Aphoristic Mixed Dips

The majority of Australians gifted with abnormal intelligence use it striving to be more normal than everybody else. The rest use it striving to be more abnormal than they already were.

 

Although we share fundamental beliefs, we differ on the fundamentals. I believe they should be articulated, he thinks articulating them is a crime.

How often has it come about that psychoanalysis has neuroticised the patient so that it may better learn what it feels it ought to talk to him about?

You have an inalienable right to beat up on yourself. But like most rights I have no idea where it comes from.

A true convention is one that people don’t know they’re scared to death of transgressing – until it passes away, when they become scared to death by its absence.

Moral philosophy. Every man his own police officer.

To annihilate clichés, to speak past them as if they never existed, to play with truth as with a theme are the three main works of genius. The work of journalism in general is turning truth into clichés, the speciality of the arts pages is discovering truth in cliché.

A man discovers what he thinks is a pandemic viral strain. But all he has to describe it are euphemisms and clichés. These communicate themselves. Everyone instantaneously catches the disease.

 

The easiest way of overcoming vulgarity is becoming a snob. 

The heavenly dispensation represented by the reign of communications technology will be a paradise indistinguishable at times from a devilish conspiracy to keep our dear ones at a distance, to garble their words of encouragement, to blur and invert their looks of warmth and love, to translate their deeds into gestures and their gestures into signs of problems.

My philosophy is a reflex to work off the bad impressions other people’s thoughts have made on me.

The essential work required in preparing to write a book is marshalling all the useable prejudices you have at your disposal.

The miners survived because of their inadvertent discovery of a Land of Culture they claim to have broken through to from their rocky prison 1km beneath the ground, the air of which they found they could breathe. In such assertions the public, the journos and tv crews easily recognize the true signs of death and proclaim a miracle – the miners’ rebirth from the spirit of mateship and egalitarianism, communicated to the subterranean regions via numberless media of hope and love.

In my notebook I write down all the errors and partialities I have at any time been subject to in the hope that I may no longer be subject to them and so that the foolish and the desperate might one day consider them a higher work of art that never bothered to compose itself.

A book that didn’t spend the main part of its gestation a lone affair of the author is an offence against the shame of book-writing.

The Armstrongians are those who begin inspired by Goethe’s universality and end trying to imitate his stolidity.

Never feel obliged by another man’s metaphors. Freedom consists in an essential sense in a relation to language.

A moralist threw a dress-up party the theme of which was mortal sin. Micky came as lust, tried groping the breasts of the hostess and was thrown out.

Australians have no traditions. But we mean them.

In comedy all misunderstandings are honourable occasions.

Most men and women who once acted with a degree of social or intellectual independence nowadays have to be their own secretaries. Which means they have to do the bidding of super-secretaries from marketing and accounts. The latter don't wield power absolutely, they wield it super-absolutely, mechanistically - in such a way that its cruelties, irrationalities and inanities appear to happen of their own accord.

His sabbatical was the intellectually most desperate six months of his life. He had no female undergraduates to garner ideas about himself from.

The bourgeois believes that culture consists in having good intentions.

The yob believes culture is an unsubstantiated pretence.

The snob believes culture consists in showing the yobs who’s who.

The intellectual believes culture is society’s duty to pay him enough to read books so that he can buy other books.

To the aesthete culture is the temple before which he stands guard – as one of the temple slaves.

To the artist it is a genuine mood in which his highest feelings and his darkest thoughts can equally have life and which, apart from that, he often curses.

The closest the bourgeois gets to revenging himself on his country for its injustices is having the newspaper delivered.

Animals are more truly amused by tv than any human being I know. They intuitively realise that what they see there are just human beings forming colourful patterns by going through the motions. Whereas human beings can’t help looking to tv for signs of a reality beyond tv that is either not there in any sense or that tv itself induces to purport to exist.

To resist the compulsion to abbreviate is the closest you can come to civil disobedience. Spelling your words is conscientious objection to the war on language being conducted every day by means of language.

Undergrad philosophy has degenerated into giving reasons why the young people might like to study philosophy. These are taken to be sufficient. The young people don’t bother any further with philosophy.

The explanatory/scientific = to trace the unknown back to the known.
The mystic/artistic = to re-submit the known to the tribunal of the unknown and unknowable.

