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.

American university authority: sub specie scientiae/academiae

"...As many professions as feasible would locate the center of their authority within university schools. By defining its functions comprehensively and constantly expanding its clientele, the American university would serve to enhance the public's image of a professional authority in the society.
"The weight of that authority could not be minimized in a nation that not only lacked respect for historical tradition but which, for the most part, lacked a common past.
...
"Americans lacked tradition as a source of authority, but did not lack 'science'. It was the primary function of American universities to render universal scientific standards credible to the public. Indeed, by means of science cultivated within the university, Americans even discovered the origins of a usable history in the German forest and on the American frontier -- a scientific history now pioneered by professional scholars. To the middle-class American in the later nineteenth century, science implied more than method and procedure."

-- The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America, Burton J. Bledstein, 1976, p. 325-326.

the new objectivity of late 19th-century higher education

"By screening students upon entrance, formalizing courses of study, publishing textbooks, standardizing examinations, and awarding degrees, higher educators convinced the public that objective principles rather than subjective partisanship determined competence in American life."

-- The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America, Burton J. Bledstein, 1976, p. 124.

a secular theodicy in Victorian America

"In part, the success of the culture of professionalism could be attributed to the fact that American Mid-Victorians constructed a secular theodicy. Despite its flux, madness, and seeming irrationality, the world was a rational place, and every person could discover his 'real me' within the natural confines of space and time. Such firm notions as career and character, for instance, organized a human life totally, from beginning to end....To know that every occurrence had a reason, a justification, both emboldened and inspired a Mid-Victorian. The scientific assurance that the most despised weakness -- human failure -- was rooted within the nature of the fallen victim resolved the thorny question of responsibility. Success was a personal triumph for the middle-class individual, as failure was a personal disaster.
"Evil in the Mid-Victorian theodicy stemmed from the inability to realize one's potential, the inability to commit oneself to place and time, to subjugate carnal desires and their distractions, to approach a life professionally. The flaw was internal. Society blamed the ineffectual individual for his own failure. No one else was at fault."

-- The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America, Burton J. Bledstein, 1976, p. 112-113.

'Professor' of all trades

"Similarly, in the American college all regular faculty members called themselves 'Professor'; in England only the select few who held chairs in a university acquired the title, with lesser faculty known as readers and lecturers. In nineteenth-century America, 'Professor' was a grandiose title quickly appropriated by anyone who claimed to make a living at a skill, or according to Bartlett [in Dictionary of Americanisms, 1877], who pretended to 'make a profession of anything.' Barbers called themselves 'Professor,' as did dancing-masters, banjo players, tailors, phrenologists, acrobats, boxers, music-hall piano players, and public teachers of all sorts."

-- The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America, Burton J. Bledstein, 1976, p. 20-21.

colonization of the body, by 1883

"'In the brief period of less than fifty years,' N. S. Davis, president of the American Medical Association, told his colleagues in 1883, 'we have specialists for almost every part or region of the human body.'"

-- The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America, Burton J. Bledstein, 1976, p. 85. 

Strauss on Hegel, Goethe, and 'historical criticism'

"When [the Hegelians] appeal to Hegel himself and protest that he would not have recognized my book* as an expression of his own feelings, I agree. Hegel was personally no friend of historical criticism. It annoyed him, as it annoyed Goethe, [to] see the heroic figures of antiquity, to which their higher feelings clung lovingly, gnawed at by critical doubt. If, occasionally, these figures were puffs of mist which they took to be pieces of rock, they did not want to know; they did not want to be disturbed in the illusion by which they felt exalted."

-- *In Defense of My 'Life of Jesus' against the Hegelians, 1838, David Friedrich Strauss, cited in The Longing for Myth in Germany: Religion and Aesthetic Culture from Romanticism to Nietzsche, George S. Williamson, 2004, p. 159.

a Romantic Bible

"...Friedrich Schlegel spoke at times of creating a 'new Bible.' The early Romantics showed little interest in the narratives or stories of the actual Bible, which they rejected on both aesthetic and philosophical grounds. In 'Christianity or Europe?' Novalis expressed an aversion to the Bible 'philology' of contemporary Protestantism, while Schleiermacher described the Bible as a 'mausoleum of religion'. What Friedrich Schlegel had in mind was rather a 'new gospel' that Lessing had invoked two decades earlier in 'The Education of the Human Race' (1780)."

-- The Longing for Myth in Germany: Religion and Aesthetic Culture from Romanticism to Nietzsche, George S. Williamson, 2004, p. 55.

the K-12 of social and political pedagogics

just as some elementary school student is not expected to be able to act and work maturely in high school, it is naive and unrealistic to imagine that all people in any society are self-responsible enough to eg not passively eat foods making them obese, or be mature enough to vote in some serious way on a referendum or election...
any society is more like a K-12 school than a graduating class

posthumous meaning?

"Carl Becker has pointed out the 'uses of posterity' for the philosophes of the eighteenth century: the judgment of the court of history provided a kind of secular immortality for those who had worked long and earnestly to further the good of the human spirit. Those nineteenth-century intellectuals who theorized about their own role also needed to be remembered, needed to be able to project the approval of their sub-group into the future, and to console themselves with the thought that (however little acclaim they might receive in their generation) they would be remembered as those who had in their day had charge of the light."
posthumous meaning?
-- The Idea of the Clerisy in the Nineteenth Century, Ben Knights, 1978, p. 8.
   

Karamzin, 1790, on the idle British rich

"Anyone who believes that happiness consists in riches and luxuries ought to be shown the many Croesuses here who, surrounded by every means of enjoyment, have lost the taste for all enjoyments, and whose souls die long before they themselves do. The is the English spleen! This moral sickness, which might also be called by a more Russian name -- boredom -- is known in all lands, but it is worse here than anywhere else because of the climate, the heavy food, and excessive quietude, so like sleep.
"What a strange creature man is! When he has cares and anxieties -- he complains; when he has everything, when he is carefree -- he yawns. Out of boredom the rich Englishman travels; out of boredom becomes a hunter, squanders money, marries, shoots himself. He is unhappy from happiness! I am speaking of the idle rich, whose grandfathers amassed fortunes in India, for those who are busy, directing world trade and devising new ways of playing with the imaginary needs of the people, do not know what spleen is."

-- from London, 1790, Letter of a Russian Traveler, 1789-1790, N. M. Karamzin, [Columbia University Press, NY, 1957], p. 333-334.

lower education, 1756

"In New York City, a gentleman complained in the 1750s 'how common it is to see a Shoemaker, Taylor, or Barber, haranguing with a great deal of Warmth on the public Affairs.' Though armed only with 'Knowledge from the News-Papers,' a tradesman would 'condemn a General, Governor, or Province with as much Assurance as if he were of the Privy council.'"

-- Citation from New York Post-Boy, Nov 8, 1756, The Strength of a People: The Idea of an Informed Citizenry in America, 1650-1870, Richard D. Brown, 1996, p. 51.

