Against Education

Learning by Osmosis by David Greusel

In light of which, check out Daily-Routines blog

Freedom

…[H]e only is a free man who owns and administers his own land, craft, trade, art or profession and is able, at necessity, to maintain himself and his family therefrom.

- Ralph Adams Cram, “What Is a Free Man?,” Catholic Rural Life Objectives (St. Paul, Minn: National Catholic Rural Life Conference, 1937) 36-7.

“[T]he individual [gets] his sustenance from property which bears his imprint and assimilation…” Indeed, it was not security he was after with such a scheme, which would only mean “being taken care of, or freedom from want and fear – which would reduce man to an invertebrate – [but rather] stability, which gives nothing for nothing but which maintains a constant between effort and reward.”

- John Sharpe, “Introduction,” Beyond Capitalism and Socialism (Norfolk, Virginia: LTD Publications, 2008) xv.

If I can accept a divine Commandment, it’s this one: ‘Thou shalt preserve the species.’ The life of an individual must not be set at too high a price. If the individual were important in the eyes of nature, nature would take care to preserve him.”

- Adolf Hitler, Hitler’s Secret Conversations, 1941-1945 (New York: Tarred, Straus, and Young, 1953) 116.

Preservation is tied to the iron law of necessity and the right of victory of the best and the strongest…Whoever wants to live, must struggle, and whoever will not fight in this world of eternal struggle does not deserve to live…Even if this is harsh – it is simply the way it is.”

- Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (Munich: NSDAP, 1943) 316-317.

[An evolutionist] can have for his rule of life, as far as I can see, only to follow those impulses and instincts which are the strongest or seem to him the best one.”

- Charles Darwin, Autobiography (New York: Norton, 1969) 94.

For HS: Judging by Appearances

Contrary to popular opinion, appearances do not generally deceive. Instead, they are an indispensable feature of the way things are and serve as our first contact with the world. The world reveals itself first through the way it can be sensed and felt, by means of our eyes or ears or by touch or taste. Art helps us see, sense and feel the world in novel ways by revealing new angles and fresh perspectives.

- Adrienne Dengerink Chaplin

More Cardus coming at you. Q & A with Adrienne Dengerink Chaplin, aesthetic philosopher extrodinaire.

Water runs downhill because it is Bewitched

The ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations. He has so often seen birds fly and lay eggs that he feels as if there must be some dreamy, tender connection between the two ideas, whereas there is none. A forlorn lover might be unable to dissociate the moon from lost love; so the materialist is unable to dissociate the moon from the tide. In both cases there is no connection, except that one has seen them together. A sentimentalist might shed tears at the smell of apple-blossom, because, by dark association of his own, it reminded him of his boyhood. So the materialist professor (though he conceals his tears) is yet a sentimentalist, because, by dark association of his own, apple-blossoms remind him of apples. But the cool rationalist from fairyland does not see why, in the abstract, the apple tree should not grow crimson tulips; it sometimes does in his country…

Just as we all like love tales because there is an instinct of sex, we all like astonishing tales because they touch the nerve of the ancient instinct of astonishment. This is proved by the fact that when we are very young children we do not need fairy tales: we only need tales…Boys like romantic tales; but babies like realistic tales, because they find them romantic…

Nursery tales only echo an almost pre-natal leap of interest and amazement. These tales say that apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green. They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water.

- G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, pp. 58-59.

The Ardent Flight of Apples

I observed that learned men in spectacles were talking of the actual things that happened – dawn and death and so on – as if they were rational and inevitable. They talked as if the fact that trees bear fruit were just as necessary as the fact that two and one trees make three. But it is not…You cannot imagine two and one not making three. But you can easily imagine trees not growing fruit; you can imagine them growing golden candlesticks or tigers hanging on by the tail. These men in spectacles spoke much of a man named Newton, who was hit by an apple, and who discovered a law. But they could not be got to see the distinction between a true law, a law of reason, and the mere fact of apples falling. If the apple hit Newton’s nose, Newton’s nose hit the apple. That is a true necessity: because we cannot conceive the one occurring without the other. But we can quite well conceive the apple not falling on his nose; we can fancy it flying ardently through the air to hit some other nose, of which it had a more definite dislike.

- G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, p. 56.