G. Flaubert - The Dictionary of Received Ideas

My favourites from Flaubert's Dictionary of Platitutes - superbly translated and annotated (1954) by Edward J. Fluck ["pronounce 'fluke'; if in front of a literature class, snigger briefly and say 'it must have had it's advantages'".' GF]. If anyone would like to pick their own favourites, let's compare lists. (CS) 

Absinthe - An extra-virulent poison: one glass, and you are dead. Journalists drink it while they write their articles. Has killed more soldiers than the Bedouins.

Apartment (Batchelor's) - Always in disorder, with feminine effects trailing here and there. Aroma of cigarettes. Extraordinary things are to be found in one.

Artists - Are all dilettantes. Praise their disinterest in money matters (obsolete idea). Express surprise over the fact that they dress like everybody else (obsolete idea). They make heaps of money, but throw it out the window. Often invited to dine in town. A woman artist is definitely a whore. What artists do can't be called work.

Baldness - Always precocious, is caused by loose living during one's youth or by entertaining lofty thoughts.

Chiaroscuro - One doesn't know what it is.

Cheese - Quote the aphorism of Brillat-Savarin: "A dessert without cheese is a beautiful woman with only one eye."

Classics (The) - One is supposed to be acquainted with them.

Clown - Has had dislocated limbs since childhood.

Coitus - Copulation - Words to be avoided: Say: "They had relations. . . "

Coffee - Imparts wit. Tasty only when it comes from Le Havre. At a formal dinner, should be taken standing. Sipping it unsweetened, very fashionable, suggests you have lived in the Orient.

Conservative - Pot-bellied politician. "You narrow-minded conservative!" - "Yes, sir, there must be people of limited vision to take care of the reckless."

Constipation - All men-of-letters are constipated. Influences political convictions.

Cossacks - Eat candles.

Crucifix - Most becoming in a bedchamber or on the scaffold.

Devotion - Complain about the lack of it in other people. "We are far inferior to dogs in this respect."

Dimples - One must always say to a pretty girl that she has Cupids lodged in her dimples.

Egg - Starting-point of a philosophical discussion on the genesis of beings.

Elephants - Are known for their good memory, and worship the sun.

Feudalism - Even though you have no clear ideas about this, thunder against it.

Fire - Purifies everything. As soon as you hear somebody shout, "Fire", first thing to do is to lose your head.

Functionary - Inspires respect, no matter what his function is.

Genius - No point in admiring it, it's a "neurosis".

Gibberish - The way foreigners talk. Always laugh at a foreigner who speaks French badly.

Gothic - Style of architecture bearing more on religion than other styles.

Guests - Examples to set before one's son.

Habit - Is second nature. Habits you indulge in at school are bad habits. If you got into the habit, you could play the violin like Paganini.

Halberd - On seeing a threatening cloud, don't fail to say: "It's going to rain halberds." In Switzerland, all men carry halberds.

Hare - Sleeps with its eyes open.

Harem - Always compare a rooster among his hens to a sultan in his harem. The dream of all schoolboys.

Hermaphrodite - Excites an unhealthy curiosity. Try to see one.

Homer - Never existed. Famous for his style of laughter.

Ideal - Perfectly useless.

Ideologists - All newpapermen are ideologists.

Idolators - Are cannibals.

Imbroglio - What all dramatic works amount to.

Inventors - All die in the poorhouse. Somebody else profits by their discovery, which is unfair.

Knife - Is Catalan when its blade is long. Is termed a dagger when it has been used to commit murder.

Koran - Book by Mohammed that is all about women.

Kraus, Kraus, Kraus: Pro Domo et Mundo

Chance Events, Chance Thoughts

I’d like to strictly distinguish my existence [Dasein] from their attendance [Dabeisein]. I live, they just turned up.

The little stations between the major stations are proud of the fact that express trains have to pass them by.

The type of mind that can say what everything is but not what anything seems to be.

Hatred has to make you productive. Or else it’s more sensible to find love in your heart.

The silly sausage who calls a pig a pig commits the supreme act of ingratitude.

Medical proverb: The fathers’ trousers, worn and done, are the neuroses of the son.

Scepticism has progressed from: Que sais-je? to: Do I know?

The modern father: My son’s doing the wrong thing. He’s a mystic.

There’s room enough in the tiniest hut, but not in the same city, for a couple who are blissfully in love.

I’m not in favour of women, just against men.

I once knew a Don Juan of chastity whose Leporello was not even capable of compiling a list of all the ice maidens in town.