Maslow's naturalistic, not supernaturalistic, mysticism

"Throughout the book [Religion, Values and Peak-experiences, 1964], Maslow rejected supernaturalism. By this he meant anything that cannot be verified empirically. While still an atheist, he therefore stressed a kind of naturalistic mysticism, denying the traditional trappings of religion such as an afterlife, a personal God, and a divine order. For Maslow, none of these is necessary to be religious, to live the B-values to their fullest."

-- The Right to Be Human: A Biography of Abraham Maslow, Edward Hoffman, 1988, p. 277.
  

Maslow's self-actualization, actually

"He [Abraham Maslow] first sought* to rectify the growing 'misunderstanding of self-actualization as a static, 'perfect' state in which all human problems are transcended, and in which people 'live happily ever after' in a superhuman state of serenity or ecstasy. This is empirically not so.' Rather, he insisted, self-actualization is 'a development of personality which frees the person from the deficiency of growth, and from the neurotic...problems of life, so that he is able to face, endure, and grapple with the 'real,' problems [of] the human condition.'"

-- The Right to Be Human: A Biography of Abraham Maslow, Edward Hoffman, 1988, p. 256-257.

* in "Critique of Self-Actualization. I. Some Dangers of Being-cognition" in Journal of Individual Psychology 15 (1959), 24.
   

folkways, mores, and ethnocentrism, 1906

"Folkways, issued in 1906, brought immense popularity and fame to its author. It was composed of almost seven hundred pages of rich ethnographic detail, culled from the writings and reports of anthropologists, explorers, missionaries, and travelers. Although Folkways eventually passed into intellectual obsolescence, when Maslow read it in the 1920s it was still the definitive work on cultural variability, introducing concepts such as folkways, mores, and ethnocentrism into scientific and even popular language.
[William Graham] Sumner wrote the book partly to clarify his notion that humans have held tremendously variable beliefs and customs over the course of world history and civilization. Each culture's members tend to view its own mores as correct, proper, or even divinely commanded, and to dismiss differing perspectives as wrong, crazy, or evil. To dramatize his thesis, he selected practices abhorrent to modern sensibility, such as infanticide and child sacrifice, incest, cannibalism, slavery, blood revenge, and witchcraft, each of which was deemed normal and indeed moral by its own culture."

-- The Right to Be Human: A Biography of Abraham Maslow, Edward Hoffman, 1988, p. 30.

psychology will save the world

"For one thing, I am not only the disinterested and impersonal seeker for pure cold truth for its own sake. I am also very definitely interested and concerned with man's fate, with his ends and goals and his future. I would like to help improve him and to better his prospects. I hope to help teach him how to be brotherly, cooperative, peaceful, courageous, and just. I think science is the best hope for achieving this, and of all the sciences, I consider psychology most important to this end. Indeed, I sometimes think that the world will either be saved by psychologists -- in the very broadest sense -- or else it will not be saved at all."

-- Abraham Maslow, Nebraska Symposium on Motivation, University of Nebraska, January 1955, cited in The Right to Be Human: A Biography of Abraham Maslow, Edward Hoffman, 1988, p. 207.
   

London, September 1790, Russian vs English

"The English winter is not so cold as ours. On the other hand, we have beautiful days such as are rare here even in summer. How, then, can an Englishman help looking like September?
Secondly, their cold nature I do not find at all pleasing.
'It is a volcano covered with ice', a French émigré told me, laughing.
But I stand, I look, I see no flames, and all the while I am shivering. My Russian heart likes to pour itself out in sincere, animated conversation. It likes the play of eyes, sudden changes of expression, a meaningful gesture of the hand. The Englishman is taciturn, indifferent. He talks as though he were reading, never revealing sudden impulses of the heart which like an electric shock shake our entire physical system." 

Letters of a Russian Traveler, 1789-1790, N. M. Karamzin.

Emerson and Coleridge Downed South

"Richmond's Messenger attempted to cut down both Coleridge and Emerson, with one swing of the scythe, in a review of the latter's Essays. The review argued that the bulk of Americans who admired the two philosophers were 'ambitious school boys of the metaphysical turn of mind'. The Virginia critic smugly conceded that some grown men might like Coleridge and Emerson, also, but that their number would not 'much exceed the number of the present House of Representatives, that is about one for every seventy-thousand of the population of the country.'"

-- Citation from the Southern Literary Messenger, XVIII (April, 1852), in Romanticism and Nationalism in the Old South, Rollin Osterweis, 1949, p. 39-40.
   

"But Dickens and Emerson...found themselves unwanted."

"The  stage was now set for Southern romanticism to develop along clearly discernible lines. Ideas, associated with the movement in Europe and the North, were continuing to arrive -- notions matured by Carlyle, Hugo, Michelet, Dickens, Cooper, Irving, the Gothic revival architecture, the nature cult in painting, the evangelical strain in religion; but there was a preconceived plan for treating them. A cordon sanitaire against anything that might threaten the status quo surrounded the South. Romantic ideas must pause at the border and pass inspection before gaining right to entry. Carlyle met a warm welcome, as did Michelet, Uhland, and Mrs. Hemans. Cordiality greeted Irving and Cooper. But Dickens and Emerson, and other devotees of the cult of humanitarianism, found themselves unwanted."
"But Dickens and Emerson...found themselves unwanted."
-- Romanticism and Nationalism in the Old South, Rollin Osterweis, 1949, p. 55.
   

"he's a jerk"

"Romantic religion, as it developed in the Southwest, combined the two principal psychological phases of romanticism -- sensibility and imagination. The former was represented by the intense emotion which characterized the entire affair. The imagination phase emerged in the procedure of the camp meeting -- the 'jerks,' the 'barking' exercises,' and those heartrending trances in which the victim 'professed to have seen God, heaven, the angels, the devil, and the damned.'"

-- Romanticism and Nationalism in the Old South, Rollin Osterweis, 1949, p. 188.
  

Schiller in New Orleans, 1842

"Walter Scott and Carlyle were probably the chief conveyors of notions associated with English romanticism, Lamartine the principal 'culture carrier' of the French, and Schiller of the German, so far as New Orleans was concerned....
"A student of 'The German Drama on the New Orleans Stage' [April 1843] found that Schiller was preferred to all other German playwrights in the Louisiana metropolis. He first became well known there in 1842, when Die Räuber was produced at the German theater, probably the earliest organized German stage in America. The influx of thousands of German immigrants to New Orleans, in this period, had led to the establishment of the German theater, in 1839. During the [18]50's not only the German-speaking section of the population but the entire city was enthusiastic for Schiller."

-- Romanticism and Nationalism in the Old South, Rollin Osterweis, 1949, p. 164.
  

academically speaking

"The university president, like the minister of the forward-looking Protestant denominations, should bring men together in a context of inspiration; he should not gratuitously antagonize them. He should find evil only where it is generally thought to be found, and even then he should spend the larger proportion of his time exalting the good."

