A World Lost

Anthony Mario Ludovici, The Confessions of an Anti-Feminist (Counter-Currents, 2018), edt. John V. Day, My Friends 1:

. . . to those youngsters who may think that for the septuagenarians and octogenarians of today to adopt an attitude of negativism and hostility to the modern world and humanity is unwarranted, if not contemptible, let it be solemnly and emphatically stated that no young person of the present day can ever know what we old Victorians feel about the many staggering changes that have come over the world since we were adolescents like them. They who have been born in a world already loudly humming with the whirl of mechanical transport, punctuated with the deafening detonations of motorcycles; whose skies were already being crossed and criss-crossed by machines travelling faster than sound, and whose peace and enjoyment of life and its former amenities have become more and more and habitually limited and threatened by innovations of all kinds, even in the most rural recesses of the land; whose very freedom of movement and of other activities has become exasperatingly hampered by the teeming hordes of a redundant population, so that every want, from a postage-stamp to a seat in a bus, train, restaurant, theatre or park, can be satisfied, if at all, only after a harassing wait or a bitter contest with competing crowds, especially in towns where every inch of pavement has to be conquered before it can be occupied—they, I say, who have been born in such a world, with all its present political uncertainties, dangers and confusions, cannot imagine how enchanting was our world of 1890, and how desperately we deplore its evanescence. To remember the peace, the freedom of movement, the serenity, stability and, above all, the predictability of English life in the nineties of the nineteenth century; to have known the absence of the perpetual scrimmage which now rages along every street, in every railway station and at every holiday resort in the land; even to see what has happened to the South Downs since we first trod their resilient turf seventy years ago, is to appreciate what the young of today have lost and are doomed to lose ever more and more irretrievably.

. . . I should never be surprised if it were eventually discovered that the increasing incidence in recent years of suicide, crimes of violence and even of homicide has been due in large measure to the occult hatred and contempt for life and humanity which conditions in our overcrowded urban centres necessarily generate.

Weariness Of The World

Robert Alfred Vaughan, Hours with the Mystics: A Contribution to the History of Religious Opinion, two volumes in one, vol. 1, 6th edt. (London, 1893), ch. IV., p. 30:

[Speaks Gower] . . . Go out into the woods and valleys, when your heart is rather harassed than bruised, and when you suffer from vexation more than grief. Then the trees all hold out their arms to you to relieve you of the burthen of your heavy thoughts; and the streams under the trees glance at you as they run by, and will carry away your trouble along with the fallen leaves; and the sweet-breathing air will draw it off together with the silver multitudes of the dew. But let it be with anguish or remorse in your heart that you go forth into Nature, and instead of your speaking her language, you make her speak yours. Your distress is then infused through all things, and clothes all things, and Nature only echoes, and seems to authenticate, your self-loathing or your hopelessness. Then you find the device of your sorrow on the argent shield of the moon, and see all the trees of the field weeping and wringing their hands with you, while the hills, seated at your side in sackcloth, look down upon you prostrate, and reprove you like the comforters of Job.

Fichte, The Romantics, And Imagination

Georg Brandes, Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature (New York, 1902), vol. II., The Romantic School in Germany, pp. 39-40:

Fichte's doctrine of a world-positing, world-creating Ego was at variance with “sound human reason.” This was one of its chief recommendations in the eyes of the Romanticists. The Wissenschaftslehre was scientific paradox, but to them paradox was the fine flower of thought. Moreover, the fundamental idea of the doctrine was as radical as it was paradoxical. It had been evolved under the impression of the attempt made by the French Revolution to transform the whole traditional social system into a rational system (Vernunftstaat). The autocracy of the Ego was Fichte's conception of the order of the world, and therefore in this doctrine of the Ego the Romanticists believed that they possessed the lever with which they could lift the old world from its hinges.1

The Romantic worship of imagination had already begun with Fichte. He explained the world as the result of an unconscious, yet to a thinker comprehensible, act of the free, yet at the same time limited, Ego. This act, he maintains, emanates from the creative imagination. By means of it the world which we apprehend with the senses first becomes to us a real world. The whole activity of the human mind, then, according to Fichte, springs from the creative imagination; it is the instinct which he regards as the central force of the active Ego. The analogy with the imaginative power which is so mighty in art is evident. But what Fichte himself failed to perceive is, that imagination is by no means a creative, but only a transforming, remodelling power, since what it acts upon is only the form of the things conceived of, not their substance.

