I too have my indignant hours, but I hide them because impotent indignation is ridiculous. Because I couldn't be proud, I became humble to save myself the shame of becoming mean.
His tenderness is melancholy tinged with decency, his tranquility has the flavour of resignation.
Born to love, damned to indifference.
People speak ill of lotteries without thinking that they are the only form of speculation known to the poor. To ban the Sunday draw would be to deprive men and women whom reality has given nothing anyway of the entire field of dreams.
Reason, put to sleep so clumsily, let its cry ring out more than once in the middle of the orgy of heartfelt emotion.
In winning a loving heart, you gain a fruitful grateful field, where you reap more in happiness than you sow in hopes.
Too much trust often proves stupid, too much mistrust always proves a misery.
The experience had excited both his heart and his mind, like a stone thrown into a swamp.
The wild shoots of his mean spirit shot up suddenly as he was struck by the sunbeams of unexpected good fortune.
Too weak either to better himself or become a total scumbag, he wanders along the broad path between regret and impenitence.
Ivy-like soul which has to have something to coil round and in its needy coiling takes every stick for a cedar tree.
The body is the stubborn worshipper of life and rebels against the soul's graveyard hankerings.
He has a son - you know the sort of thing that happens to so many fathers.
In his case faults and weaknesses are wild flowers, not poison weeds.
Ghosts whose spirits stray about after the bodies they've sloughed off have been laid in earth are not that terrifying. But the innumerable ghosts who have buried their spirits - who have carried their better selves to an earthly grave and pursue their haunting activities in broad daylight by means of bodies without the least trace of spirit or wit - now, they're scary.
Superstition and fear are the Muses of feeble spirits.
To be done with the interregnum of boredom and set mind, spirit, wit on the throne again.
To avoid frightening people, fate sometimes assumes the mercurial expression of pure chance.
The nightingale of love likes best to strike up its song in the dark grove of the forbidden - only rarely on the military road of duty.
The past is my capital, memory the interest I live off.
The deeper I plumb the dark domain of my ideas, the more surely I come upon the abyss of my contradictions.
Love is a dream, marriage a business.
We lost what was ours by nobler means than she won what's hers.
Illusions take leave of the human heart slowly, in single drops.
Don't take the false steps of the spirit for necessities of the heart.
Female enthusiast gazes at the moon and recalls the time when she and the earth still had something in common.
A true businessman is a great oddity - what we're talking about is a man who has forced his entire being into the columns of a double-entry account - who has made of himself an artificial calculating machine - who has torn his heart painfully from his breast, has trampled all the fair flowers of life into the ground just as he has its illusions, who has put down pebble-mix over his earthly portion of the garden of paradise so he can stack up bundles of saleable produce - having become an artifical being, hearkening no more to the nightingale's song, etc. . .
While reality howls like a storm the ideal slumbers serenely in the whisper-filled chamber of the imagination.
How lavishly he expresses in twenty sublime words what can be said in a single syllable - he's obviously gifted as an author.
(Trans. C.S.)
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
Monday, December 21, 2009
Adam Soboczynski: Down with Bologna! (Die Zeit, November 26)
[For all who look on with consternation at that vast process of macadamisation (astroturfing?) taking place within Australia's once-venerable universities, voilà a comment about the mother of all attempts to wind back universities' social and intellectual functions, taking place in Europe. Some of the most malign effects are being felt in the nation that, in a grand act of cultural high-mindedness some two centuries ago, gave birth to the modern university system. However the endeavour to contest bureaucratic efforts to consign higher education to the iron cage would appear to be Europe-wide. CS]
Is the noble student idler making a comeback? For years universities have been trying to make better, more efficient human beings out of German students. Their cumbersome degrees have been made tauter, their performance is now being controlled down to the finest details, their timetables are tightly packed. But recently the damned good-for-nothings have been blocking the lecture theatres and taking to the streets with all sorts of colourful demands: They don’t want to pay student fees. They say new courses are over-regulated and should be abolished. They say they can’t freely grow and thrive. In short: German students want the idle life again.