"Ritualistic idealism naturally became appropriate to the academic executive, because the role of manager required that such a man always appear confident about his institution. To speak in terms of doubt or failure was to violate the most basic requirement of his office; to do so would at once disqualify him from his post."

-- The Emergence of the American University, Laurence R. Veysey, 1965, p. 382, 437.
   

professionalizing sub specie scientiae

"In the nineteenth-century colleges the study of society belonged to the benign amateurs who were not intimidated by cosmic questions or their own ignorance. The narrow competence and specialization of the economists, historians, political scientists, and others who took their places deflected the classroom from advocacy and conspicuous moral judgment to a style that bore the approved description -- 'scientific,' a style that was objective, cautious, and wary of judgment."

-- Curriculum: A History of the American Undergraduate Course of Study Since 1636, Frederick Rudolf, 1977, p. 156.

100 at Harvard in 1877

"Harvard removed a student's disciplinary record from the calculation of grades in 1869, and eight years later adopted a scale of 100, replacing it in 1883 with five letter grades -- A through E. In 1895 letter grades were replaced by a new scale of rank by merit: 'passed with distinction', 'passed', and 'failed.' All this thrashing around in search of the perfect grading system was a response to a changing curriculum and a changing climate of academic life."

-- Curriculum: A History of the American Undergraduate Course of Study Since 1636, Frederick Rudolf, 1977, p. 147.

God's CV -- ca. 1700s

"Beginning in the 1760's the idea of the 'man of letters' as a proper definition of the college graduate intruded into the curriculum the study of belles lettres -- orations, history, poetry, literature. An emphasis on reason and observation, on rational moral behavior, replaced a reliance on divine law in the study of ethics. The God who inhabited Dunster's Harvard was a righteous and wrathful God; the God who inhabited Princeton in 1764 was the creator and source of all nature's wonders. The curriculum had shifted from explaining the ways of God to exploring the ways of man."

-- Curriculum: A History of the American Undergraduate Course of Study Since 1636, Frederick Rudolf, 1977, p. 53.

~2,500 in 1776

"The English colonies in North America entered upon independence with a college-educated population of approximately 2,500, some of whom were to become famous as Founding Fathers. Many others passed into obscurity as exiles loyal to the Crown."

-- Curriculum: A History of the American Undergraduate Course of Study Since 1636, Frederick Rudolf, 1977, p. 26.
   

dead philosophers put in and out of hell

"La Mothe le Vayer discourses at length [in De la vertu des payens, 1642] on the piety and salvation of Socrates, Plato, Pythagoras, Epicurus, and Confucius, though he is not necessarily convinced of the virtues of all the followers of these righteous infidels. In his opinion, the fate of Aristotle is dubious but hopeful, and he obviously would like to save Julian the Apostate, whose virtues must be commended even though his attitude toward Christianity is deplorable. During the remainder of the seventeenth century, the question of the redemption of the pious pagans twisted back and forth between optimistic and pessimistic convictions so that a dead philosopher saved by one human redeemer might be sent to the Pit by another."

-- Mysteriously Meant, The Rediscovery of Pagan Symbolism and Allegorical Interpretation in the Renaissance, Don Cameron Allen, 1970, p. 34.
   

three 17th century etiologies of pagan and Christian kinship

"Originality is not an attribute of theological contention in any era, and the seventeenth century was no exception to common experience. The patent similarities between the pagan and Christian systems were explained as as consequence of the revelation to Adam, duly perverted until Moses renewed it original luster and instructed not only the Jews but also visiting delegations of pagans. This was one explanation. A second theory was that fallen angels, overhearing (with sin-obstructed ears) the lucid predictions of prophets, attempted to befuddle potential Christian believers by inventing similar if somewhat erroneous myth-fulfillments gladly adopted by the pagan world. Finally it was imagined that God made a universal revelation of Himself to all men via the operations of the Natural Light, but that some men, Hebrews for instance, were less myopic or light-dazzled than others. All of these propositions were backed by infinite quotation and analytic adjustment of suitable non-Christian legend and speculation. Most of the adherents of these positions were foster-children of Platonism, the stepmother of the Christian Church."

-- Mysteriously Meant, The Rediscovery of Pagan Symbolism and Allegorical Interpretation in the Renaissance, Don Cameron Allen, 1970, p. 34.
   

worldwide the course of courtly life takes its way

"The practitioners of gentility, as the stories related over and over, lived by the standards of the 'best people,' who always existed elsewhere. If they did not always think of European courts, they had the characteristic provincial habit of envisioning some superior society in a grand metropolis that embodied the highest in cultural achievement. They were fixed in a colonial mentality of periphery and center. In villages they thought of Boston or New York with the same awe as New York regarded London or Paris. In village and city, the structure was the same; ultimate authority lay in a distant place. The genteel lived by a standard outside of themselves and their circle. They could not break the colonial and provincial habit of looking upward and outward for leadership."

-- The Refinement of America, Persons, Houses, Cities, Richard L. Bushman, 1992, p. 414.
   

aristocratic > middle-class parlors

"The contradiction between parlor culture and business culture of the enveloping national economy grew out of the history of the parlor, a history that introduced a deep-seated ambivalence into parlor life. The reason for this disjuncture was that parlors were borrowed from another culture, from royal courts and aristocratic drawing rooms, and did not grow organically from the everyday experiences of the ordinary people who inhabited them. By so borrowing, the middle class introduced into their houses a culture that was alien to their ordinary lives, a culture that valued polish and repose and repudiated work in contrast to the homely, middle-class regard for industry and efficiency. In the aristocratic drawing room, polished manners were the means to advancement in a world of real power; in the middle-class parlor they were an adornment, irrelevant to the world of business in farmyard, shop and factory."
parlored 
-- The Refinement of America, Persons, Houses, Cities, Richard L. Bushman, 1992, p. 264.
   

1790, "...you must call Paris the most magnificent and most vile,..."

Paris, April 1790

"You view everything and ask: What is Paris? It is not enough to call it the first city in the world, capital of splendor and enchantment. Stop here, if you do not wish to change your opinion, for if you go further you will see crowded streets, an outrageous confusion of wealth and poverty. Close by a glittering jewelry shop, a pile of rotten apples and herrings; everywhere filth and even blood streaming from the butchers' stalls. You must hold your nose and close your eyes. The picture of a splendid city grows dim in your thoughts, and it seems to you that the dirt and muck of all the cities in the world is flowing through the sewers of Paris. Take but one more step, and suddenly the fragrance of happy Arabia or, at least, Provence's flowering meadows, is wafted upon you, for you have come to one of the many shops where perfume and pomade are sold. In a word, every step means a new atmosphere, new objects of luxury or the most loathsome filth. Thus you must call Paris the most magnificent and most vile, the most fragrant and most fetid city."

-- Letters of a Russian Traveler, 1789-1790, N. M. Kazamzin [translated Florence Jonas], 1957, p. 184-185.
   

to hell with that

"With the growth of the secular and scientific spirit, it had come to seem more and more desirable to base morality not upon rewards and punishments in the hereafter, but upon human nature and what was known as 'the nature of things'."