A slap-stick threw a toothpick behind a curtain – there was a huge crash. Then he threw a needle – another huge crash. Then he threw a piece of paper – again, a huge crash. Next he took a feather, raised his hand and – yet again, a huge crash. But he hadn’t even thrown it – so he went Woot! and congratulated himself on having put one over the causal nexus. The essence of this kind of humour is the notion that the echo of human action is louder than its call and that one best demonstrates to echoes how impertinent they are by not answering them with any further call.

Diagnosis is one of the most widespread diseases.

The aesthetes had divided things among themselves. Dr. Arthur got death, Richard got life, Hugo got the Church of Holy Devotion together with the evening sky, Poldi got the entire collection of the Ambraser Gallery and Felix got all that together and lots more plus the Renaissance.

Pro Domo et Mundo

Woe betide the age in which art doesn’t make the earth less sure of itself, in which the artist rather than man faints before the abyss separating the two of them!

Art brings life into disorder. Time and again, what mankind’s poets do is re-establish chaos.

Culture comes to an end when the barbarians break free from its midst.

The modern demise of the world will come to pass when the machine enters the phase of perfection and human beings are proven broke and unfixable. The point at which the automobile will no longer succeed in bringing the driver into forwards motion.

Progress celebrates Pyrrhic victories over Nature.

When a culture senses that its end has come it calls in the priest.

If I’m supposed to believe in something that can’t be seen I’d sooner believe in miracles than in microscopic creepy crawlies.

The legalist declares the responsible party guilty as well as those who know no better.
The humanitarian declares the responsible party guilty and those that know no better innocent.
The anarchist declares both innocent.
The man of culture declares those who know no better guilty and those who did know better innocent.

That which is brought against me as an objection is often one of my premises. For instance the notion that my polemic tears at life’s heart.

Injustice is necessary or else we would never have done.

My glosses need commentaries. Otherwise they’re too easily understood.

Is it my fault that M actually exists? Didn’t I make him up all the same? If he were a general object of mockery, I’d choose someone better. If he makes a claim for damages because he has been insulted by satire then he insults the satirist.

I’m not sure whether the philistine represents a sort of cosmic vacuum or whether he is simply the wall which is separated from the life of the spirit by Toricellian empty space. But whether he's vacuous or just limited, it's clear he's compelled to react to culture with enmity on principle. For what culture does is to make him conscious [gibt ihm ein Bewußtsein] without making him any the more existent [ohne ihm ein Sein zu geben], driving him to a desperation whose logical form is cogito ergo non sum. It would drive him to suicide were it not so cruel as to force him to prove his own non-existence while still alive. Whether it’s a painting being painted or a witticism being made, the philistine is fighting a battle for his very life when he shuts his eyes or stops up his ears.

Many a man I’ve had dealings with in this my many-sided life has something against me or knows something about me. They will all be able to prove something against me – even if it is only that I had dealings with them.


Do I advise you to kick out of home the error that you gave birth to and substitute it with a more veracious adoptee?

Ask your neighbour about what you yourself are already better informed about. His counsel will then be valuable.

What another doesn’t know I decide autocratically. But I’m glad to ask him about what I already know.

The weakling has doubts before the moment of decision, the strong man after it.

It’s no bad thing to think of most things as being of no significance, but of everything as significant.

Only in the ecstasy of linguistic conception do worlds come to be out of chaos.

By night, at my desk, pen in hand, in an advanced state of writerly ecstasy, I’d find the presence of a woman more disturbing than a Germanist interfering in the bedroom.

I don’t relish sticking my nose into my own private business.

I refer to the topic by talking about myself. They stick to the topic but refer to themselves.

I ask no one for a light. I don’t want to be in anyone’s debt. Neither in life, love or literature. And yet I’m definitely a smoker.

When I demonstrate that the world has lost its way by pointing to symptoms of its decline, one of the lost ones always comes and asks me what the symptoms are supposed to do about themselves. They do what they do because they have to – they don't enjoy it. – Alas, I don’t enjoy it either, though I have to too.

The truly true truths are the ones that can be made up. [C.f. Se non e’ vero, e’ ben trovato]

Life is a struggle that would be worthy of a better cause.

The external world is a tiresome side-effect of a sustained condition of uneasiness.

Karl Kraus: Of The Artist

The signs of true artistry – to fashion for oneself a problem out of what is taken for granted and thereby solve the problems of others; to make good their ignorance with one’s own knowledge and doubt oneself down into the depths of hell; to put a question to a servant and give the answer to a master.