1. Somewhat germane lines are found here: Abusing Philosophy

Infinite Ass

Lucian of Samosata, Βίων πράσις or Philosophies for Sale, 13, in: Lucian, tr. A. M. Harmon (Loeb Classical Library, 1919), vol. II., p. 475:

BUYER 

What, are you laughing at us all, and do you think nothing of our affairs?

DEMOCRITEAN

Even so; for there is nothing serious in them, but everything is a hollow mockery, drift of atoms, infinitude.

BUYER 

No indeed, but you yourself are a hollow mockery in very truth and an infinite ass. Oh, what effrontery!

Ἀγοραστής

Πῶς λέγεις; καταγελᾷς ἡμῶν ἁπάντων καὶ παρ᾽ οὐδὲν τίθεσαι τὰ ἡμέτερα πράγματα;

Δημόκριτος

ὧδε ἔχει: σπουδαῖον γὰρ ἐν αὐτέοισιν οὐδέν, κενεὰ δὲ πάντα καὶ ἀτόμων φορὴ καὶ ἀπειρίη.

Ἀγοράστης

οὐ μὲν οὖν, ἀλλὰ σὺ κενὸς ὡς ἀληθῶς καὶ ἄπειρος.

The Fiery Contemplation

Plutarch, Peri Erotos, in: Plutarch's Moralia, (The Loeb Classical Library, 1987), vol. XV., Fragments, tr. F. H. Sandbach, §138, p. 261:

And it is a most delightful thing to look upon the beautiful, but to touch and hold them has its dangers. Or rather, as Xenophon says,1 whereas fire burns only those who touch it, the beautiful kindles a flame even in those who stand well away. For it is sight that allows this passion to get its grip.

1. Xenophon, Cyropædia, v. 1. 16., tr. J. S. Watson, 1855:

«But, by Jove,» said Cyrus, «you, perhaps, retired before the time that love naturally lays hold of a man. It is possible that a person touching fire, may not immediately be burned; and wood does not immediately blaze up; yet I do not willingly touch fire, or gaze on beautiful persons; and I advise you, Araspes, not to let your eyes dwell long upon beautiful persons; for as fire burns those that touch it, beautiful persons inflame those that look at them even from a distance, so that they are set on fire with love.»

Our Innate Heimweh

John B. Lyon, Crafting Flesh, Crafting the Self, (Bucknell University Press, 2006), ch. 2, Trauma and the Self: Clemens Brentano’s Godwi, p. 89:

Brentano describes love as the source of living motion in humans, and also describes a fundamental human tendency toward otherness. From birth, humans are given a longing for what is foreign, for what takes them away from their origin (‘‘Humans were initiated into that distance’’). As a result, however, we are also born with Heimweh, a longing for an origin from which we are constantly drawn away. At times, Brentano attributes this Heimweh to external nature, as in the first letter of the novel: ‘‘ich glaube, daß der Sturm in der Natur und dem Glücke, ja daß alles Harte und Rauhe da ist, um unsern unsteten Sinn, der ewig nach der Fremde strebt, zur Rückkehr in die Heimath zu bewegen’’. [I believe, that the storm in nature and in fortune, indeed, that everything that is hard and coarse is there to move our unconstant mind, that eternally strives towards what is foreign, to return to its home.] . . . this drive is also innate. As humans we strive toward the other, but need to return constantly to our Heimath. To find the nature of the self in Godwi is to recognize these contradictory impulses within the self and to determine the nature of the Heimath to which the self longs to return. . . .