And they are completely justified. There’s an honourable tradition at German universities, mainly in the humanities, of studying a bit of this and that with no particular direction. Apart from anything else, it also goes back far too far to be eliminated within a few years. When the American writer Mark Twain visited Heidelberg in 1878 he was amazed how few regulations there were at German universities. Students, he noted, “are not admitted to university for a determinate period of time and so it’s probable that they’ll switch courses. They don’t need to sit exams to be admitted to university. . . They just pay an admission fee of five or ten dollars, receive a student card that gives them access to the university’s facilities and that’s all there is to it. They choose the subjects they want to study and enrol in the course, but they can also take a break from coming to lectures when they like.”
Ten years ago, these observations, made over 130 years ago, would still have characterised German students exactly. Fashionably put, the idle life was the student’s sole psychological indicator. And the idle life, if you look at it properly, by no means meant laziness (which there no doubt was as well), but a way of life that was bound to conjure up social envy: German students happily stopped coming to seminars given by uninspired professors. With a keenness that went beyond all reason, they devoted themselves to their own particular likings, expressed their preferences for the classes of charismatic lecturers (which in those days they could still for the most part freely choose), read Kafka stories with curious abandon and then two semesters later handed in a 60-page assignment that was not just accepted without complaint but also given top marks – something that today would already be impossible for logistical reasons.
If a few of the official tasks that the student idler had to complete were unpleasant, then they were the kind of business he sat through with mocking lack of interest – end-of-semester grades had no bearing on the grade he graduated with. He was hard-working in a way you can only actually call idling in the sense of actively idling around, being on the look-out. And now and again it was precisely those students who had favoured wild, undirected or unforced ways of thinking, disruptive individualism or originality, who went on to careers. Those who shunned precisely what today’s universities consider their holiest values: set courses with set contact hours and set fees, professionally relevant practice-exercises, standards of comparison and control, an administrative apparatus that runs rings round itself in its mad desire to evaluate and accredit; mechanical attempts to attract funds from third parties via time-consuming applications; inter-disciplinary go-getting which has a whiff of the collective farm about it and is the opposite of self-contained intellectualism and learned poise (these have no measurable market-value and so are scorned).
In other words, there was a degree of disorder, of stubborn self-assertion, of smoke-blown lack of bourgeois conformity within universities which couldn’t but incense the reformers who came to widespread prominence in the 90’s, the well-schooled financial advisers, who were concerned about German competitiveness. It was regularly commented that the reformers’ zeal had its origins in the very latest brand of free market radicalism. Indeed, no one actually even took the trouble to conceal it in the new bachelors and masters degrees: student performance is calculated according to “workload”, that is to say according to the amount of labour involved, students collect “credit points”, universities’ stated aims are defined using the plastic language of “mobility”, “flexibility”, “practical relevance” and “competition”.
Is the noble student idler making a comeback? For years universities have been trying to make better, more efficient human beings out of German students. Their cumbersome degrees have been made tauter, their performance is now being controlled down to the finest details, their timetables are tightly packed. But recently the damned good-for-nothings have been blocking the lecture theatres and taking to the streets with all sorts of colourful demands: They don’t want to pay student fees. They say new courses are over-regulated and should be abolished. They say they can’t freely grow and thrive. In short: German students want the idle life again.
And they are completely justified. There’s an honourable tradition at German universities, mainly in the humanities, of studying a bit of this and that with no particular direction. Apart from anything else, it also goes back far too far to be eliminated within a few years. When the American writer Mark Twain visited Heidelberg in 1878 he was amazed how few regulations there were at German universities. Students, he noted, “are not admitted to university for a determinate period of time and so it’s probable that they’ll switch courses. They don’t need to sit exams to be admitted to university. . . They just pay an admission fee of five or ten dollars, receive a student card that gives them access to the university’s facilities and that’s all there is to it. They choose the subjects they want to study and enrol in the course, but they can also take a break from coming to lectures when they like.”