Why does the public behave so hatefully towards literature? Because it has a command of language. People would venture forth against the other arts in the same way if singing to each other were as good a means of communicating, or smearing each other with paint or spattering each other with plaster. The unfortunate thing is that Literary Art works with material the rabble handles on a daily basis. This is why literature is beyond help. The public claims for itself the verbal material of literature all the more impudently the further literature distances itself from general comprehensibility. The best thing would be to keep literature a secret from the public until a law came into existence which banned everyday language altogether, or perhaps allowed the general public the use of sign-language in case of emergencies. Before such a law sees the light of day however, it is to be hoped they might have learnt to respond to the famous aria “How’s business, mate?” with a still-life.

Journalism, which has driven the true writers into its own stall, has in the meantime taken command of their pastures. The hacks would like to be authors in their own right. Selections of occasional pieces appear. One is stunned that the book-binders don’t find them going to pieces in their hands during production. Bread is baked out of crumbs. What is it though that makes the hack hope for attention from posterity? Continued interest in the material that he “selects”. When a man blabs on about eternal themes shouldn’t he merit being heard for all eternity? This fallacy is journalism’s living element. It always has big ideas within its reach. In its hands eternity itself becomes topical, though it just as easily becomes an anachronism too. The artist gives shape to daily events, to the very hour and minute. The occasion for his work may be as limited and conditioned as you like by time and place, his artwork is all the more limitless and free the further it bears itself beyond that occasion. Let it age confidently in the present; it rejuvenates itself over decades.

Creative men can afford to shut out the impression of others' creativity. Which is why they often turn their backs on the world, even though they regularly perceive its imperfections.

That which has its living element in the material dies before the material. That which has its living element in language lives as long as the language.

The thoughtless man thinks that one only has a thought by having it and clothing it with words. He fails to comprehend that one actually only has it when one has words into which the thought grows.

The sense [Der Sinn (masc)] took hold of the form [die Form (fem)], there was a struggle and she succumbed. A thought was given birth to which had the traits of both.

Language is the mother not the maid of thought.

A reader is incapable of surmising from the mere spoken or written thought that its form existed prior to the material it gives form to, nor should he. But one can show him that it was so by trying to raise up a thought that has slipped below the threshold of consciousness. To produce free associations, as distantly connected as you like from the material of the thought, will be a vain exercise. It simply doesn’t help that the man who has the thought and the other he is trying to induce to see it draw closer to one another by material groping. For instance the thought that one “can’t see the wood for the trees” would never be flushed up by a chance sighting of a wood, nor by that of the trees that veil the wood from sight. It might well present itself though on the path via which it first came into being. Try repeating the tone of voice or the gesture with which one said it to oneself, soon enough a certain something that in some way expresses missing the point or parts instead of wholes will start to shimmer before you and – there you have it, you see the wood that you couldn’t see for the trees. To think in the medium of language means coming into superfluity via superficiality. As last night’s dream comes back to you when you brush a hand against the bed-sheets.

Language is the divining-rod that discovers the well-springs of thought.

I fasten onto the thought by the word and it comes to me.

How many thoughts do I have that failed to occur to me and that I couldn’t fix with particular words, but that I whipped up out of language as a whole.

The thought is out there but it doesn’t occur to anyone. The prism of material life has diffused it, it lies scattered about in its linguistic elements: - the artist binds them together into the thought.

There are people who imitate originality before the fact. When two people have a thought, it doesn’t belong to the one who had it first but to the one who had it better.

In art too the poor man isn't allowed to take anything from the rich man, though the rich man may take everything from the poor man.

Mr. M was reprimanded for having put an ugly sentence to paper. And rightly so. For it came to light that the sentence was actually one of Jean Paul’s and a good one.

If a thought can successfully live in two different forms, it doesn’t have it anywhere near as good as two thoughts that live in a single form.

Art has to be content with itself in an age that knows itself superior to eternity.

The journalist is actually turned on by deadlines. He writes worse when he has time at his disposal.

Heinrich Heine got so far undoing the blouse of the German language that nowadays all the louts can go the grope on her.

The imitator is often better than the innovator.