-- The Eighteenth-Century Background, Basil Willey, 1940, p. 62.
   

Dante's Dante, Spenser's Arthur, Bunyan's Pilgrim, Defoe's Crusoe

"So beneficently had God planned the world, that by giving full rein to his acquisitive appetites the individual was, in fact, adding his maximum quota to the sum of human happiness. Thus, instead of Dante ascending to Paradise under the guidance of Reason and Grace, instead of Spenser's Arthur, fashioned in noble and gentle discipline, instead of Bunyan's Pilgrim setting forth with his load of sin to escape from the wrath to come, the new world offers us as its symbolical figure Robinson Crusoe, the isolated economic man, pitting his lonely strength successfully against Nature in a remote part of the earth, and carrying on a little missionary activity as a side-line."

-- The Eighteenth-Century Background, Basil Willey, 1940, p. 24-25.
   

"climates of opinion", e.g....

"First, [the scientific movement] produced a 'climate of opinion' in which supernatural and occult explanations of natural phenomena ceased to satisfy, and the universe can more and more to be regarded as the Great Machine, working by rigidly determined laws of material causation. The supernatural, in both its divine and its diabolical forms, was banished from Nature."

-- The Eighteenth-Century Background, Basil Willey, 1940, p. 11.

Locke(d) inside

"Locke's prose style is the best index of his mind, and the mind of the age as well. Like Wren's architecture, it is harmonious, lucid and severe, rising occasionally into the dome of manly eloquence....In reading Locke we are conscious of being in the presence of a mind which has come to rest in the 'philosophic' world-view. There is no more of the metaphysical flicker from world to world, none of the old imagery struck out in the heat of struggle or in the ardour of discovery. Locke writes philosophy in the tone of a well-bred conversation, and makes it his boast to have discarded the uncouth and pedantic jargon of the schools. His air is that of a gentleman who, along with a group of like-minded friends, proposes to conduct a disinterested enquiry into truth. The very ease of his prose betokens a mind at rest on its own assumptions, and reveals how fully Locke could count on these being also the assumptions of his readers. His vocabulary is almost wholly abstract and uncoloured; what he offers us is always the reasoning of a grave and serious man, not the visions of enthusiasm or the fictions of poetry."

-- The Seventeenth Century Background: The Thought of the Age in Relation to Religion and Poetry, Basil Willey, 1934, p. 266-267.
   

1700s -- prosaic reality, poetic fancy

"Descartes himself is perhaps only the most conspicuous representative of a way of thought which was irresistibly gaining ground as the century proceeded, and we must now, therefore, ascribe to him all the consequences of that thought. But the fact remains that by the beginning of the eighteenth century religion has sunk to deism, while poetry has been reduced to catering for 'delight' -- the providing embellishments which might be agreeable to fancy, but which were recognized by the judgment as having no relation to 'reality'."

-- The Seventeenth Century Background: The Thought of the Age in Relation to Religion and Poetry, Basil Willey, 1934, p. 93.
  

Hobbes's hates

"Very nearly every statement of Hobbes can be reduced either to hatred and contempt of schoolmen and clerics, or to fear of civil war and love of ordered living in a stable commonwealth."

-- The Seventeenth Century Background: The Thought of the Age in Relation to Religion and Poetry, Basil Willey, 1934, p. 101.
   

an otherness in the universe

"It was one of the privileges of the seventeenth century to be able to believe, without any effort and striving, that 'truth' was not all of one order. It would be more accurate to say that this was unconsciously assumed, or felt, rather than consciously 'believed'. Thus however eager one might be for 'exantlation' [act of drawing out; exhaustion; obsolete -- Sir T. Browne] of one kind of truth, the new kind, the old order of numinous truth was still secure in its inviolate separateness. The feeling that there was a divine meaning, an otherness, in the universe, as well as a mechanical order, was still natural and inevitable; it had not, as so often since, to be deliberately worked up or simulated."

-- The Seventeenth Century Background: The Thought of the Age in Relation to Religion and Poetry, Basil Willey, 1935, p. 66.
   

pop fiction, 1795

"The image of the lazy, fickle reader registered the emergence of a recognizably modern form of print consumption. Authors like Schiller hoped to form intimate connections with active, totally engaged readers, who would labor over their writing in an unceasing effort to enlighten and cultivate themselves. The expansion of the print market confronted them with a growing body of educated men and women who consumed books and journals as a form of leisure activity. They read as much for entertainment and for respite from the demands of work as for moral guidance and other kinds of instruction. The recipe for a popular novel included a brimming cup of 'enlightened' bourgeois moralism, several spoonfuls of domestic sentimentality and romantic adventure, and perhaps a pinch of oblique eroticism. In 1795, the year Die Horen was launched and Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre began to appear, Karoline von Wobeser published a novel with the fetching title Elisa, or Woman as She Ought to Be. The heroine of this tearful narrative is a dutiful young woman who is forced to marry a rake but in the end converts him to her virtuous way of life. Elisa was the greatest commercial success of the decade."

-- Fichte, The Self and the Calling of Philosophy, 1762-1799, Anthony J. La Vopa, 2001, p. 276.
   

"Not-I" rocks: Goethe on Fichte's vandalized windows

"You have seen the Absolute I in a great predicament, and of course it is very impolite of the Not-I, which has been subject to law, to fly through the window panes. It goes with [Fichte], however, as it goes with the Creator and Maintainer of all things, who, as the theologians tell us, also cannot manage his creatures."

-- Letter of Goethe to Voigt, cited in Fichte, The Self and the Calling of Philosophy, 1762-1799, Anthony J. La Vopa, 2001, p. 265.

gentility between the ugly and the sublime

"Gentility being neither ugly nor sublime, belonged wholly to the beautiful. Gentility, whether in dress, personal manners, or architecture, was harmony, smoothness, polish, gradual rather than abrupt variation, the subduing of harsh emotions. Gentility beatified the world in Burke's sense. Eighteenth-century portraits, with their graceful and easy postures, fine clothes, and composed faces, present people who have overcome their baser impulses and learned to conceal the fearful secrets of their hearts....
"...Gentility's devotion to beautiful nature put it at odds with the ugly and the sublime. Horror and awe, emotions evoked by the sublime, were repressed in genteel natures, as were all things base and disturbing -- the dissonant, the plebeian, the filthy."

-- The Refinement of America, Persons, Houses, Cities, Richard L. Bushman, 1992, p. 98.
   

the Versailles of the middle-class

"At the court of Versailles, the royal presence brought the exquisite sensibilities of refined behavior to the highest pitch. No effort was spared to enhance the king's glory and to beautify his environment. His very presence demanded perfection of manners and gave a point to the necessary self-discipline. Back in their parlors, middle-class people had to subject themselves to the discipline of genteel conduct without the compelling presence of a monarch and with only the vaguest idea of court life. But a faint light from the court still shone in their rooms. Genteel behavior always reflected the belief that somewhere a glorious circle existed where life was lived at its highest and best, where fashions were set, where true gentility was achieved, where perfect harmony, grace, and beauty could be found."