Ten years ago, these observations, made over 130 years ago, would still have characterised German students exactly. Fashionably put, the idle life was the student’s sole psychological indicator. And the idle life, if you look at it properly, by no means meant laziness (which there no doubt was as well), but a way of life that was bound to conjure up social envy: German students happily stopped coming to seminars given by uninspired professors. With a keenness that went beyond all reason, they devoted themselves to their own particular likings, expressed their preferences for the classes of charismatic lecturers (which in those days they could still for the most part freely choose), read Kafka stories with curious abandon and then two semesters later handed in a 60-page assignment that was not just accepted without complaint but also given top marks – something that today would already be impossible for logistical reasons.
If a few of the official tasks that the student idler had to complete were unpleasant, then they were the kind of business he sat through with mocking lack of interest – end-of-semester grades had no bearing on the grade he graduated with. He was hard-working in a way you can only actually call idling in the sense of actively idling around, being on the look-out. And now and again it was precisely those students who had favoured wild, undirected or unforced ways of thinking, disruptive individualism or originality, who went on to careers. Those who shunned precisely what today’s universities consider their holiest values: set courses with set contact hours and set fees, professionally relevant practice-exercises, standards of comparison and control, an administrative apparatus that runs rings round itself in its mad desire to evaluate and accredit; mechanical attempts to attract funds from third parties via time-consuming applications; inter-disciplinary go-getting which has a whiff of the collective farm about it and is the opposite of self-contained intellectualism and learned poise (these have no measurable market-value and so are scorned).
In other words, there was a degree of disorder, of stubborn self-assertion, of smoke-blown lack of bourgeois conformity within universities which couldn’t but incense the reformers who came to widespread prominence in the 90’s, the well-schooled financial advisers, who were concerned about German competitiveness. It was regularly commented that the reformers’ zeal had its origins in the very latest brand of free market radicalism. Indeed, no one actually even took the trouble to conceal it in the new bachelors and masters degrees: student performance is calculated according to “workload”, that is to say according to the amount of labour involved, students collect “credit points”, universities’ stated aims are defined using the plastic language of “mobility”, “flexibility”, “practical relevance” and “competition”.
Sunday, December 6, 2009
The Art of Having Something to Say: Part 6: Schopenhauer
“Oh, for a spot of old-fashioned misanthropy in this unhappy world of notional positivities, of personal and home improvement, of progress that is less than half believed in, of universal fellowship and respect that never seem to work out. . .”
If we were not all so excessively interested in ourselves, life would be so uninteresting that none of us would be able to endure it.
He who does not enjoy solitude will not love freedom.
Everybody’s friend is nobody’s.
Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.
Every parting gives a foretaste of death; every re-meeting a foretaste of the resurrection. That is why even people who are indifferent to each other rejoice so much if they meet again after twenty or thirty years of separation.
When dealing with fools and blockheads there is but one way of showing your intelligence – by having nothing to do with them.
We have not so much to find a correct mean between the two views as rather gain the higher standpoint from which such views disappear of themselves.
Excluding those faces which are beautiful, good-natured, or intellectual – and these are few and far between – I believe that a person of any sensibility hardly ever sees a new face without a sensation akin to shock at encountering a new and surprising combination of unedifying elements.
humour . . . to do honour to which in the midst of this mercilessly ambiguous existence of ours hardly a single page could be too serious. . .
All truth passes through three phases. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
The animals are the damned of this earth and human beings their devilish tormentors.
The inexhaustible activity of thought! finding ever new material to work upon in the multifarious phenomena of self and nature, and able and ready to form new combinations of them, - there you have something that invigorates the mind, and apart from moments of relaxation, sets if far above the reach of boredom.
In solitude, where everyone is thrown back upon his own resources, what a man has in himself comes to light; the fool in fine raiment groans under the burden of his miserable personality, a burden which he can never throw off, whilst the man of talent peoples the waste places with his animating thoughts.