The book page men plunder Nature’s household in order to dress up their moods. When they write about blowing their noses it comes out sounding like rolling thunder – otherwise, who’d understand what they meant? “That’s just like when …” they say, thinking they do the cosmos a great honour letting the events of the natural world trot alongside their stupendous sentiments and checking if Nature measures up. This is what they call using similes or making comparisons. In fact the most they succeed in doing is every so often shedding light on the means of comparison with the aid of the object of comparison. At any rate it’s a matter of being cultured. The you know what something’s like when it’s like something else. When Heine is full of yearning, that’s like when a fir tree – hopefully there’s a fir tree there which can play along … Let me say once and for all – a poet’s most elementary experiences are something which take place in the depths of his soul and what occurs within occurs in the world outside him as well - in this unique moment of congruity there is no disparity between the image and its meaning, no separation between illustration and text. Shakespeare’s experience of the ingratitude of daughters is born with the image of that ingratitude – the hedge-sparrow feeds the cuckoo so long that it has its head bit off by its young. Heine would first have to discover the meaning of the motif of ingratitude in Nature so that Nature’s way of proceeding could then be compared with the given human situation. The book page men drag themselves into the wider world in order to be able to express themselves in the first place; once they’ve reduced something noble to their own level they discover that it’s actually similar to themselves; once they’ve decked themselves out in others’ finery they recognise themselves. The poet is already a part of Nature; if he is to give expression to Nature, it will be in accordance with her will. Poetry does not depend any sort of fortunate fact involving fir trees having dreams. It is not the egotistical pretension that Nature beholds the poet and is there to do his bidding. On the contrary it is founded on mutual understanding which brings tears to the eyes of the poet too. The facile notion that something apt follows from every movement of the soul has seduced the German ear and brought unspeakable misery upon art! Art has been made a means of killing time and thereby kills off eternity itself. Nature wears a pleasing aspect because we find in her the pretty things that our favourite writers have crammed into her by uttering the words: That’s as if . . . They have snipped life down into a series of ornaments which now decorate our nullity. The fir tree no longer sprouts fresh green needles but has dreams. Oh, it’s much more poetic that way, as well as testifying to the yearning of the poet, which we'd otherwise still need to see some evidence of. Nowadays the poet says quite simply: If the fir tree felt as I did, then I’d feel like the fir tree, viz. dreamy.

Let me warn you about reprints. The living element of what I write is my writing: reproduce it and it will suffocate. For everything depends on the air a phrase breathes and in bad air even a phrase of Shakespeare’s is guaranteed to croak.

A curse upon journalism, it has the Midas touch in reverse; every foreign thought it comes into contact it with it transforms into an opinion! How is one to reclaim stolen gold when the thief manifestly only has a bit of miserable small change in his pocket?

Opinions are of no consequence to art, she sends them on to the journos to use as they see fit and is in danger precisely when the journos declare her to be in the right.

I don’t have any deep reason for disliking novels, for it seems apt to me that something that doesn’t interest me is said in a roundabout way.

They place in his way the obstacles he wanted to free them from.

Varieté. Slap-stick is the only brand of humour with a Weltanschauung nowadays. Because there's a deeper reason to it, it appears to be as much without rhyme or reason as the situations it sets before us. The laughter it provokes in our region of the earth is indeed without rhyme or reason. A human being who suddenly gets down on all fours makes for a primitive contrast which the simplest minds will find irresistible. A scene in which an MC in tails falls to the floor like a sack presupposes somewhat more sophisticated powers of comprehension. What could it be but the ad absurdum of dignity, of the sense of formality, of a thoroughly decorative mode of life? Middle European culture supplies one with all the prerequisites needed to understand this type of humour. The humour of clowning cannot take root here. Between the two there can be no comparison. When two clowns jump up and down on each others’ stomachs the only thing that tickles us is when they suddenly swap spots, the comedy of the unforseen agony. American humour on the other hand is the ad absurdum of the life of man become machine. The action takes place without anything getting in the way, making it plausible for a man to fly into the room via the window only then to be thrown out the door – which he takes with him under his arm as he goes. Life gets tremendously simplified. Because comfort is the highest principle of all, it goes without saying that you can get yourself a beer by using a human being as a beer tap and holding a glass underneath any one of his outlets. People bash each others’ skulls with hatchets and tenderly enquire – did you notice anything? Machines carry out a continuous slaughter, but without shedding a drop of blood. Why all the violence? It's a test of the strength of our comfortable ways. One presses a button and the servant boy cops it in the neck. If something’s a nuisance it is wiped out of existence. Wooden beams bend at will, everything goes swimmingly, there are no idle hands. But then a slip of paper won’t do what it’s told. It refuses to lie there where one has put it for comfort’s sake, it drifts up into the air again and again. How irritating. One sees oneself forced to give it a thumping with a hammer. It’s still twitching. One gets ready to shoot it maybe, one blows it up with dynamite. An outrageous piece of machinery is produced in order to calm the slip of paper down. Life has become terribly complicated. In the end everything goes bottom up because something or other doesn’t want to fit into the system . . . maybe a scrap of sentimentality that a fraud has brought over from Europe.

