of mine, feign there's no more;
          Thus of my wit thou 'lt make the greater store. (trans. Anon. 1696.)

Retrieving The Divine

Friedrich Hebbel, Diari (Tagebücher), edt. Lorenza Rega, 2009, Diario 1, 23 March, 1835, p. 39 (personal translation from the Italian): 

This notebook must record all the notes of my heart and preserve them faithfully, for my future edification. Man is not an instrument in which all the notes come back in an eternal cycle, even if in the most distinct and singular combinations; the sentiment that is extinguished in his chest vanishes away evermore; the self-same ray of sunshine never yields the same flowers in physical or psychic life. Each hour becomes a closed world that has a large or small beginning, a tedious intermediate part, and a dreaded or longed-for end. And who can help indifferently witnessing the spectacle of thousands of worlds sinking into him, without wanting to at least retrieve the divine, whether it was a joy or a pain, that ran through them? This is my justification for dedicating a few minutes to this journal every day.

Naturalness, Modesty, And Love

Havelovk Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, vol. I., 3rd edt., 1928, The Evolution of Modesty, IV., pp. 83-2:

Dugas goes further, and asserts that the ideals of modesty develop with human development, and forever take on new and finer forms. «There is,» he declares, «a very close relationship between naturalness, or sincerity, and modesty, for in love, naturalness is the ideal attained, and modesty is only the fear of coming short of that ideal. Naturalness is the sign and the test of perfect love. It is the sign of it, for, when love can show itself natural and true, one may conclude that it is purified of its unavowable imperfections or defects, of its alloy of wretched and petty passions, its grossness, its chimerical notions, that it has become strong and healthy and vigorous. It is the ordeal of it, for to show itself natural, to be always true, without shrinking, it must have all the lovable qualities, and have them without seeking, as a second nature. What we call 'natural,' is indeed really acquired; it is the gift of a physical and moral evolution which it is precisely the object of modesty to keep. Modesty is the feeling of the true, that is to say, of the healthy, in love; it long exists as a vision, not yet attained; vague, yet sufficiently clear for all that deviates from it to be repelled as offensive and painful. At first, a remote and seemingly inaccessible ideal, as it comes nearer it grows human and individual, and emerges from the region of dream, ceasing not to be loved as ideal, even when it is possessed as real.

«At first sight, it seems paradoxical to define modesty as an aspiration towards truth in love; it seems, on the contrary, to be an altogether factitious feeling. But to simplify the problem, we have to suppose modesty reduced to its normal functions, disengaged from its superstitions, its variegated customs and prejudices, the true modesty of simple and healthy natures, as far removed from prudery as from immodesty. And what we term the natural, or the true in love, is the singular mingling of two forms of imaginations, wrongly supposed to be incompatible: ideal aspiration and the sense for the realities of life. Thus defined, modesty not only repudiates that cold and dissolving criticism which deprives love of all poetry, and prepares the way for a brutal realism; it also excludes that light and detached imagination which floats above love, the mere idealism of heroic sentiments, which cherishes poetic illusions, and passes, without seeing it, the love that is real and alive. True modesty implies a love not addressed to the heroes of vain romances, but to living people, with their feet on the earth. But on the other hand, modesty is the respect of love; if it is not shocked by its physical necessities, if it accepts physiological and psychological conditions, it also maintains the ideal of those moral proprieties outside of which, for all of us, love cannot be enjoyed. When love is really felt, and not vainly imagined, modesty is the requirement of an ideal of dignity, conceived as the very condition of that love. Separate modesty from love, that is, from love which is not floating in the air, but crystallized around a real person, and its psychological reality, its poignant and tragic character, disappears.» (Dugas, «La Pudeur,» Revue Philosophique, Nov., 1903.) So conceived, modesty becomes a virtue, almost identical with the Roman modestia.