Latin And Greek

Paul Shorey, Philology and Classical Philology, in: The Classical Journal, Vol. 1, No. 6 (May, 1906), p. 169:

Latin is a necessity; Greek is the first of luxuries. “Latin,” said Porson, or was it Bentley? “a man may in some sort master. Of Greek every man learns only so much as God permits.” In the great ages of enthusiasm God permits a good deal. In the trough of the waves, in the intervals of reaction and depression, men try to believe that Latin alone will do as well. . . .

Too Much Wisdom Backfires

Charles Louis de Secondat, Montesquieu, Persian Letters, tr. John Davidson (London & New York, undated), Letter CX., p. 246:

It seems, my dear * * *, that the ablest men grow stupid when they get together; and that, where you have the greatest number of wise men, there you have the least wisdom. . . .

A dearest would approve of this, but only with more subtlety.

That Nothing In Life Is Unmixed

Plutarchus, Moralia, Of The Tranquality of the Mind (De Tranquillitate Animi), 474a-b., §15, tr. Matthew Morgan, in: Plutarch's Morals, vol. I., edt. William Goodwin, intro. Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1878, p. 158:

For as the strings of a lute or bow, so is the harmony of the world alternately tightened and relaxed by vicissitude and change;1 and in human affairs there is nothing that is unmixed, nothing that is unallied. But as in music there are some sounds which are flat and some sharp, and in grammar some letters that are vocal and some mute, but neither the man of concord nor syntax cloth industriously decline one sort, but with the fineness of his art mixeth them together; so in things in this world which carry a direct opposition in their nature one to another,— when, as Euripides expresseth it, 

 The good things with the evil still are joined,                                                                                     And in strict union mutually combined;                                                                                             The chequered work doth beautiful appear,                                                                                       For what is sweet allays the more severe;

—yet we ought not to be discouraged or have any despondencies. But in this case let us imitate the musicians, who drown the harsh cadences with others that more caress the ear; so, by tempering our adverse fortune with what is more prosperous, let us render our lives pleasant and of an equal tone. For that is not true which Menander tells us:— 

 Soon as an infant cloth salute the day,                                                                                                        A genius his first cryings doth obey,                                                                                                    And to his charge comes hastily away;                                                                                              The dæmon doth assist the tender lad,                                                                                                Shows him what's good, and saves him from the bad. 

1. Cf. Heraklitus, frag. 51:

 . . . οὐ ξυνιᾶσιν ὅκως διαφερόμενον ἑωυτῷ ὁμολογέει· παλίντροπος ἁρμονίη ὅκωσπερ τόξου καὶ λύρης                                                                                                                                                   . . . The harmonious structure of the world depends upon opposite tension like that of the bow and the lyre.

Idleness And Ignorance

Baroness Staël Holstein, i.e., Madame de Staël, Germany (London, 1813), tr. in three vols., vol. III., pt. 3, ch. xxi., pp. 263-65:

In the idle class of society, it is almost impossible to have any soul without the cultivation of the mind. Formerly nature was sufficient to instruct man, and to expand his imagination; but, since thought (that fading shadow of feeling)1 has turned all things into abstractions, it is necessary to have a great deal of knowledge to have any good sentiment. Our choice is no longer balanced between the bursts of the soul, devoid of instruction, and philosophical studies; but between the importunate noise of common and frivolous society, and that language which has been holden by men of real genius from age to age, even to our own times.

. . . Those only, who fill their lives with good actions, can dispense with study: the ignorance of idle men proves their dryness of soul, as well as their frivolity of understanding.

. . . for no book does harm to him who reads every book. If idle men of the world, on the contrary, are busy for a few moments, the work they meet with is an event in their heads, like that of a stranger's arrival in the desert; and when this work contains dangerous sophistries, they have no arguments to oppose to it. The discovery of printing is truly fatal for those who only read by halves, or by hazard; for knowledge, like the spear of Achilles, ought to cure the wounds which it has inflicted.