Karl Kraus: Journalists, Aesthetes, Politicians, Psychologists, Academics and Others. . .

From: Pro Domo et Mundo
Of Society

I divide the people I don’t say hello to into four groups. There are those I don’t say hello to so that I don’t compromise myself – the simplest case. Then there are those I don’t say hello to so that they aren’t compromised – a case requiring some delicacy. Next are those I don’t say hello to so that I don't do damage to their image of me. They’re even harder to handle. Lastly there are those I don’t say hello to so that I don't do damage to my image of me. There I have to really be on the look-out. And yet I’ve got together a rough routine. My way of not saying hi to people is such that I know how to bring out each of these nuances so that no one is done an injustice.

Middle class society is made up of those who have already had their appendix out and those who already have so little ready money that they wouldn’t even be in the running for the Imperial Order of Franz Josef.

One couldn’t make head or tail of him, because he was something. He didn’t have that adroitness which is better than what one is because it draws to oneself what one isn’t.

They will sooner forgive you the low trick they played on you than the good deed you did them.

There have been so many times when someone who shared my opinion kept the better half for himself. Now I’ve wised up and only ever offer the public my thoughts.

The prospect of a city whose every extra seems to occupy centre-stage is definitely enough to drive one mad. In Vienna you find your way into a street blocked by the garbage man, you have time to observe his features till he's taken the can round the corner. There’s nothing in the street except the garbage man, he grows to gigantic proportions and stands between you and life itself. Or maybe it’s a local police guard. You see him on a daily basis, you take part in his story, you say to yourself - he’ll be grey soon, like me. Isn’t it tragic to spend your time waiting to die being the involuntary spectator of all this banality? . . . In this city the extras have taken over the film. The head of each sardine comes to have an individualisable visage of its own and threatens to devour the man whose plate it's on. Life here traces itself out without any hint of perspective; its figures are like those of a bad cartoon. They remain frozen when they should be on the move. They move in order to show off the boots they’re wearing. Horses hang in the air, their front legs extended. A man tells a joke, opens his mouth to laugh and will never again shut it. A flower-girl is petrified between takes of the self-same scene. A cab-driver points to his horses and hopes, by assuring the passer-by that he has a cab to go with it, to bring the latter to convince himself that he does indeed have one. The young gallant today is badly shaven.

I've found a thought, but then I have to look for $10. I lose the thought, but I find the $10. The thought is again nearby; I just have to look for it. The person behind the counter is waiting; I have to find change - a $2 coin. I have it already! No, it’s a button. The folks roundabout are getting interested. Then it’s gone again, that thought. The official personage behind the counter is still there. I’m supposed to hand over a $2 coin, but all I’ve got is the $10 note. My coat’s open, the weather's cold and damp, I’m standing in a draft. I’m going to catch flu and then – goodbye work. I have to make a decision: should I go to get change or should I concentrate on the thought? If I go for change, I know what will happen. A dirty-looking hand will reach out to mine, press some gold coins into it and then strew stupid shrapnel on top. I close my coat. Now the thought will be there again soon. The person behind the desk turns away contemptuously and makes a tooting noise. Oh thought, now you’re gone.

There is only one way of rescuing yourself from the machine – by using it. In effect, you only arrive at yourself by car.

The greatest ill in the world is the compulsion to fritter away one's inner vitality on material things that are supposed to serve that inner vitality.

The way people defend themselves against me demonstrates that my attacks on them are so justified that I always regret not having foreknowledge of their defensiveness – which I would otherwise have made a major theme of the attack itself. An academic philosopher, unmasked by me as a militarist, put it this way – Kraus went on the attack against me because I didn’t want to contribute to his magazine; as a lecturer he would supposedly have had to reject such an unreasonable demand. – Now admittedly I don’t remember having invited him to contribute to the magazine. If I did so, it must have been before he got his PhD, and what he really meant was that he had to decline because he wanted to become a lecturer. If I'm aware of something like that, it speeds up the process of getting to know the man and his mindset and I integrate it into the judgment I pass on him. For my attacks present their motives for all to see. By attributing my attack to vengefulness, this man is lying in a way that makes him guilty of worse motives than my supposed vengefulness. Apart from that, he’s going about it illogically, for it remains an open question how it’s possible I myself didn’t become an academic long ago if I’m that egotistical and calculating and make such a pretence of intellectual effort. If I were what they say I am I would have long ago become what they are now! Whenever someone I’ve called a bad apple retorts in this way, all I have to say is that I would never have thought he was such a bad apple!