The Idly Read

James Hurnard, Arthur and Helen (found in: James Hurnard: A Memoir, Chiefly Autobiographical, with Selections from his Poems, edt. Louisa B. Hurnard, London, 1883, p. 94):

35        Much had he read, but yet he studied not;
            And what is idly read is soon forgot;
            Still, much he knew; and what he knew was worth
            More than much knowledge which, in nooks of earth,
            Dull schoolmen prize. The wisdom which he drank
40        Was not drawn up from Learning's leaden tank,
            He quenched his thirst at Nature's crystal rills,
            And sipped the dew-drops which the morn distils.
            The song of birds, the wind's majestic roar,
            The solemn fall of billows on the shore.
45        Nature has many tongues with which to teach;
            He knew them all, and comprehended each;
            And when he looked on earth or gazed on high,
            And saw the planets navigate the sky,
            Mind, with her various powers, within him wrought
50        And furnished soon his treasury of thought.
            He saw ideal forms all pure and bright,
            And peopled earth with denizens of light.
            Exalted thus above the mean and base
            He shunned the frigid of the human race.
55        He was not proud, and yet he could despise
            Ignoble minds that never dare to rise.

The Earthy And The Coarse

Friedrich Nietzsche, Unpublished Fragments (Spring 1885-Spring 1886), tr. Adrian Del Caro (Stanford University Press, 2020), §26 [405], p. 237:

The character of Hölderlin and Leopardi: I am heartless enough to laugh about their demise. People don't understand this. Things turn out badly for these ultra-Platonists who always love their naïveté. There must be something earthy and coarse in people: otherwise they perish in a ridiculous way when their theories are constantly contradicted by the simplest facts: e.g., by the fact that a man needs a woman from time to time, just as he needs a decent meal from time to time. . . .

Between Miserable Egotism And Love

Friedrich Schiller, Philosophical Letters, letter IV., Theosophy of Julius, Love and Sacrifice sections (unknown translator. George Bell and Sons: London, 1875, pp. 386-89):

        Was it not this almighty instinct
        That forced our hearts to meet
        In the eternal bond of love?
        Raphael! enraptured, resting on your arm,
        I venture, joyful, the march towards perfection,
        That leadeth to the spiritual sun.

        Happy! happy! I have found thee,
        Have secured thee 'midst millions,
        And of all this multitude thou art mine!
        Let the wild chaos return;
        Let it cast adrift the atoms!
        Forever our hearts fly to meet each other.

        Must I not draw reflections of my ecstasy
        From thy radiant, ardent eyes?
        In thee alone do I wonder at myself.
        The earth in brighter tints appears,
        Heaven itself shines in more glowing light,
        Seen through the soul and action of my friend.

        Sorrow drops the load of tears;
        Soothed, it rests from passion's storms,
        Nursed upon the breast of love.
        Nay, delight grows torment, and seeks
        My Raphael, basking in thy soul,
        Sweetest sepulchre! impatiently.

        If I alone stood in the great All of things,
        Dreamed I of souls in the very rocks,
        And, embracing, I would have kissed them.
        I would have sighed my complaints into the air;
        The chasms would have answered me.
        O fool! sweet sympathy was every joy to me.

Love does not exist between monotonous souls, giving out the same tone; it is found between harmonious souls. With pleasure I find again my feelings in the mirror of yours, but with more ardent longing I devour the higher emotions that are wanting in me. Friendship and love are led by one common rule. The gentle Desdemona loves Othello for the dangers through which he has passed; the manly Othello loves her for the tears that she shed hearing of his troubles. [...]

I fear that the philosophy of our time contradicts this doctrine. Many of our thinking brains have undertaken to drive out by mockery this heavenly instinct from the human soul, to efface the effigy of Deity in the soul, and to dissolve this energy, this noble enthusiasm, in the cold, killing breath of a pusillanimous indifference. Under the slavish influence of their own unworthiness they have entered into terms with self-interest, the dangerous foe of benevolence; they have done this to explain a phenomenon which was too godlike for their narrow hearts. They have spun their comfortless doctrine out of a miserable egotism, and they have made their own limits the measure of the Creator; degenerate slaves decrying freedom amidst the rattle of their own chains. Swift, who exaggerated the follies of men till he covered the whole race with infamy, and wrote at length his own name on the gallows which he had erected for it—even Swift could not inflict such deadly wounds on human nature as these dangerous thinkers, who, laying great claim to penetration, adorn their system with all the specious appearance of art, and strengthen it with all the arguments of self-interest.

I admit freely that I believe in the existence of a disinterested love. I am lost if I do not exist; I give up the Deity, immortality, and virtue. I have no remaining proof of these hopes if I cease to believe in love. A spirit that loves itself alone is an atom giving out a spark in the immeasurable waste of space.

[...]