1. Quite a Nietzschean remark, aye? (Italics mine.)

A Consolation

Edward Young, Night Thoughts, Night Ninth, The Consolation:

As when a traveller, a long day past

In painful search of what he cannot find,

At night’s approach, content with the next cot,

There ruminates, a while, his labour lost;

Then cheers his heart with what his fate affords,

And chants his sonnet to deceive the time,

Till the due season calls him to repose:

Thus I, long-travell’d in the ways of men,

And dancing, with the rest, the giddy maze,

Where Disappointment smiles at Hope’s career;               10

Warn’d by the languor of life’s evening ray,

At length have housed me in an humble shed;

Where, future wandering banish’d from my thought,

And waiting, patient, the sweet hour of rest,

I chase the moments with a serious song.

Song soothes our pains; and age has pains to soothe.

Romantic Hospital Of Germany

Georg Brandes, Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature (New York, 1902), vol. II., The Romantic School in Germany, Intro., pp. 9-10:

What a contrast is presented by the overstrained, extravagant personalities peopling the Romantic hospital of Germany! A phthisical Moravian Brother with the consumptive's sensuality and the consumptive's mystic yearnings—Novalis. A satirical hypochondriac, subject to hallucinations and with morbid leanings to Catholicism—Tieck. A genius, impotent to produce, but with the propensity of genius to revolt and the imperative craving of impotence to subject itself to outward authority—Friedrich Schlegel. A dissipated fantast with the half-insane imagination of the drunkard—Hoffmann. A foolish mystic like Werner, and a genius like the suicide Kleist. Think of Hoffmann, and his pupil, Hans Andersen, and observe how sane, but also how sober and subdued, Andersen appears compared with his first master.

Religion At Convenience

Charles Louis de Secondat, Montesquieu, Persian Letters, tr. John Davidson (London & New York, undated), Letter LXXV., p. 184:

. . . they are rebels who have felt the yoke, and have shaken it off before knowing what it is. Nor are they any securer in their incredulity than in their faith: their life is a constant ebb and flow between belief and unbelief. One of them said to me once, “I believe in the immortality of the soul for six months at a time; my opinions depend entirely upon my bodily condition: I am a Spinozist, a Socinian, a Catholic, un-godly or devout, according to the state of my animal spirits, the quality of my digestion, the rarity or heaviness of the air I breathe, the lightness or solidity of the food I eat. When the doctor is at my bedside, the confessor has me at a disadvantage. I know very well how to prevent religion from annoying me when I am in good health; but I allow myself to be consoled by it when I am ill: when I have nothing more to hope for here below, religion offers itself, and gains me by its promises; I am glad to give myself up to it, and to die with hope on my side.”

. . . ce sont des rebelles qui ont senti le joug, et l'ont secoué avant de l'avoir connu. Aussi ne sont-ils pas plus fermes dans leur incrédulité que dans leur foi; ils vivent dans un flux et reflux qui les porte sans cesse de l'un à l'autre. Un d'eux me disoit un jour: Je crois l'immortalité de l'âme par semestre; mes opinions dépendent absolument de la constitution de mon corps; selon que j'ai plus ou moins d'esprits animaux, que mon estomac digère bien ou mal, que l'air que je respire est subtil ou grossier, que les viandes dont je me nourris sont légères ou solides, je suis spinosiste, socinien, catholique, impie ou dévot. Quand le médecin est auprès de mon lit, le confesseur me trouve à son avantage. Je sais bien empêcher la religion de m'affliger quand je me porte bien; mais je lui permets de me consoler quand je suis malade: lorsque je n'ai plus rien à espérer d'un côté, la religion se présente et me gagne par ses promesses; je veux bien m'y livrer, et mourir du côté de l'espérance.

