finis

do to disinterest and no viewers in readers of blog "Thought for Food", I have decided to stop postings.
sadly. but what is, even was, the point?

world-views of "Jesus"

"From the Deists and Reimarus to Strauss and Renan, the world view that was brought to the study of the Gospels was decisive in the interpretation of Jesus....The history of the study of Jesus in European thought in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is as much a history of changing philosophies, theologies, and world views, as it is of growing refinements in historical techniques."

-- from the "Postscript" in Jesus in European Protestant Thought, 1778-1860, Colin Brown, 1985, p. 275.
   

Nietzsche's appointment in Basel doomed before the start

Leipzig, Day of Repentence [November 20, 1868]

"My dear friend [Erwin Rohde]:
To see again from close at hand the seething brood of the philologists of our time, and every day having to observe all their moleish pullulating, the baggy cheeks and the blind eyes, their joy at capturing worms and their indifference to the the true problems, the urgent problems of life -- not only the young ones doing it, but also the old, full-grown ones -- all this makes me see more and more clearly that the two of us, if this is to be our only means of remaining true to the spirit in us, shall now go our way in life with a variety of offenses and intrigues. When scholar and human being do not completely tally, first the aforementioned brood looks on the miracle with amazement, then it gets annoyed, and finally it scratches, barks, and bites, as you yourself recently found out."

-- Friedrich Nietzsche to Erwin Rohde, Selected Letter of Friedrich Nietzsche, translated and edited Christopher Middleton, 1969, p. 41.

'real life' is out of this world

"Many advertisements took their place alongside other mass diversions -- the amusement park, the slick-paper romance, the movies. None demanded to be taken literally or even all that seriously; yet all promised intense 'real life' experience to their clientele, and all implicitly defined 'real life' as something outside the individual's everyday experience."

-- "From Salvation to Self-Realization: Advertising and the Therapeutic Roots of the Consumer Culture, 1880-1930", T. J. Jackson Lears.

advertising's foundational anthropology for 'making customers'

"It was left to Edward Bernays, nephew of Freud and 'father' of public relations, to provide the epitaph for bourgeois ideals of individual autonomy and conscious choice. 'The group mind, ' he wrote in Propaganda (1928), 'does not think in the strict sense of the word. In place of thoughts it has impulses, habits, emotions.' To ensure that consumption kept pace with production, Bernays advised, advertisers must learn how to 'make customers' through an understanding of the 'structure, the personality, the prejudices, of a potentially universal public.' The advertisers' job of 'making customers' closely paralleled the new political consultants' aim of 'making voters.' From either view, the 'public' was no longer composed of active citizens but rather manipulable consumers."

-- "From Salvation to Self-Realization: Advertising and the Therapeutic Roots of the Consumer Culture, 1880-1930", T. J. Jackson Lears.

all the world's a(n unconscious) stage

"In preindustrial England virtually all the actors in this social drama [the rank-ordered society] knew their places and the parts assigned to them. They enacted them in their clothes and deportment, their word and gesture, houses and furnishings, food and drink. Each actor always remained mindful of his relation to his immediate 'superiors' and 'inferiors', and of the ties of patronage and obligation that linked members up and down the social scale."

-- Rudeness and Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-Century Urban America, John F. Kasson, 1990, p. 19.

(un)suited

"In the course of the nineteenth century the image of the ideal gentleman rapidly shed the remnants of the eighteenth-century courtliness and assumed the aspect of the solid, substantial, inexpressive businessman. The colors of the wardrobe grew progressively somber. The New York Knickerbocker Abram Dayton recalled that by the 1830s 'black was the prevailing color' among fashionable young men of the city; 'it was worn for promenade, parlor, church, ball, business,' and 'in such uniformity of style, as effectively to destroy all individuality.'... By the later nineteenth century the modern suit developed in Europe and America and became the requisite costume -- virtually the anonymous uniform -- of the business culture."

-- Rudeness and Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-Century Urban America, John F. Kasson, 1990, p. 118.

religion and politics?

"Dispensing advice that dated back at least to the seventeenth century, etiquette writers stressed that relgious controversy was to be shunned and the very topic of religious doctrine avoided. Politics came under a similar prohibition. In social gatherings, civility supplated substance."

-- Rudeness and Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-Century Urban America, John F. Kasson,  1990, p. 158.
   

Pop Nazi Occultism

"Books written about Nazi occultism between 1960 and 1975 were typically sensational and under-researched. A complete ignorance of the primary sources was common to most authors and inaccuracies and wild claims were repeated by each newcomer to the genre until an abundant literature existed, based on wholly spurious 'facts' concerning the powerful Thule Society, the Nazi links with the East, and Hitler's occult initiation."

-- From Appendix E: "The Modern Mythology of Nazi Occultism", in The Occult Roots of Nazism, Nicholas Goodrich-Clarke, 1985/2004, p. 224-225.

Höss

"Rudolf Höss, the commander of Auschwitz concentration camp, was undoubtedly the greatest mass murderer known to history. Yet his autobiography reveals a rather normal, pedestrian bourgeois existence. In the same breath in which he acknowledges himself a professional killer, he also describes a normal family life, tells of his kindness to children and his fondness for animals. In one passage his Jewish prisoners march to their death surrounded by flowering apple trees and the beauties of springtime."

-- The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich, George L. Mosse, 1964, p. 310.