I grant it is ennobling to the human soul to sacrifice present enjoyment for a future eternal good; it is the noblest degree of egotism; but egotism and love separate humanity into two very unlike races, whose limits are never confounded.

Egotism erects its centre in itself; love places it out of itself in the axis of the universal whole. Love aims at unity, egotism at solitude. Love is the citizen ruler of a flourishing republic, egotism is a despot in a devastated creation. Egotism sows for gratitude, love for the ungrateful. Love gives, egotism lends; and love does this before the throne of judicial truth, indifferent if for the enjoyment of the following moment, or with the view to a martyr's crown—indifferent whether the reward is in this life or in the next.

The 1st Of Ruskin's Childhood's Calamities

John Ruskin, Præterita, ch. II.:

First, that I had nothing to love. 

My parents were—in a sort—visible powers of nature to me, no more loved than the sun and the moon: only I should have been annoyed and puzzled if either of them had gone out; (how much, now, when both are darkened!)—still less did I love God; not that I had any quarrel with Him, or fear of Him; but simply found what people told me was His service, disagreeable; and what people told me was His book, not entertaining. I had no companions to quarrel with, neither; nobody to assist, and nobody to thank. Not a servant was ever allowed to do anything for me, but what it was their duty to do; and why should I have been grateful to the cook for cooking, or the gardener for gardening,—when the one dared not give me a baked potato without asking leave, and the other would not let my ants' nests alone, because they made the walks untidy? The evil consequence of all this was not, however, what might perhaps have been expected, that I grew up selfish or un-affectionate; but that, when affection did come, it came with violence utterly rampant and unmanageable, at least by me, who never before had anything to manage. 

The General Journey Of The Philosopher Without Affectation

Émile Faguet, On Reading Nietzsche, tr. George Raaffalovich (New York, 1918), ch. I., Nietzsche Seeks Himself, pp. 1-2:

Often, if not always, while expressing his ideas, a philosopher merely analyzes his own character. Often, if not always, the philosopher's starting point is his own feelings. Then, gifted with the faculty of putting his feelings into thoughts, because he is a philosopher, he turns his feelings into ideas. Then, gifted with the synthetic faculty, he gathers all his ideas, which are but transformed feelings, into one general idea. Then perhaps, he looks around, perceives everything which, in the domain of ideas, thwarts and hampers his own general idea and criticizes it. His criticism is minute because he is a dialectician. It is bitter and bold because his general idea is at bottom nothing but a personal feeling to which he clings and even a passion which dominates him. Then, in the course of his critical operation, he discovers ideas which confirm his general thought and he welcomes them. His general thought becomes a system. Again, because he is honest, ideas come to him which contradict his system. He does not dismiss them, because he loves ideas for their own sake but he throws them on the margin of his intellect, or at least he does his best more or less to bring them into his own system. Finally, he reaches the conception—which most of the time, he cannot realize nor even embrace—of a system which would exceed his own and could include in its greater breadth all the ideas that have come to him, those that were hostile and those that were dear to him. He conceives a system beyond his own system, a general idea beyond his own general idea. This system he sketches. Of this idea he gets a glimpse. As a rule, especially if he dies young, he remains on the threshold of this Promised Land, which he leaves to others.

Sweet Pains

Henri Bremond, A Literary History of Religious Thought in France: From the Wars of Religion down to our Times, tr. K. L. Montgomery (Macmillan, 1928), vol. I., Devout Humanism, ch. XIV., Towards «Pure Love», pp. 298-99 (with the footnote of the author at p. 299):

The ancients, he [i.e., Charles de Saint-Paul] writes, 

gave Love wings to signify that it elevates and uplifts the spirit above the crouching and servile temper of those coarse souls who are insensible to its influence. His torch . . . shows that it kindles in souls many happy flashes and much excellent knowledge unknown to all who do not know him as he is; the daintiness of wooing instilled by him witnesses that nought is so refining as pure love. Love is represented as young, not because it is rash or to blame for any want of consideration . . . but rather to demonstrate that true and perfect love is immortal. His bow and arrows are typical . . . of the mighty effects of love on the spirits, impressions for which «wounds» is a misnomer . . . (for) they are accompanied with such sweetness of delight and pleasant pains that none who has experienced them but would ever prefer them to the soundness of perfect insensibility.1

1. Tableau de la Madeleine [Tableau de la Magdelaine en l'estat de parfaite amante de Jesus. Où se voient les exercices par lesquels on peut arriver à la gloire d'un semblable estat] (1628), pp. 12-17. This strange monk is moved and ravished by all things. «The organ,» he cries, «this admirable instrument, on which music appears as though upon a triumphal chariot» (p. 47). In another place he describes sucklings at their mothers' breasts. «It happens . . . that quite suddenly the humours (which the milk) sends to their brains cause their little eyes to close, putting them into a sweet languor, during which they do not let go the breast, but remain attached to it without other action than a slow and almost unconscious movement of their lips, with which they imperceptibly mouth the mother's bosom.» (p. 192.) 

