Recommended: Pizza Toast & Coffee (Thanks to Alan Jacobs, @ayjay)
The Devotees of Expediency
From Albert Jay Nock’s (1937) Free Speech and Plain Language: I had a desultory talk with one devotee of expediency not long ago, a good friend and a thoroughly excellent man. He was all worked up over the activities of Communists and what he called pink Socialists, especially in the colleges and churches. He said they were corrupting the youth, and he was strong for having them coerced into silence.
From Theodor Haecker’s (1950) Journal in the Night: “There are periods when men are skeptical of the deductions which their reason is capable of drawing. Today that is not so. The consequences deduced from the most threadbare ‘scientific’ hypothesis are looked upon as though they were eternal truths.”
From Theodor Haecker’s (1950) Journal in the Night: “Beware of the terrible light-hearted simplifiers – both theoretical and practical. They create the most hopeless confusion imaginable, in the long run.”
(Soon at IWP Books)
Man, Suffering, Striving, Doing
From the Introduction (by Alexander Dru) to Haecker’s Journal in the Night: It is here that the importance of Burckhardt can hardly be exaggerated. Burckhardt composed no universal history, though his Reflections have been included under that heading. But in everything he wrote, and particularly in his Greek Culture, he is concerned with the unity of history framed, as it were, between the alpha and the omega, between the origins and the end.
Alan Jacobs (@ayjay) on Illusions and Their Removal.
Wisdom Weighed
From Liberal Humanism’s Lost World by Michael Knox Beran: Trilling cataloged the self-deceptions of the progressives. First, they mistook their desire for power — an “impulse toward moral aggrandizement” — for virtue. Second, they pretended that their effort to rethink American culture was constructive. In their “growing intellectuality — or rather, intellectualism,” they put every “aspect of existence” under a microscope. “Not only politics, but child-rearing, the sexual life, the life of the psyche, the innermost part of existence was subject to ideation,” to a rationalizing effort to make culture conform to abstract ideas.
From Allan Janik & Stephen Toulmin’s (1973) Wittgenstein’s Vienna:
When Kraus called for a critique of language, as the crucial instrument of thought, he did so with a moral hatred for that slovenliness in thought and expression which is the enemy of individual integrity, and leaves one defenseless against the political deceptions of corrupt and hypocritical men. But Kraus’s one-man crusade to restore the honesty of social debate had wider implications also. Very soon it woke echoes in other fields of intellectual and artistic activity, and broadened into the demand for a critique of the means of expression used in all fields – for example, for a stripping-away of all that conventional and meaningless decoration with which sentimentality had encumbered the creative arts, so as to restore the expressive capacities they needed in order to fulfill their original and proper functions once again. How could any ‘medium’ be adequate to any ‘message’? How could anything whatever serve as a means of expressing or symbolizing anything else? All over the artistic and intellectual field, we find men taking up this same critique. In what sense if any could music (for example), or painting, or architecture, or everyday language, be regarded as a ‘representation,’ or Darstellung? And what alternative ‘symbolic function’ could it be said to have? All those issues which Marshall McLuhan has popularized in the last few years were debated with far greater seriousness and rigor in the Vienna of Kraus and Boltzmann, Loos and Schonberg.
Currently Reading: Wittgenstein’s Vienna by Allan Janik & Stephen Toulmin 📚
Arrived: Thomas Browne: Selected Writings 📚
Ted Gioia: “This is James Daunt’s super power: He loves books.”
Not a Leg to Stand On by Theodore Dalrymple.
Soon at IWP Books: Theodor Haecker’s (1950) Journal in the Night.
From Theodor Haecker (1950) Journal in the Dark: “The essence of modern dictatorship is the combination of one-dimensional, flat thinking with power and terror.”
The Voice of Wisdom
From Erwin Chargaff’s (1986) Serious Questions: An ABC of Skeptical Reflections: In earlier days, when I was still what they call teaching at a university, I was sometimes asked questions that showed me the depth of misery over which the seemingly carefree, youthful mind was suspended. Not being a licensed guru I refrained from advice but, occasionally, out of the not very bulky fullness of my own experience, I could say a few words.
New at IWP Books: Erwin Chargaff’s (1986) Serious Questions: An ABC of Skeptical Reflections.
From Theodor Haecker’s (1950) Journal in the Night: “The soul of the man who only has ears for the noise of these times will soon be miserably impoverished. He will soon be found to be deaf to all reasonable language.”
From Erwin Chargaff’s (1986) Serious Questions: “Clearly, a chase has been declared on that odious three-letter word, and I expect soon to encounter woperson for woman, huperson for human, personhole for manhole, to personage for to manage, etc. I find the idea that you can scrabble your way to a new consciousness ridiculous. If this form of linguistic Luddism is not stopped by its own absurdity, we may still hear of Hebrews and Shebrews.”
From Erwin Chargaff’s (1986) Serious Questions: “…I fear that, if we continue our efforts in the direction that we have given them during the last fifty years, the prediction made by Thomas Love Peacock more that one hundred and twenty years ago may well come true: ‘I almost think it is the ultimate destiny of science to exterminate the human race.’”
From Theodor Haecker’s (1950) Journal in the Night: “What is the most difficult thing for men? Measure: ‘the golden mean’. And this is true in theory, in teaching as in practice, in doing and acting. And that makes one despair that things will go better after this war. Those with a sense of measure will not have the power to make the peace, and those who have the power will make peace without ‘measure’.”
From Theodor Haecker’s (1950) Journal in the Night: “It is difficult enough to know one’s way about in one’s own thoughts; how much more difficult where one’s feelings are concerned.”
Alan Jacobs (@ayjay): “Please read this from Anne Snyder about all the cool and important things she is (we are) doing with Comment.”
More or Less Complete Rubbish
From Erwin Chargaff’s (1986) Serious Questions (Soon at IWP Books): I know many people who, besides listening to the radio, spend at least three hours a day before the television set. That means that they spend nearly one month and a half in a year on this form of amusement. If they do that for fifty years, they have expended six and a quarter years of their lives sitting before that box, imbibing more or less complete rubbish.
In Prayer and in Leadership
From Theodor Haecker’s (1950) Journal in the Night: Man, it seems, is not equal to setting up a just social order on his own. He is hardly able even to perceive the two principles upon which he has to build, namely that men are equal and unequal and consequently that he must be true to both principles. As a rule he prefers the easier way and takes only one as his starting point: either equality, or inequality.