By a peculiar weakness of human nature, people generally think too much about the opinion which others form of them; although the slightest reflection will show that this opinion, whatever it may be, is not essential to happiness. Therefore it is hard to understand why everybody feels so very pleased when he sees that other people have a good opinion of him, or say anything flattering to his vanity. If you stroke a cat, it will purr; and, as inevitably, if you praise a man, a sweet expression of delight will appear on his face; and even though the praise is a palpable lie, it will be welcome, if the matter is one on which he prides himself. If only other people will applaud him, a man may console himself for downright misfortune or for the pittance he gets from the two sources of human happiness already discussed [what he is in himself; what he possesses]: and conversely, it is astonishing how infallibly a man will be annoyed, and in some cases deeply pained, by any wrong done to his feeling of self-importance, whatever be the nature, degree, or circumstances of the injury, or by any depreciation, slight, or disregards.
The world as representation, if we consider it in isolation, by tearing ourselves from willing, and letting it alone take possession of our consciousness, is the most delightful, and the only innocent, side of life. We have to regard art as the greater enhancement, the more perfect development, of all this; for essentially it achieves just the same thing as is achieved by the visible world itself, only with greater concentration, perfection, intention and intelligence; and therefore, in the full sense of the word, it may be called the flower of life. If the whole world as representation is only the visibility of the will, then art is the elucidation of this visibility, the camera obscura which shows the objects more purely, and enables us to survey and comprehend them better. It is the play within the play, the stage on the stage in Hamlet.
Ah, the life of a professor of philosophy is indeed a hard one! First he must dance to the tune of ministers and, when he has done so really well, he can still be assailed from without by those ferocious man-eaters, the real philosophers.
There still exists the old fundamentally false contrast between spirit and matter among the philosophically untutored who include all who have not studied the Kantian philosophy and consequently most foreigners and likewise many present-day medical men and others in Germany who confidently philosophise on the basis of their catechism. But in particular, the Hegelians, in consequence of their egregious ignorance and philosophical crudeness, have recently introduced that contrast under the name “spirit and nature” which has been resuscitated from pre-Kantian times. Under this title they serve it up quite as naively as if there had never been a Kant and we were still going about in full-bottomed wigs between clipped hedges and philosophising, like Leibniz in the garden at Herrenhausen, on “spirit and nature” with princesses and maids of honour, understanding by “nature” the clipped hedges and by “spirit” the contents of the periwigs. On the assumption of this false contrast, we then have spiritualists and materialists. The latter assert that, through its form and combination, matter produces everything and consequently the thinking and willing in man, whereat the former then raise a great outcry.
Not fame, but that which deserves to be famous, is what a man should hold in esteem.
Light is not visible unless it meets with something to reflect it and talent is sure of itself only when its fame is noised abroad.
He who deserves fame without getting it possesses by far the more important element of happiness, which should console him for the loss of the other.
When modesty was made a virtue it was a very advantageous thing for the fools, for everybody is expected to speak of himself as if he were one.
The present alone is true and actual; it is the only time which possesses full reality, and our existence lies in it exclusively. Therefore we should always be glad of it and give it the welcome it deserves, and enjoy every hour that is bearable by its freedom from pain and annoyance with a full consciousness of its value.
If we were not all so excessively interested in ourselves, life would be so uninteresting that none of us would be able to endure it.
He who does not enjoy solitude will not love freedom.
Everybody’s friend is nobody’s.
Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.
Every parting gives a foretaste of death; every re-meeting a foretaste of the resurrection. That is why even people who are indifferent to each other rejoice so much if they meet again after twenty or thirty years of separation.
When dealing with fools and blockheads there is but one way of showing your intelligence – by having nothing to do with them.
We have not so much to find a correct mean between the two views as rather gain the higher standpoint from which such views disappear of themselves.