Education And Killing Originality

Émile Faguet, The Cult of Incopmetence, tr. Beatrice Barstow (New York, 1914), ch. XI., Attempted Remedies, pp. 185-187:

The precocious development of early talent and originality is the thing which strangely terrifies these examination-maniacs. They have a horror of the man who teaches himself. They have a horror of any one who ventures to think for himself and to enquire for himself at twenty-five years of age. They want, like an old hen, to mother the young mind as long as possible. They will not let it find its own feet, till very late, and till, as the scoffer might well say, its limbs are absolutely atrophied. I do not say that they are wrong. The man who has taught himself is apt to be a vain, conceited fellow who takes pleasure in thinking for himself, and has an absolute delight in despising the thoughts of others. It is, however, no less the fact, that it is among these self-taught men that we find those vigorous spirits who venture boldly beyond the domain of human science and extend its frontier. The question then is which is best, to favour all these troublesome self-taught people in the hope of finding some good ones among them, or by crossing and worrying them to run the risk of destroying the good as well as the bad. I am myself strongly in favour of the first of these alternatives. It is better to let all go their own way, even though pretenders to originality come to grief, a thing that matters very little. Minds that are truly original will develop themselves and find room for the expansion of all their powers.

But here,—take note how the democratic spirit comes in everywhere—the question of numbers is raised. Ten times more numerous, I am told, are the pretenders to originality whom we save from themselves by discipline than the true geniuses whose wings we clip.

I reply that, in matters intellectual, questions of figures do not count. An original spirit strangled is a loss which is not compensated by the rescue of ten fools from worse excesses of folly. An original spirit left free to be himself is worth more than ten fools whose folly is partially restrained.

Nietzsche has well said: «Modern education consists in smothering the exceptional in favour of the normal. It consists in directing the mind away from the exceptional into the channel of the average.» This ought not to be. I do not say that education should do the opposite of all this. Oh no, far from that. It is not the business of education to look for exceptional genius, or to help in its creation. Exceptional genius is born of itself and it has no need of such assistance. But even less is it the business of education to regard the exceptional with terror, and to take every means possible, even the most barbarous and most detailed, to prevent it as long as possible from coming to the light.

Education ought to draw all that it can out of mediocrity, and to respect originality as much as it can. It ought never to attempt to turn mediocrity into originality, nor to reduce originality to the level of mediocrity.

Rerum Fragor

Gur Zak, Petrarch's Humanism and the Care of the Self (Cambridge, 2010), Intro., pp. 1-4:

. . . here was the palace of Evander, there the shrine of Carmentis, here the cave of Cacus, there the nursing she-wolf and the fig tree of Rumina with the more apt surname of Romulus.

Starting thus with the description of the mythical origins of the city, Petrarch then continues his journey in space and time, advancing mostly linearly through the ages of Roman history, from these mythical origins through the glory of the Empire and early Christianity to the time of Constantine. He then concludes this short chronicle, lamenting not only that what is left from the glory of Rome is mere ruins but also that the significance of the ruins is mostly forgotten: “For today who are more ignorant about Roman affairs than the Roman citizens?” Ignorance, he adds, that is in turn complemented by the “flight and exile” (fugam exiliumque) of the many virtues that flourished in bygone times.

Promising to return to this complaint at another time, Petrarch then brings the discussion back to himself and invites Giovanni to recall how they used to stop at the baths of Diocletian, weary of the long excursion, and to enjoy there the “healthy air, the unimpeded view, silence and desired solitude.” Alone at the baths, the noises of the outside world ceased to bother them—“we did not discuss business at all, nor household problems nor public affairs”—and with the “fragments of the ruins” (ruinarum fragmenta) still in front of their eyes they turned their gaze to higher matters, discussing history and moral philosophy, the arts and their authors and principles. . . . 

