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.