Ideas have consequences by Richard M. Weaver PDF

By Richard M. Weaver

"In what has develop into a vintage paintings, Richard M. Weaver unsparingly diagnoses the ills of our age and provides a pragmatic therapy. He asserts that the area is intelligible, and that guy is loose. The catastrophes of our age are the product now not of necessity yet of unintelligent selection. A medication, he submits, is feasible. It lies within the correct use of man's cause, within the renewed attractiveness of an absolute truth, and in the  Read more...

Show description

Read Online or Download Ideas have consequences PDF

Similar history & theory books

New PDF release: Niccolò Machiavelli : history, power, and virtue

This quantity is an try and reconsider Niccolò Machiavelli, essentially the most tough political thinkers within the heritage of ecu political suggestion. In 2013, we'll mark 500 years seeing that Machiavelli wrote his perplexing letter to Lorenzo de' Medici, Il Principe. This ebook is an exercise to hide the most complicated facets of Machiavelli's lifestyles and paintings

Additional info for Ideas have consequences

Example text

Propriety, like other old-fashioned anchorages, was abandoned because it inhibited something. Proud o f its shamelessness, the new journalism served up in swaggering style matter which heretofore had been veiled In decent taciturnity. I t was nat­ ural th at so true an apostle of culture as M atthew Arnold should have sensed the m ortal enemy in this. " Is this why, two hundred years be­ fore, a governor of Virginia had thanked G od, to the scan­ dal of succeeding generations, that there was not a news­ paper in the colony?

Every group regarding itself as emancipated is convinced th at its predecessors were fearful of reality. It looks upon euphemisms and a ll the veils o f decency w ith which things were previously draped as obstructions which it, w ith su­ perior wisdom and praiseworthy courage, w ill now scrip away. Im agination and indirection it identifies w ith ob­ scurantism; the mediate is an enemy to freedom. One can sec this in even a brief lapse o f tim e; how the man o f today looks w ith derision upon the prohibitions o f the 1890’s and supposes th at the violation o f them has been w ithout penalty!

On the other side is the metaphysical community, suffused w ith a common feeling about the world which enables all vocations to meet w ithout embarrassment and to enjoy the strength that comes of common tendency. Our plea then must be to have back our metaphysical dream that we may save ourselves from the sins of sentim entality and brutality. ' W ithout this grand source of ordering, our intensities turn to senseless affection and drain us, or to hatreds and con­ sume us. On the one hand is sentim entality, w ith its emo­ tion lavished upon the trivial and the absurd; on the other is brutality, which can make no distinctions in the applica­ tion o f its violence Ages which have borne reputations for cruelty arc more to be regarded than those renowned, as ours is coming to be, for brutality, because cruelty is refined and, at least, discriminates its objects and intentions.

Download PDF sample

Ideas have consequences by Richard M. Weaver


by Paul
4.3

Rated 4.22 of 5 – based on 34 votes