-- The Refinement of America, Persons, Houses, Cities, Richard L. Bushman, 1992, p. 37.
   

Fichte, "...making it...incomprehensible to the educated public..."

"Fichte's search for his God-given mission as a young Lutheran had culminated in his philosophical view of himself as an instrument of 'speculation'".

"'Popular philosophy' became one of the major targets of Fichte's polemical wrath. His attacks were testy reactions to the charge that Kantians were returning philosophy to obscurantism and that his own writings were a particularly egregious case in point....Having tried but failed to popularize Kantianism in the Contribution*, Fichte now preferred to make philosophy rigorous, even if that meant making it, as least for a while, incomprehensible to the educated public as well as the uneducated masses."

-- Fichte, The Self and the Calling of Philosophy, 1762-1799, Anthony J. La Vopa, 2001, p. 206, 211.

* A Contribution toward Correcting the Judgment of the Public about the French Revolution, 1793.
   

Goethe's Werther, Kant's Critiques -- heart- and headbreak

"In the late 1780s and the 1790s Kantian philosophy made a good number of converts among Germany's educated youth. It was not the first time that an eighteenth-century author had struck a chord in a generation coming of age. From the mid-1770s onward, a veritable youth cult had developed around Goethe's Die Leiden des jungen Werthers. But even to today's readers Goethe's novel conveys an extraordinary sense of emotional immediacy. It is not hard to understand why the book overwhelmed young men, and indeed why, to the author's consternation, they found Werther a hero to be emulated. Kant is quite another matter. Piece by piece, he was building an awesomely abstract and intricate philosophical system, and he did not pretend to be able to explain it in a layperson's language. The new philosophy was, in Fichte's apt description 'headbreaking.'"

--  Fichte, The Self and the Calling of Philosophy, 1762-1799, Anthony J. La Vopa, 2001, p. 46.
   

"...behind a mask that conceals the real self." 1933

"'Secondary relationships,' the nemesis of early psychologists, suddenly ceased to be destructive. Impersonality no longer led to disintegration of rural mores but to increased freedom for individuals to choose the roles they wished to play. 'Since the major portion of social contacts in the city are of the touch-and-go type, external appearance assumes a pronounced social value,' they [Gist and Halbert, in Urban Society, 1933] concluded; 'because of the exaggerated emphasis on external form, many urban persons live behind a mask that conceals the real self.' City dwellers learned to express their personalities by closely adhering to conventions and customs symbolic of their attitudes to life.

As Gist and Halbert concluded:

"This masquerading, posing, playing a role, gives the outward impression of hypocrisy, and to the rural person, who deliberately avoids artificiality and who cannot understand the basis of urban relationships, the metropolite is hypocritical, untrustworthy, a 'slicker.' Yet withal it is a natural phenomena, a form of social adjustment that has grown out of the exigencies of urban life.'"

-- Back to Nature: The Arcadian Myth in Urban America, Peter J. Schmitt, 1969, p. 187.
  

1925 traffic jams in NY, et al

"Traffic controls were frequently as primitive as sewage disposal. With the development of the skyscraper, two to six new 'cities' rose from the streets of the old; massive traffic jams became a daily hazard of urban life. 'Every day the congestion increases,' [Clarence] Stein concluded, ' in spite of traffic policemen, curb setbacks, one-way streets, electric traffic signals.' Subways were equally crowded by 1925."

-- Back to Nature: The Arcadian Myth in Urban America, Peter J. Schmitt, 1969, p. 178.
   

organizing play

"Play was no longer a means of exercise but an end in itself, a science conforming to the needs of an urban culture. The rural image of informal outdoor exercise gave way to an urban ideal for town and country alike. In the 1920's, the National Recreation Association found rural play patterns woefully inadequate. Country children had nowhere to go but the open fields and nothing but their own inventiveness to guide them. In 1929, the Association published a rural recreation handbook to bring the social games of urban society to those who still lived in the country."

-- Back to Nature: The Arcadian Myth in Urban America, Peter J. Schmitt, 1969, p. 75.
   

RIP American Romantic Style

"Old-fashioned attitudes toward death and burial were conditioned by crowded old-world graveyards in London, where, as one writer put it, corpses are 'buried in standing postures because not room is left to lay them down.' In many such graveyards, the dead were periodically removed to make more room, and in other cases, whole cemeteries were leveled as building sites. The American cemetery seemed by contrast 'a special kind of park with a peculiar dignity and sacredness,' which offered visible signs of grace and immortality with the changing seasons. Romantic melancholy inspired the first 'rural' cemeteries...."

-- Back to Nature: The Arcadian Myth in Urban America, Peter J. Schmitt, 1969, p. 67.
   

false values, John Burroughs, 1912

"The show and splendor of great houses, elaborate furnishings, stately halls, oppress me, impose on me. They fix the attention on false values, they set up a false standard of beauty; they stand between me and the real feeders of character and thought."

-- John Burroughs, 1912, "The Gospel of Nature", in Century 84, cited in The Simple Life, Plain Living and High Thinking in American Culture, David E. Shi, 1985/2007, p. 199.
   

differing equalities: Jefferson's and Putin's

"We are all different, but when we ask for the Lord’s blessings, we must not forget that God created us equal." V. V. Putin, Op/Ed NYTimes September 11, 2013

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." US Declaration of Independence, July 2/4, 1776, written mainly by Thomas Jefferson.

the 99% in NY in 1765

"Is it equitable that 99, rather 999, should suffer for the Extravagance or Grandeur of one, especially when it is considered that Men frequently owe their wealth to the impoverishment of their Neighbors?" 

-- From a letter to the editor of the New–York Gazette, cited in The Simple Life, Plain Living and High Thinking in American Culture, David E. Shi, 1985/2007, p. 53.

   
See full text: http://libertystreeteconomics.typepad.com/.a/6a01348793456c970c0167644d814f970b-popup
from http://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2012/04/historical-echoes-we-are-the-99-percent-1765-edition.html
 

"...to defend the subordination or even extermination of..."

"...but in a larger sense the Southerners were sharing in, and taking advantage of, the general shift toward racialist thinking in Europe and the United States. This racialist thinking was used to justify more than the southern institution of slavery. It served to defend the subordination or even extermination of non-European peoples throughout the world and was believed by Europeans to explain the ever-increasing gulf of power and progress that separated them from the peoples they were overrunning."

-- Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism, Reginald, Horsman, 1981, p. 122.
   