Joan of Arc’s Startling Sanity

As I turn and tumble over the clever, wonderful, tiresome, and useless modern books, the title of one of them rivets my eye. It is called “Jeanne d’Arc,” by Anatole France.* I have only glanced at it, but a glance was enough to remind me of Renan’s “Vie de Jesus.”** It has the same strange method of the reverent sceptic. It discredits supernatural stories that have some foundation, simply by telling natural stories that have no foundation…

I do not mention either book in order to criticise it, but because the accidental combination of the names called up two startling images of sanity which blasted all the books before me. Joan of Arc was not stuck at the cross-roads, either by rejecting all the paths like Tolstoy, or by accepting them all like Nietzsche. She chose a path, and went down it like a thunderbolt.

Yet Joan, when I come to think of her, had in her all that was true either in Tolstoy or Nietzsche, all that was even tolerable in either of them. I thought of all that is noble in Tolstoy, the pleasure in plain things, especially in plain pity, the actualities of the earth, the reverence for the poor, the dignity of the bowed back. Joan of Arc had all that and with this great addition, that she endured poverty as well as admiring it; whereas Tolstoy is only a typical aristocrat trying to find out its secret.

And then I thought of all that was brave and proud and pathetic in poor Nietzsche, and his mutiny against the emptiness and timidity of our time. I thought of his cry for the ecstatic equilibrium of danger, his hunger for the rush of great horses, his cry to arms. Well, Joan of Arc had all that, and again with this differences, that she did not praise fighting, but fought…

She beat them both at their own antagonistic ideals; she was more gentle than the one, more violent than the other. Yet she was a perfectly practical person who did something, while they are wild speculators who do nothing.

- G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, pp. 49-50.

Fierce Things Fade for want of anything to be Fierce about

The modern revolutionist, being an infinite skeptic, is always engaged in undermining his own mines…Therefore the modern man in revolt has become practically useless for all purposes of revolt. By rebelling against everything he has lost his right to rebel against anything…

Nietzsche had some natural talent for sarcasm: he could sneer, though he could not laugh; but there is always something bodiless and without weight in his satire, simply because it has not any mass of common morality behind it. He is himself more preposterous than anything he denounces. But, indeed, Nietzsche will stand very well as the type of the whole of this failure of abstract violence. The softening of the brain which ultimately overtook him was not a physical accident. If Nietzsche had not ended in imbecility, Nietzscheism would end in imbecility. Thinking in isolation and with pride ends in being an idiot. Every man who will not have softening of the heart must at last have softening of the brain.

- G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, pp. 47-48.

Which is why Christians should not be quite so interested in how the Early Church conducted Itself

As Derrida shows, it is axiomatic for Plato that supplementarity is degenerative: that is, anything added to an original, anything flowing from a source, is “worse” than the source itself, precisely because it has moved away from the source…Such a metaphysics cannot support a comic view of history, much less deep comedy…

For trinitarian theology, the “Second” is fully equal to and is in fact the glory of the “First”.

- Peter J. Leithart, Deep Comedy, p. xiii – xiv.

From glory to Glory

“Tragedy” is used here (at least initially) very loosely, as a stroy in which the characters begin neutrally or well, but slide inexorably to a bad end; “comedy” is a story in which the characters may face dangers, perhaps dangers of great intensity, but ultimately rise to a happy ending. “deep comedy” brings two additional nuances: First, in deep comedy the happy ending is uncontaminated by any fear of future tragedy, and, second, in deep comedy the characters do not simply end as well as they began, but progress beyond their beginning. Comedy may move from glory to glory restored, but deep comedy moves from glory to added glory.

- Peter J. Leithart, Deep Comedy, p. xii.

The Death of Triangles

All the will-worshippers…always talk of will as something that expands and breaks out. But it is quite the opposite – Every act of will is an act of self-limitation. To desire action is to desire limitation. In that sense every act is an act of self-sacrifice. When you choose anything, you reject everything else…”Thou shalt not” is only one of the necessary corollaries of “I will”…

Anarchism adjures us to be bold creative artists, and care for no laws or limits. But it is impossible to be an artist and not care for laws or limits. Art is limitation…If you draw a giraffe, you must draw him with a long neck. If, in your bold creative way, you hold yourself free to draw a giraffe with a short neck, you will really find that you are not free to draw a giraffe…

Do not go about as a demagogue, encouraging triangles to break out of the prison of their three sides. If a triangle breaks out of its three sides, its life comes to a lamentable end. Somebody wrote a work called “The Loves of Triangles”; I never read it, but I am sure that if triangles ever were loved, they were loved for being triangular. This is certainly the case with all artistic creation…The artist loves his limitations: They constitute the thing he is doing.

- G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, pp. 45 – 46.