I imagine an ugly woman who looks in the mirror could believe the mirror image ugly, not she herself. Thus it is that society sees its nastiness and crudity in my mirror and stupidly believes that I’m nasty and crude.

If you’re getting panicky in the slaughterhouse of middle-class life, maybe you should grasp the opportunity and desert to the war.

Journalists, Aesthetes, Politicians, Psychologists, Academics and Other Numbskulls

The distance between art and the general public was never so great as it is today; however there has never before been that art-like artificial hotchpotch, the sort of thing that seems to write itself and almost reads itself. Today everyone writes and everyone understands and it’s just a matter of chance who remains a reader and who steps forth as writer from out of this horde of educated Huns striding forth against culture.

The sociability of the theatregoer is the shabby remainder of an epoch that's already kicked the bucket. Life, having got in a tangle, once got free of itself on the stage – from which location the devil once took it; from which spot the knacker now will.

In hatching the idea of teaching journalism at universities, mainstream culture has really come up with a funny one. Anyone with any social responsibility would demand it be made part of the MBA.

The idea behind all sorts of education is to make life into a charmless business, either by telling you how life is or telling you it amounts to nothing. We’re confused by this continual to-ing and fro-ing, one minute enlightened, the next endarkened.

Space and time get written about as if they were things for which no practical application had yet been found.

I’d give my life to know what the majority of human beings is meant to do with these much touted wider horizons.

Psychoanalysis unmasks the poet at first glance, you can’t put a single one over it – it knows exactly what Des Knaben Wunderhorn means. So be it - though now I'd say it’s high time for a psychological method that can see through the man who seems to be talking about sex but who’s secretly actually talking about art. For this return journey on the highways of symbolism I gladly offer my services as chauffeur! Though I’d also be pleased if a man who thought he was talking about psychology could be proven to have a subconscious that was actually talking about something else.

Neither jurists nor doctors seem to be aware that in matters erotic there are neither certain truths nor objective facts; that no expert report can convince us of the worth of an object we cannot love and no diagnosis of its flaws disappoint us once it has awakened our love; that we love totally in spite of realistic considerations, gratifying ourselves if need be in spite of the true state of the world. In short what they are oblivious to is that it’s high time to hound jurists and medicos out of a world that belongs to thinkers and poets.

They have the press, they have the stock-market, now they have the unconscious!

If someone steals something from you, don’t bother going to the police, who won’t be interested. Don't go to a psychoanalyst either, who will only be interested in one thing, that it is actually you who have stolen something.

Fine views are worthless. It all depends who has them.

Satires which the censor understands deserve to be banned.

The fool who can’t pass by a single one of the riddles of the world without restating the riddle as if it were nothing but his humble opinion wins a reputation for modesty. The artist who turns his thoughts ecstatically to something as inconspicuous as a trellis or a cobblestone is considered arrogant.

What is education? That which most are given, many pass on and few possess.

Russell Jacoby: The Last Intellectuals

Russell Jacoby's The Last Intellectuals (1987) runs the argument that post-war America down to the late 1980's saw a notable decline in intellectual life, the near-total extinction of the figure of the public intellectual. "The disappearance of general intellectuals into professions" diagnosed in the book is, however, no one-dimensional decline and fall - it reflects a much wider fracturing of the public domain, though it also follows an institutional logic of its own; unique to the story for Jacoby is a loss of political and intellectual nerve on the part of a whole generation of writers, thinkers and scholars located in and around cities and university campuses.

The argument may call for an update in view of 25 years of further developments - firstly in light of the growth of technology as an agent of radical social change - though equally in light of the by now almost totally residual presence within universities of the New Left - that generation of politically motivated students-cum-professors who, according to Jacoby, had by the late 80's taken decisive steps to accommodate themselves to routinised hyper-specialist academic life. Perhaps the thesis of The Last Intellectuals also calls for some adjustment to Australian conditions - though as it happens surprisingly little, since it was precisely from the late 80's that extensive technical, financial and administrative constraints were imposed on educational institutions by Australian governments - a rationalisation of the nation's universities that, coupled with rapid expansion, has since had so many irrational, demoralising effects analogous to those detailed by Jacoby - not least among them a decline in the public meaning of critical rationality itself.