Mutata sunt omnia—everything is changed—Petrarch declares, including his own talent, experience, and mood. The words he spoke at that perfect moment of solitude are therefore forever lost: time passed, leading him away from the moment of presence he enjoyed at the baths, and has taken with it also the words he used at that time. The description of the ruins of Rome thus becomes a metaphor of Petrarch’s own self: like the glorious city, he himself is subjected to the ravages of time, constantly changing, leaving behind only fragments—scattered memories and words retained in the minds of the two interlocutors that cannot, as he insists, invoke the past in full. The subjection to the passage of time, Petrarch therefore implies, is a subjection to a constant sense of absence and loss.

But time is not the only cause of the poet’s sense of fragmentation and loss. Society has a part in this experience as well: it was the perfect solitude of the baths, detached from the cares of the world, that allowed him to step, as it were, out of time, and freely reflect on higher matters, and it is the “din of business matters” (rerum fragor) that is now impeding his spirit from retrieving the state of mind he then enjoyed. The diachronic fragmentation is thus accompanied in the letter by the synchronic dismemberment imposed by society. As Petrarch declares near the end of the letter, it is only in solitude that he “belongs to himself” (Ibi enim, non alibi, meus sum).

The reference to solitude as the one state in which Petrarch can feel that he fully belongs to himself suggests that the sense of fragmentation and flux in the letter is accompanied by a feeling of exile. Just as Rome is exiled from her own golden age—the time to which the ruins allude—and to which she might return if she would only begin to “know herself,” so Petrarch is exiled from the state of wholeness that he might regain by returning to solitude. The experiences of exile and fragmentation, as this letter exhibits, are intrinsically intertwined in Petrarch’s mind: it is the loss of a mythical state of presence and bliss, according to him, that is responsible for his current sense of disintegration and flux.

Significantly, for Petrarch the return to the safe haven of solitude, to himself, is characterized above all by writing—his ability to write what he truly wishes: “only there and not elsewhere I belong to myself. There lies my pen which at present rebels everywhere I go and refuses my orders, because I am preoccupied with burdensome matters. Thus, while it is constantly busy when I have plenty of leisure, it prefers to have leisure when I have much to do, and almost like a wicked and insolent servant, it seems to convert the fervor of the master into its own desire for rest.” His return from exile to himself, Petrarch therefore implies here, is above all a return to his vocation as a writer

How Things Get Spoiled: Vermoralisierung

Friedrich Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, 2nd essay, §7 (tr. Horace B. Samuel):

. . . it should be shown specifically that, at the time when mankind was not yet ashamed of its cruelty, life in the world was brighter than it is nowadays when there are pessimists. The darkening of the heavens over man has always increased in proportion to the growth of man's shame before man. The tired pessimistic outlook, the mistrust of the riddle of life, the icy negation of disgusted ennui, all those are not the signs of the most evil age of the human race: much rather do they come first to the light of day, as the swamp-flowers, which they are, when the swamp to which they belong, comes into existence—I mean the diseased refinement and moralisation, thanks to which the "animal man" has at last learnt to be ashamed of all his instincts. On the road to angelhood (not to use in this context a harder word) man has developed that dyspeptic stomach and coated tongue, which have made not only the joy and innocence of the animal repulsive to him, but also life itself:—so that sometimes he stands with stopped nostrils before his own self, and, like Pope Innocent the Third, makes a black list of his own horrors («unclean generation, loathsome nutrition when in the maternal body, badness of the matter out of which man develops, awful stench, secretion of saliva, urine, and excrement»).1 Nowadays, when suffering is always trotted out as the first argument against existence, as its most sinister query, it is well to remember the times when men judged on converse principles because they could not dispense with the infliction of suffering, and saw therein a magic of the first order, a veritable bait of seduction to life.

1.  A reference to Cardinal Lotario dei Segni's De Miseria Condicionis Humane (1194-5).

Philosophy: A Rare Plant

Friedrich Nietzsche, Wille zur Macht, §420 (tr. A. M. Ludovici):

I do not wish to convert anybody to philosophy: it is both necessary and perhaps desirable that the philosopher should be a rare plant. Nothing is more repugnant to me than the scholarly praise of philosophy which is to be found in Seneca and Cicero. Philosophy has not much in common with virtue. I trust I may be allowed to say that even the scientific man is a fundamentally different person from the philosopher. What I most desire is, that the genuine notion "philosopher" should not completely perish in Germany. There are so many incomplete creatures in Germany already who would fain conceal their ineptitude beneath such noble names.