Sexuality In Moral Life

Jean-Marie Guyau, A Sketch of Morality Independent of Obligation or Sanction, tr. Gertrude Kapteyn (London, 1898), 1st bk., ch. II., The Highest Intensity of Life, pp. 82-3:

Sexuality is of capital importance in moral life. If against all possibility a non-sexual generation had been prevalent among the animal species, and finally among human beings, society would hardly exist. It was noticed long since that spinsters, bachelors, and eunuchs fall into the habit of being more selfish. Their centre has always remained in the depths of themselves without ever fluctuating. Children also are selfish; they do not yet possess a surplus of life to pour forth from themselves; it is about the period of puberty that their characters transform themselves. The young man is full of enthusiasm; he is ready for every sacrifice because, in point of fact, it is necessary that he should sacrifice something of himself—that he should diminish himself to a certain extent; he is too full of life to live only for himself. The period of generation is also that of generosity. The old man, on the contrary, is often inclined to become selfish again. People who are ill have the same tendency. Each time that the fount of life is diminished a need is felt in the whole of one's being to save—to spare one's self. One hesitates to allow one drop of internal sap to filter through.

Money And Decadence

Gaius Sallustius Crispus, Two Epistles to Julius Cæsar, Epistle II., tr. John Selby Watson, in: Sallust, Florus, Velleius Paterculus (London, 1852), pp. VII-VIII., 273-4:

For, on frequently reflecting by what means eminent men had attained greatness, what conduct had strengthened people or nations with great accessions of power, and from what causes the mightiest kingdoms and empires had fallen to decay, I found that there were invariably the same causes of good and evil that those who rose had held riches in contempt, and those who fell had coveted them. . . .

For a man to erect a mansion or villa, and to decorate it with statues, tapestry, and other ornaments, and to make everything in it admirable except its possessor, is not to render riches an honour to himself, but to be himself a disgrace to them. Those, too, who are accustomed to overload their stomachs twice a day, and to pass no night without a mistress, when they have enslaved the mind that ought to have commanded, in vain seek to employ it, in its inefficient and infirm condition, as if it had been wisely improved for, from want of intellectual power, they mostly ruin alike their schemes and themselves. But these, and all other like evils, will have an end, if the respect that is paid to money be diminished, and if neither offices, nor any objects of general ambition, be set to sale. 

Reading And Its Pleasures

 William Edward Lecky, The Map of Life: Conduct and Character (Longmans, Green, and Co., 1917), ch. XII., pp. 242-3:

It is not every one who could say, like Gibbon, that he would not exchange his love of reading for all the wealth of the Indies. Very many would agree with him; but Gibbon was a man with an intense natural love of knowledge, and the weak health of his early life intensified this predominant passion. But while the tastes which require physical strength decline or pass with age, that for reading steadily grows. It is illimitable in the vistas of pleasure it opens; it is one of the most easily satisfied, one of the cheapest, one of the least dependent on age, seasons, and the varying conditions of life. It cheers the invalid through years of weakness and confinement; illuminates the dreary hours of the sleepless night; stores the mind with pleasant thoughts, banishes ennui, fills up the unoccupied interstices and enforced leisures of an active life; makes men for a time at least forget their anxieties and sorrows, and if it is judiciously managed it is one of the most powerful means of training character and disciplining and elevating thought. It is eminently a pleasure which is not only good in itself, but enhances many others. By extending the range of our knowledge, by enlarging our powers of sympathy and appreciation, it adds incalculably to the pleasures of society, to the pleasures of travel, to the pleasures of art, to the interest we take in the vast variety of events which form the great world-drama around us.