From the point of view of 2010, Jacoby's 25 year-old book would seem to give pointers to an Australian future that is now a past - a past that many will agree has been far from salutary but that will only cease to show itself in the deceptive guise of unquestionable present necessities if younger generations of students, writers, thinkers and scholars turn squarely to face it. (CS)

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Academic freedom itself was fragile, its principles often ignored. Nor were violations confined to meddling trustees and outside investigators. The threat emerged, perhaps increasingly, from within; academic careers undermined academic freedom. This may be a paradox, but it recalls an inner contradiction of academic freedom - the institution neutralises the freedom it guarantees.

The New Left sprang into life around and against universities; its revulsion seemed visceral. Yet New Left intellectuals became professors who neither looked backward nor sideways; they kept their eyes on professional journals, monographs, and conferences. Perhaps because their lives had unfolded almost entirely on campuses they were unable or unwilling to challenge academic imperatives.

In several areas the accomplishments of the New Left intellectuals are irrevocable. Yet [their sizeable contribution to scholarship] is extraordinary for another reason; it is largely technical, unreadable and - except by specialists - unread. While New Left intellectuals obtain secure positions in central institutions, the deepest irony marks their achievement. Their scholarship looks more and more like the work it sought to subvert. A great surprise of the last twenty-five years is both the appearance of New Left professors and their virtual disappearance. In the end it was not the New Left intellectuals who invaded the universities but the reverse: the academic idiom, concepts, and concerns occupied, and finally preoccupied, young left intellectuals.

"Professors Woods, Perry and Hocking are moderately talented and enterprising young men with whom philosophy is merely a means for getting on in the world," declared Professor E.B.Holt of several younger teachers in his department. "I do not respect them; I will not cooperate with them; and I am happy to be in a position now to wipe out the stigma of being even nominally one of their colleagues." With this statement Holt in 1918 resigned from Harvard University and moved to an island off the Maine coast. . .

The latest research invention, footnote citation "indexes", encourages deferential and toothless scholarship. The Social Science Citation Index, a massive volume appearing three times a year, draws from thousands of journals the footnote references to particular articles and books. By looking up a specific author, say C. Wright Mills or Daniel Bell, one finds a list of the journal articles where Mills or Bell has been cited. In principle this allows a researcher to find material where Mills or Bell, or related matters, are discussed - or at least footnoted. However, this index is increasingly touted as a scientific method for identifying scholars who have impact in their field; it is also being used as a guide for promotion and awards. Presumably the more references to a professor, the greater the stature. Many citations to an individual's work indicates he or she is important; conversely few or no references implies someone is unknown and irrelevant. "If citation indexing becomes a basis for promotion and tenure, for grants and fellowships," comments Jon Wiener, "the implications for one's own footnotes are clear. In the marketplace of ideas, the footnote is the unit of currency. . . One should definitely footnote friends. . . and do what is possible to see that they footnote you in return. . . " Like any quantitative study of reputation, the index is circular. It measures not the quality of work but clout and connections. If used to evaluate careers, however, the lessons for the striving professor are clear: cast a wide net, establish as many relations as possible, do not isolate yourself from the mainstream. It pays not simply to footnote but to design research to mesh smoothly with the contributions of others; they refer to you as you refer to them. Everyone prospers from the saccharine scholarship.

The study of professions is itself an occupation; but inquiries into academic professionalisation [often] fail to guage [an] essential cultural dimension. It is frequently missed or understated: professionalisation leads to privatisation or depoliticisation, a withdrawal of intellectual energy from a larger domain to a narrower discipline. Leftists who entered the university hardly invented the process, but they accepted, even accelerated it. Marxism itself has not been immune; in recent years it has become a professional "field" plowed by specialists.

"The monastic cell has become a professional lecture hall; an endless mass of 'authorities' have taken the place of Aristotle," wrote John Dewey in one of his earliest essays. "Jahresberichte, monographs, journals without end occupy the void. . . .If the older Scholastic spent his laborious time in erasing the writing from old manuscripts. . . the new Scholastic . . . criticises the criticisms with which some other Scholastic has criticised other criticisms. . . "

Philosophy has proved almost immune to reform. Of course, the self-examination of every discipline proceeds at its own speed. Philosophic self-scrutiny, however, may well be the weakest, because American philosophy has promoted a technical expertese that repels critical thinking; its fetish of logic and language has barred all but a few who might rethink philosophy, an endeavour sometimes pursued by colleagues in political science, sociology, or history.