Excluding those faces which are beautiful, good-natured, or intellectual – and these are few and far between – I believe that a person of any sensibility hardly ever sees a new face without a sensation akin to shock at encountering a new and surprising combination of unedifying elements.
humour . . . to do honour to which in the midst of this mercilessly ambiguous existence of ours hardly a single page could be too serious. . .
All truth passes through three phases. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
The animals are the damned of this earth and human beings their devilish tormentors.
The inexhaustible activity of thought! finding ever new material to work upon in the multifarious phenomena of self and nature, and able and ready to form new combinations of them, - there you have something that invigorates the mind, and apart from moments of relaxation, sets if far above the reach of boredom.
In solitude, where everyone is thrown back upon his own resources, what a man has in himself comes to light; the fool in fine raiment groans under the burden of his miserable personality, a burden which he can never throw off, whilst the man of talent peoples the waste places with his animating thoughts.
By a peculiar weakness of human nature, people generally think too much about the opinion which others form of them; although the slightest reflection will show that this opinion, whatever it may be, is not essential to happiness. Therefore it is hard to understand why everybody feels so very pleased when he sees that other people have a good opinion of him, or say anything flattering to his vanity. If you stroke a cat, it will purr; and, as inevitably, if you praise a man, a sweet expression of delight will appear on his face; and even though the praise is a palpable lie, it will be welcome, if the matter is one on which he prides himself. If only other people will applaud him, a man may console himself for downright misfortune or for the pittance he gets from the two sources of human happiness already discussed [what he is in himself; what he possesses]: and conversely, it is astonishing how infallibly a man will be annoyed, and in some cases deeply pained, by any wrong done to his feeling of self-importance, whatever be the nature, degree, or circumstances of the injury, or by any depreciation, slight, or disregards.
The world as representation, if we consider it in isolation, by tearing ourselves from willing, and letting it alone take possession of our consciousness, is the most delightful, and the only innocent, side of life. We have to regard art as the greater enhancement, the more perfect development, of all this; for essentially it achieves just the same thing as is achieved by the visible world itself, only with greater concentration, perfection, intention and intelligence; and therefore, in the full sense of the word, it may be called the flower of life. If the whole world as representation is only the visibility of the will, then art is the elucidation of this visibility, the camera obscura which shows the objects more purely, and enables us to survey and comprehend them better. It is the play within the play, the stage on the stage in Hamlet.
Ah, the life of a professor of philosophy is indeed a hard one! First he must dance to the tune of ministers and, when he has done so really well, he can still be assailed from without by those ferocious man-eaters, the real philosophers.
There still exists the old fundamentally false contrast between spirit and matter among the philosophically untutored who include all who have not studied the Kantian philosophy and consequently most foreigners and likewise many present-day medical men and others in Germany who confidently philosophise on the basis of their catechism. But in particular, the Hegelians, in consequence of their egregious ignorance and philosophical crudeness, have recently introduced that contrast under the name “spirit and nature” which has been resuscitated from pre-Kantian times. Under this title they serve it up quite as naively as if there had never been a Kant and we were still going about in full-bottomed wigs between clipped hedges and philosophising, like Leibniz in the garden at Herrenhausen, on “spirit and nature” with princesses and maids of honour, understanding by “nature” the clipped hedges and by “spirit” the contents of the periwigs. On the assumption of this false contrast, we then have spiritualists and materialists. The latter assert that, through its form and combination, matter produces everything and consequently the thinking and willing in man, whereat the former then raise a great outcry.
Not fame, but that which deserves to be famous, is what a man should hold in esteem.
Light is not visible unless it meets with something to reflect it and talent is sure of itself only when its fame is noised abroad.
He who deserves fame without getting it possesses by far the more important element of happiness, which should console him for the loss of the other.
When modesty was made a virtue it was a very advantageous thing for the fools, for everybody is expected to speak of himself as if he were one.
The present alone is true and actual; it is the only time which possesses full reality, and our existence lies in it exclusively. Therefore we should always be glad of it and give it the welcome it deserves, and enjoy every hour that is bearable by its freedom from pain and annoyance with a full consciousness of its value.
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