A Brazen Gasconader

Charles Louis de Secondat, Montesquieu, Persian Letters, tr. John Davidson (London & New York, undated), Letter L., p. 131:

A man, who seemed sufficiently splenetic, commenced to grumble at the tediousness of conversation. “What! are there none but fools, who describe their own character, and bring everything home to themselves?” ‘‘You are right,” replied our tattling friend abruptly. ‘‘Nobody does as I do; I never praise myself; I have means, am well-born, spend freely, and my friends say that I have some wit; but I never talk of all that; if I have any good qualities, that which I set most store by, is my modesty.”

I wondered at this malapert; and while he was talking very loud, I whispered, ‘‘Happy is he who has enough of vanity never to boast of his own qualities, who dreads the ridicule of his audience, and never hurts the pride of others by exalting himself!”

Un homme qui paraissoit assez chagrin commença par se plaindre de l'ennui répandu dans les conversations. Quoi! toujours des sots qui se peignent eux-mêmes, et qui ramènent tout à eux? Vous avez raison, reprit brusquement notre discoureur: il n'y a qu'à faire comme moi; je ne me loue jamais; j'ai du bien, de la naissance, je fais de la dépense, mes amis disent que j'ai quelque esprit; mais je ne parle jamais de tout cela: si j'ai quelques bonnes qualités, celle dont je fais le plus de cas, c'est ma modestie.

J'admirois cet impertinent; et pendant qu'il parloit tout haut, je disois tout bas: Heureux celui qui a assez de vanité pour ne dire jamais de bien de lui; qui craint ceux qui l'écoutent; et ne compromet point son mérite avec l'orgueil des autres!

Abusing Philosophy

Barthold George Niebuhr, The Life and Letters of Barthold George Niebuhr (New York, 1854), ch. II., sect. II., Kiel, 27th May, 1794, p. 48:

Of philosophical books which I do not understand, I have so far a superfluity. Since I heard that Fichte has begun to defend the right of insurrection (which, however, Kant and Reinhold abhor), and to deny the obligation of treaties, I begin to fear that men are abusing the mysteries of philosophy, from which I expected, and still expect, the elucidation and evolution of the most important questions, to the establishment of the most dreadful sophisms, or at least that a skillful hand may so abuse them. And then, if philosophy itself be turned against the cause of right and civil order, and the power of the mob be backed by the authority of brilliant fallacies, what refuge from their united tyranny is left us but death?

I long to get back to my ancients, my best friends, to whom I owe all my thoughts, at least on such subjects, to Aristotle and Cicero. Oh that it were permitted me, if only like the last of these, to attain an imperfect wisdom, and to expound it with his majesty of style!

Respect And Love

Immanuel Kant, Notes and Fragments (edt. Paul Gyuer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), ch. 4, Notes on Moral Philosophy (drawn from the original German title “Reflexionen zur Moralphilosophie”), II., Notes on Moral Philosophy from 1764-1770, §6601, p. 421:

Whatever we find worthy of the highest respect we really respect highly; whatever we find worthy of love we do not always love, namely if it is not especially connected to us.

Both sentiments are somewhat opposed to one another. Partiality toward us makes us love, but not highly respect, the one who is partial to us.

We have a greater drive to be respected than to be loved–but a greater drive to love others than to respect them. Because in love toward another one senses his own superiority, in respect for another he limits this superiority.

Elevated Taste

Baltasar Gracián y Morales, The Art of Worldly Wisdom, tr. Joseph Jacobs (New York: MacMillan, 1904), Elevated Taste, §lxv., pp. 37-8:

You can train it [viz. taste] like the intellect. Full knowledge whets desire and increases enjoyment. You may know a noble spirit by the elevation of his taste: it must be a great thing that can satisfy a great mind. Big bites for big mouths, lofty things for lofty spirits. Before their judgment the bravest tremble, the most perfect lose confidence. Things of the first importance are few; let appreciation be rare. Taste can be imparted by intercourse: great good luck to associate with the highest taste. But do not affect to be dissatisfied with everything: 'tis the extreme of folly, and more odious if from affectation than if from Quixotry. Some would have God create another world and other ideals to satisfy their fantastic imagination.