Growing Older And Lonelier

Friedrich Nietzsche, a Letter to Herr Ob. Reg. R. Krug, November 16, 1880 (tr. A. Ludovici): 

With what wistful eyes you will look back upon your life to-day. We grow older and therefore lonelier; the love that leaves us is precisely that love which was lavished upon us like an unconscious necessity not owing to our particular qualities, but often in spite of them. The curtain falls on our past when our mother dies; it is then for the first time that our childhood and youth become nothing more than a memory. And then the same process extends; the friends of our youth, our teachers, our ideals of those days, all die, and every day we grow more lonely, and ever colder breezes blow about us. . . .

Alone Am I

Christine de Pisan or Cristina da Pizzano (± 1363 – ± 1431), Ballade XI. (translation found in William A. Nitze's and E. Preston Dargan's book, A History of French Literature, 1922):

        Alone am I, alone I wish to be,
        Alone my sweetest friend hath left me here,
        Alone am I, in my sole company,
        Alone in sorrow bent, and without cheer.
        Alone am I in langurous disgrace,
        Alone far more than wanderer from God's grace,
        Alone, without a friend, the world I face. . . .

        Seulete sui et, seulete vueil estre,
        Seulete m'a mon douz ami laissiée;
        Seulete sui, sanz compaignon ne maistre,
        Seulete sui, dolente et courrouciée,
        Seulete sui, en langueur mesaisiée,
        Seulete sui, olus que nulle esgarée,
        Seulete sui, sanz ami demourée. . . .

The Road Through The Dialogues

Albinus, The Introduction of Albinus to the Dialogues of Plato, tr. George Burges, ch. 8 (found in: The Works of Plato, Bohn's Classical Library, 1908, vol. VI., pp. 319-20):

He then, who is, according to nature, well born, and according to age is in the season for philosophizing, and according to a predilection, for the sake of exercising himself, is proceeding to reasoning, and he, who, according to a habit, has been previously initiated in instruction, and has been drawn aside from political circumstances, will begin from the Alcibiades [of Plato] to be well-turned by the inclination of intellect, and to know of what thing it is needful to make for himself a care, and, as it were by a beautiful pattern, to see who is the philosopher and what is his pursuit, and upon what suppositions his discourse is carried on. (Such a person) must enter upon the Phædo next in order; for in it (Plato) states who is the philosopher, and what is his pursuit; and upon the supposition of the soul being immortal he goes through the discourse relating to it. After this it would be requisite to enter upon the Republic. For, commencing with the earliest instruction, he delineates the whole of education, by making use of which a person would arrive at the possession of virtue. But since it is requisite for us to be versed in the knowledge of things divine, so as to be able, by possessing virtue, to be assimilated to them, we shall enter upon the Timæus; for by entering upon this account relating to Nature, and on the so-called theology, and the arrangement of the Universe, we shall clearly have a recollection of things divine.

. . . For as it is necessary to become a spectator of his own soul and of things divine, and of the gods themselves, and to obtain the most beautiful mind, he must cleanse out the false opinions of his conceptions. For not even have physicians deemed the body capable of enjoying the food brought to it, unless a person shall have previously cast out what was in it in the way of an obstacle. But after the cleansing out, it is requisite to excite and call forth the sentiments, imparted by nature, and to cleanse out these too, and to exhibit them pure, as principles. In addition to this, through the soul being thus previously prepared, it is necessary to introduce into it its peculiar doctrines, according to which it may be perfected; now these relate to physics, and theology, and morality, and statesmanship. . . .

Absolute Self-Abnegation

Oscar Browning, A Short History of Education, edt. W. H. Payne, 1897, p. 55:

Pestalozzi [Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi], on the other hand, was completely and entirely devoted to education. His greatest merit is that he set an example of absolute self-abnegation; that he lived with his pupils, played, starved, and suffered with them; and clung to their minds and hearts with an affectionate sympathy which revealed to him every minute difference of character and disposition.

 

Pestalozzi with the Orphans in Stans, 1879, done by Konrad Grob, Öffentliche Kunstsammlung.