Karamzin with Kant, 1789, on future life

Konigsberg, June 19, 1789 [notes of conversation with Immanuel Kant]

"...I [Kant] take comfort in the fact that I am already sixty and that soon I shall reach the end of my life, for I hope to begin another, a better one.
"When I consider the joys I have known, I now feel no pleasure, but when I remember those occasions when I acted in conformity with the moral law inscribed in my heart, I am gladdened. I speak of the moral law. We might call it conscience, a sense of good and evil -- but it exists. I lied. No one knows of my lie, yet I feel ashamed. When we speak of the future life, probability is not certainty; but when we have weighed everything, reason bids us believe in it. And suppose we were to see it with our own eyes, as it were? If we were much taken with it, we would not longer be able to interest ourselves in the present life, but would be in a continuous state of languor. And, in the opposite case, we would not be able to comfort ourselves by saying, midst the trials and tribulations of the present life, 'Perhaps it will be better there!' But when we speak of destiny, of a future life, and so on, we presume the existence of an Eternal Creative Reason which created everything for some purpose and everything good. What? How? But here even the wisest man admits his ignorance. Here reason extinguishes her lamp and we are left in darkness. Only fancy can wander in this darkness and create fictions."

-- Letter of a Russian Traveler, 1789-1790, N. M. Karamzin, [Columbia University Press, NY, 1957], p. 40-41. 
   

"the greatest nation in the history of...", 1840s

"It was unusual by the late 1840s to profess a belief in innate human equality and to challenge the idea that a superior race was about to shape the fates of other races for the future good of the world. To assert this meant challenging not only popular opinion, but also the opinion of most American intellectuals."


-- Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism, Reginald, Horsman, 1981, p. 250.

   

"...could rest easier if the sufferings of other races...", 1830s

"By the 1830s the Americans were eagerly grasping at reasons for their own success and for the failure of others. Although the white Americans of Jacksonian America wanted personal success and wealth, they also wanted a clear conscience. If the United States was to remain in the minds of its people a nation divinely ordained for great deeds, then the fault for the suffering inflicted in the rise to power and prosperity had to lie elsewhere. While Americans could rest easier if the sufferings of other races could be blamed on racial weakness rather than on the white's relentless search for wealth and power."

-- Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism, Reginald, Horsman, 1981, p. 210.
   

Jefferson and the Saxons, 1825

"Near the end of his life, in 1825, Jefferson contrasted the Saxon and the Norman conquests of England  'the former exhibiting the genuine form and political principles of the people constituting the nation, and founded in the rights of man; the latter built on conquest and physical force, not at all affecting moral rights, nor even assented to by the free will of the vanquished. The battle of Hastings, indeed, was lost, but the natural rights of the nation were not staked on the events of a single battle. Their will to recover the Saxon constitution continued unabated.' [TJ letter Oct. 25, 1825]. This view of Anglo-Saxon England was in its way as unreal as those writings which depicted Arthur's England as a Camelot of brave knights, fair ladies, and magic swords, but it persisted in English and American thinking long after Jefferson's death."

-- Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism, Reginald, Horsman, 1981, p. 21.
   

the erred optimism of Mill?

"[Sir James] Stephen's response to [J. S.] Mill, in Liberty, Equality, Fraternity [1873] was that the facts did not support Mill's optimistic view. Look at actual men and you will see that they are a mixed bag, but that on the whole one cannot rely on their non-vicious or non-selfish characteristics. Large numbers of mankind are bad and indifferent, selfish, idle and sensuous, incapable of advance from ignorance through argument and discussion. To bestow liberty on such people does not improve them; nor is it necessarily to their advantage to have freedom to indulge the impulses of their character. Because man's nature is untrustworthy, to grant free rein to it is likely to be socially pernicious rather than beneficial. It is desirable, therefore, upon occasion, perhaps many occasions, to coerce others for our good and theirs."

-- Wilhelm von Humboldt and German Liberalism, A Reassessment, John Roberts, 2009, p. 97.
   

"The consequent German intellectual emphasis on private culture..."

"The French Revolution had revealed, at least in the view of most Germans of the educated class, the disastrous effects of trying to remodel society in accordance with purely rational theories. But, equally, the paternalism of the German principalities was insufficient and even worse, self-defeating, as a means of reforming society to achieve the conditions of human dignity, in that it treated men as means rather than as individuals in themselves. The consequent German intellectual emphasis on private culture reflected disenchantment with the conditions that public life presented. It justified for some (though not for Humboldt and Schiller) a flight from politics when the alternative approaches to political questions appeared either unpalatable, impractical, or both.
"Humboldt's thought is an attempt to make this conception of the cultured man within a civilized society the criterion for the political arrangements of society."

-- Wilhelm von Humboldt and German Liberalism, A Reassessment, John Roberts, 2009, p. 72.
  

Bildung and Kultur, to Herder and Humboldt

"For Herder and [W. v] Humboldt, Bildung, the inner constitution of the individual, and Kultur, the external constitution of the world are not isolated but two elements in one relationship. Kultur revealed in history, speech and knowledge is the outside force with which the individual must unite to find his true individuality. Realising individuality has become the process of assimilating and adapting the external cultural environment into one's own personality."

-- Wilhelm von Humboldt and German Liberalism, A Reassessment, John Roberts, 2009, p. 63-64.
  

W. v Humboldt on Kant vs Jacobi, 1789

"A year later, in October 1789, [Wilhelm von] Humboldt writes that the arguments of [Christian] Wolff have collapsed and 'Kant is the king of the castle.' In fact, the philosophies of Kant and Jacobi were opposed to each other. Kant relied on the intellect and reason to direct men to moral action and Jacobi relied on intuition. Humboldt came to see that Jacobi's system was entirely different from Kant's, and for Humboldt both were inadequate. Kant was too rationalistic, too abstract, placing reliance on a priori reason divorced from the world of sense; Jacobi placed too much reliance on unverifiable feelings with the consequent difficulty of distinguishing truth from delusion."

-- Wilhelm von Humboldt and German Liberalism, A Reassessment, John Roberts, 2009, p. 3. 
  

collegians in '27...

"Students today are much more alike than they were. . . . They wear the same kind of caps, the same cut of trousers, the same variety of 'slickers' and coonskin overcoats -- they talk the same slang and have much the same easy air of knowing the world. You may tell a collegian today whenever you meet him".

-- cited from Eight O'Clock Chapel, 1927, by "two elderly professors", in The American College and the Culture of Aspiration, David Levine, 1988, p. 122.

"the Humanities"?

"The word humanities emerged after 1850 in America as a neologism to describe a kind of elevating, holistic study of literature, music, and art. It derived from the academic meaning of the fifteenth-century word humanity, which distinguished the secular study of Greek and Latin texts (literae humaniores) from theological studies: humanity contrasted with divinity. Humanity in the antebellum era meant primarily study of Greek and Latin texts. But after 1850 it acquired it plural form and hitched itself to those studies that bestowed liberal culture."

-- The Culture of Classicism, Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life 1780-1910, Caroline Winterer, 2002, p. 118.

the stadium versed the serious student

"Athletics played a most important role on the college campus of the 1920s. A football victory set an optimistic tone at many schools in the interwar period. Furthermore, a successful sports program raised the visibility of an institution: it provided a means of entertainment and identification for the local community -- and that community could include an entire state -- as well as for the college's alumni and students. In the eyes of most people, students and others alike, the stadium was the most important building on campus, and the achievements of a school's athletes there overshadowed the achievements of faculty and students in the laboratory and in the classroom.
...
"Amidst the activities and fraternities, one type of student was bound to be unhappy -- the serious student."

-- The American College and the Culture of Aspiration, David Levine, 1988, p. 120, 121.

"...nearer the year 1 than to the year 1900."

"The American boy of 1854," wrote Henry Adams in the early twentieth century, "stood nearer the year 1 than to the year 1900." With those words the historian described the cataclysmic intellectual and social changes that marked the four decades after the Civil War. Like many of his contemporaries, Adams imagined the late nineteenth century as the first truly modern age, distinguished from earlier eras by an almost unbreachable chasm of thought and practice."

-- The Culture of Classicism: Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life 1780-1910, Caroline Winterer, 2002, p. 99.

Goethe, Schleiermacher, Milton

"And when Friedrich [Schlegel] lent him his presentation copy of Schleiermacher's Discourses he read the first two or three with eager admiration of their breadth of culture, but 'the more negligent the style became, and the more Christian the religion, the more this effect changed into its opposite, and finally the whole thing ended in wholesome and cheerful antipathy'. During the summer [1799] he had read Milton's Paradise Lost in the Weimar Park, perhaps seeking guidance for his own attempt in Faust to turn Christian theology to poetic effect, but, though he conceived a considerable respect for Milton, the subject of his epic, for all its advantages of an easy appeal to the faithful, remained in his view 'worm-eaten and hollow within'....If Milton could not help him, Schleiermacher certainly could not either."

-- Goethe: The Poet and the Age: Volume II: Revolution and Renunciation, 1790-1803, Nicolas Boyle, 2000, p. 643.

moonshine on the Ilm, 1799

"For a week the author of 'To the Moon' rose in the middle of the night and from the silent meadows of the Ilm observed that 'so significant object' through a seven-foot telescope made by a local craftsman. 'There was a time when people wanted the emotion of the moon, now they want the sight of it', he later said to Schiller, who acutely remarked on the uncanny tangibility in the telescope of an image that otherwise seemed purely and unapproachably visual. The mystery of Nature only receded, however, it did not vanish."

-- Goethe: The Poet and the Age: Volume II: Revolution and Renunciation, 1790-1803, Nicolas Boyle, 2000, p. 641.

Goethe felt "wakened from a dream"

"But this belief in the journal [Propylaea] as the organ of men of taste throughout the German-speaking world was deeply shaken by the news which Cotta sent Goethe at the end of June [1799]: sales in the first year were no more than 450 an issue, barely enough to cover Goethe's fee, and Cotta had so far lost nearly 2,000 dollars on the venture. Goethe, desperately disappointed, felt 'wakened from a dream'."

-- Goethe: The Poet and the Age: Volume II: Revolution and Renunciation, 1790-1803, Nicolas Boyle, 2000, p. 634.

distraction in Frankfurt am Main, 1797

Frankfurt am Main, 9 August 1797
Goethe to Schiller
 "...the public in a great city*...lives in a constant whirl of getting and spending, and what we call mood ["Stimmung"] can be neither produced not communicated. All entertainments, even the theatre, are there only to provide distraction and the great inclination of the reading public for magazines and novels arises because the former always, and the latter usually furnish a distraction from distraction.... I even think I have noticed a kind of distaste for poetical productions, at least in so far as they are poetical, which on these grounds seems quite natural. Poetry requires, indeed commands concentration, it isolates a person against their will...".

-- Goethe: The Poet and the Age: Volume II: Revolution and Renunciation, 1790-1803, Nicolas Boyle, 2000, p. 543.

* Frankfurt in 1800 had ca. 35,000 inhabitants.
   

Goethe and societal leaders

"Niemand als wer sich ganz verläugnet ist werth zu herrschen, und kan herrschen."
(13 May 1780, Tagebücher)

-- War in Goethe's Writings, Edward T. Larkin, 1992, p. 18.

couch potatoes in late 1700s German-speaking Europe

"Die Mensch is über das Dasein der Pflanze hinausgeschritten und sind nur 'niedrige Menschen, die gern in den Zustand der Pflanze zurückkehren möchten. Sie haben natürlich auch das Schicksal der Pflanzen; alle edlern Triebe, die Muskeln-, Empfindungs-, Geistes- und Willenskraft ermattet; sie leben ein Pflanzenleben und sterben frühzeitigen Pflanzentodes'."

-- citation from Herder, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, 1784-91 (4 Teile), in Die religiöse und die humanitätsphilosophische Bildungsidee und die Entstehung des deutschen Bildungsromans im 18. Jahrhundert, 1934, Ernst Ludwig Stahl, p. 36.
 

the 'Bildung' of a Butterfly

"Das Ideal dieses Bildungsgedankens ist die Koexistenz einer möglichst grossen Anzahl in ihrer eigentümlichen Totalität gebildeter Menschen. Das ist der Zweck menschlichen Lebens. Es ist kein vergeblicher, denn die einmal gebildete Gestalt geht nicht verloren, auch nicht im Tode. Die Grundkraft, aus der die ganze Bildung entspringt, ist eine unsterbliche, sie setzt daher ihr Werk in alle Unendlichkeit fort. Das Dasein nach dem Tode ist eine Fortsetzung des in der Welt begonnenen Lebens, im Grunde ist es ein höherer Ebene stattfindendes Leben der Bildung. Gleichnis dafür ist da Leben der Raupe, die sich in todähnlichen Schlaf einspinnt, und in schönerer Form als Schmetterling erwacht."

-- Die religiöse und die humanitätsphilosophische Bildungsidee und die Entstehung des deutschen Bildungsromans im 18. Jahrhundert, 1934, Ernst Ludwig Stahl, p. 28-29.

the deepest historical transition?

"Die menschliche Bildung erscheint nun nicht mehr als eine durch die Gnadenwirkung Gottes von oben bewirkte Umgestaltung der Seele in Ebenbildlichkeit mit Gott, sondern als eine Gestaltwerdung der Menschlichen Kraft von innen heraus."

-- Die religiöse und die humanitätsphilosophische Bildungsidee und die Entstehung des deutschen Bildungsromans im 18. Jahrhundert, 1934, Ernst Ludwig Stahl, p. 9.
    

the real Goethe?

"In social terms, we could say he was confident there was in him an independent Goethe living like his father on his independent capital, but this bourgeois self was not identifiable with any of its manifestations as courtier and salaried official of an absolute ruler -- or as spokesman of the sentimental and highly philosophical culture which took place, among the subervient German middle classes, of the realistic, novel-centered literature then growing in shopkeeping England."

-- Goethe: The Poet and the Age: Volume II: Revolution and Renunciation, 1790-1803, Nicolas Boyle, 2000, p. 310.

He had come to Rome and not found...

"Goethe admitted that he could not 'say in what specifically the new light consists', and he never tells us what the disease was from which he had been cured, but we may take it that it was something like the hope of fulfilment in which he had been traveling since September [1786], the yearning that had gnawed at his heart since his youth. But the yearning had been cured not through being satisfied, but through his recognizing, and refusing any longer to tolerate, the unreality of its object. He had come to Rome and not found what he was looking for, and that, he thought, was his great discovery. He had set out on a 'symbolical' journey, and at its end had discovered the limits on the world's willingness to be filled with his own personal meaning. He had come looking for culmination, enjoyment, and a revelatory immediacy of experience, and he had found, or thought he had found, the need for study, informed understanding, and hard work."

-- Goethe: The Poet and the Age, Vol. I: The Poetry of Desire, Nicholas Boyle, 1991, p. 441.

"By thinking you get old."

"Why do you think so much? A man should never think. By thinking you get old." [Count Cesarei to Goethe, ~October 22, 1786, in the carriage nearing Florence.]

-- Cited in Goethe: The Poet and the Age, Vol. I: The Poetry of Desire, Nicholas Boyle, 1991, p. 430.

the story of Genesis

"Over the generations, the ways that people have understood Genesis tend to correlate with the ways that people have understood reality. It is not just that Genesis provides an account of the origins of reality -- which it does -- but that the kinds of meaning that people expect to find in Genesis are the same kind that they expect in the world outside of the book. In other words, the ways that people perceive Genesis both shape and reflect their perception of reality. What is perhaps surprising is how radically these ways of perceiving Genesis and reality have changed over time,..."

-- The Book of Genesis: A Biography, Ronald Hendel, 2013, p. 8.

bemasked in 1780s Weimar

"The isolation of a self cut off from a society into which it sends only masks, or 'figure', is a recurrent refrain in Goethe's letters in the early Weimar period, which only intensifies after his move to the apparently more social world of the house on Frauenplan."

-- Goethe: The Poet and the Age, Vol. I: The Poetry of Desire, Nicholas Boyle, 1991, p. 351.

"...frozen icons of the artist's self?"

"Is the mortal, transient artist the servant of an independent world-order which stretches before and after him, to whose laws he acknowledges himself subject and parts of which are imitated in his works? If so, a realistic, objective, living art is possible, of the kind we associate with Homer or Shakespeare (or perhaps, outside Germany, with the nineteenth-century novel). But if not, if the artist remains an autonomous creator, acknowledging no ordering force except that which he finds within him, can his work ever escape from its dependence upon him? Must it not remain...frozen icons of the artist's self?"

-- Goethe: The Poet and the Age, Vol. I: The Poetry of Desire, Nicholas Boyle, 1991, p. 165-166.

Goethe or Christ, ca. 1771

"What was the origin of this sudden access of meaning-creating power? It is surely not difficult to see it in Goethe's simultaneous and conscious detachment from religious belief. Released from the pursuit by the Saviour, and so from any specific obligation to 'imitate' Christ, or to appropriate either the great symbolic acts of His Life, or the symbolic rites which the Church derives from them to articulate all lives, the self-moving monadic soul is free to define its own sacred times and places and actions, to mark the stages of its endless desire, or 'appetition'. The mechanism for the construction of meaning remains that of Christianity -- a life with symbolic episodes, a literature referring to that life both in prophecy and in retrospective interpretation -- but it becomes available for the soul to use only if Christ is displaced from His privileged position: the soul has a meaningful life of its own only in so far as it is not a follower of Christ -- it is necessarily antagonistic to His rival claims. The rejection, however, of so powerful and established a model creates what might be called a problem of objectivity. The significant events of Christ's life are grounded in secular history and are the fulfillment of the Law and the Prophets, while the preaching and sacraments which the Church has based upon them have an application proved in myriads of lives. What confidence can Goethe have that the meaning he finds in his non-Christian life and literature and reputation is similarly well-founded? What guarantees that his permanently renewed efforts at self-understanding do issue in truth, that he is not just telling endlessly adaptable and multipliable stories about himself, not just painting the walls of his Sentimentalist prison?"

-- Goethe: The Poet and the Age, Vol. I: The Poetry of Desire, Nicholas Boyle, 1991, p. 109-110.

the earliest example of the transfer of religious terminology to a secular application

"There are in particular two major features of Germany's developing literature in the period of Goethe' youth -- say,  until 1770 -- which are interesting precisely because of the extent to which, for all their importance (usually ignored by the official accounts), they do not determine the original direction of Goethe's unique talent. The first is the earliest example of the transfer of religious terminology to a secular application: the growth of German aesthetic theory (the ex-theology of an ex-clerisy), the establishment of the concepts 'literature', 'art' in general, 'artistic genius', and, the religious term in which thirty years of philosophizing are eventually focused, 'artistic creativity'."

-- Goethe: The Poet and the Age, Vol. I: The Poetry of Desire, Nicholas Boyle, 1991, p. 26.

valuable real estate: hell

"In response to those who believed that virtue was its own reward, it was commonly argued that this was insufficient motive for the moral life; morality needed to be supported by fear of divine justice. Some preachers feared that sin was so attractive, and the possibility of avoiding the evil consequence here on earth so great, that without the curb of retribution vice would predominate even more than it did. In fact, the belief in the value of hell as a deterrent for immoral behavior was one of the major reasons why the doctrine of hell was so rarely attacked in the seventeenth century."

-- Shaftesbury's Philosophy of Religion and Ethics -- A Study in Enthusiasm, Stanley Grean, 1967, p. 188.

Whence??, Whither??, Why??

"...the metaphysical thrill was a genuine and frequent experience of unbelievers in Germany long before the Romantics. As to the philosophers, Heine was not far wrong when he wrote in Die Romantische Schule that German philosophy, though it now claimed a place by the side of the Protestant Church, or even above it, was nevertheless only its daughter, and literary men too, sometimes unconsciously, were concerned to answer just those questions about life which their childhood religion had made all important for them, but which today, for many English philosophers at least, seem to be literally without meaning, so much do our intellectual interests depend on the intellectual climate we are in."

-- Culture and Society in Classical Weimar 1775-1806, W. H. Bruford, 1962, p. 28.

Paris, June 1843

Paris, 19 June 1843
[Jacob Burckhardt to Willibald Beyschlag]

"As for Paris, it is far from making the historic impression which one expects of it. In spite of the foolish love which French art and Paris society show for the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, everyone is anxiously on the look-out for what is most modern, and a hundred life-size advertisements cry down every memory of the past at all the classical spots in the town. One only gets a mythical notion of the first Revolution; on the whole, Paris is far more absorbed in an anxious care for the future than in recollections of its past, although the individual memorials are legion. I do not think it can be very long before there is another explosion. In the meantime everyone is living from day to day, that is the predominating impression."

-- The Letters of Jacob Burckhardt, ed. Alexander Dru, 1955, p. 81-82.