## Metadata - Author: [[Peter Watson]] - Full Title: The Age of Atheists - Category: #books ## Highlights - Georg Tantzscher thought Nietzscheanism fitted neatly the needs of the free-floating intelligentsia, trapped as they were “between isolation and a sense of mission, the drive to withdraw from society and the drive to lead it.” ([Location 725](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00DPM7QXO&location=725)) - Nietzsche gave point to the avant-garde’s alienation from the high culture of the establishment.17 The two forces he favored were radical, secular self-creation and the Dionysian imperative of self-submersion. This led to several attempts to fuse the individualistic impulse within a search for new forms of “total” community, the redemptive community, a theme that recurs throughout this book. ([Location 762](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00DPM7QXO&location=762)) - Freud and Nietzsche had in common that both sought to remove the metaphysical explanation of experience, and both stressed “self-creation” as the central meaningful activity of life. While Freud strained for respectability, Nietzscheanism reveled in notoriety, but in most ways they were compatible, being stridently anti-scientific and anti-rationalist; and, with its Dionysian rhetoric, the artistic production of the Nietzscheans sought to unlock the wild reaches of the unconscious. ([Location 771](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00DPM7QXO&location=771)) - Ascona had all the elements of the counterculture that would develop later, mainly in America. Adherents sought intensity through an erotic freedom, which included nudity, sometimes orgies, and at other times embraced a cult of masculinity. There was vegetarianism, sun worship, occultism, black magic, mysticism and Satanism and a cult of festivals. What united these groupings was a belief in the irrational and in instinct, one unifying idea being that “all men are equal in regards to instinct.” ([Location 787](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00DPM7QXO&location=787)) - Workshops were set up, to manufacture handmade objects—from jewelry to furniture—for people who were dissatisfied with mass-produced factory goods.25 Activities at Ascona were supposed to be carried out not for economic reasons, or for any particular aim—which might spark ambition—but simply for the joy of activity, for maintaining as much as possible a festival spirit. One needed just enough, it was argued, to support one’s minimal needs, in that way avoiding being sucked into the social system that was the origin of the malaise in the first place. ([Location 815](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00DPM7QXO&location=815)) - In Laban’s great plan to regenerate life, dancing was primary. He had a multifaceted mind, scientific as well as artistic (he devised an entire notation for his new form of dance). He naturally appreciated that dance was physical and genetic as well as imaginative and organic. “In the very depths lives the center of gravity. Around this is deposited the crystal of the skeleton, interconnected and directed by the muscles.” ([Location 886](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00DPM7QXO&location=886)) - Laban also embraced the concept of eurhythmics. Because eurhythmics marries music and speed, he believed that one thinks with not just the brain but also the whole body, becoming an “equilibrium of will, feelings and intelligence,” thus intensifying bodily consciousness and, in so doing, “preventing any dictatorship by the brain or by the moral conscience.” “Beauty, aesthetics, good manners, conscience, ethical equilibrium, goodness, are for me synonyms.” ([Location 891](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00DPM7QXO&location=891)) - Laban stated that the most significant human creations, at all times, have been “born of the dancer spirit.” He pointed out that we find dance doctrine—choreosophy—in Plato’s Timaeus and in the Sufis, for example. For him, the dance instinct consists of a need for change—that’s what movement is. It follows for him that no religion and no orality can last in its original form. “We are polytheists and all the gods we know are parts of the daemonic self-changing of the gesture power. A demon is born (or unchained) whenever a roomful of people concentrate their attention on a dancer.” ([Location 934](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00DPM7QXO&location=934)) - Nietzsche’s fundamental point, Benn maintained, was the replacement of content with expression; the strength or vitality with which views were held was as important as their substance.49 Life was feeling as much as fact. ([Location 957](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00DPM7QXO&location=957)) - “All the pleasure of life is in general ideas,” he wrote in 1899, “but all the use of life is in specific solutions—which cannot be reached through generalities any more than a picture can be painted by knowing some rules of method. They are reached by insight, tact and specific knowledge.” ([Location 1057](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00DPM7QXO&location=1057)) - “Insight,” “tact” and “specific knowledge.” We shall see how important those words are in the story we shall be telling. More, we shall see how those words linked American and European thought, how they became the leading ideas for people who tried to live without God; and how—and this is too often overlooked—they unified people in their opposition to, and criticism of, the scientific worldview. It is a fact too little appreciated that the very people who attempted to construct a liveable lifestyle without supernatural or transcendent dimensions also found the scientific approach not up to the task either. ([Location 1060](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00DPM7QXO&location=1060)) - James and Dewey were both influenced by Emerson’s evolutionary sense of history, his awareness that “democracy is neither a form of government nor a social expediency,” but a metaphysic of the relation of man and his experience in nature—what he called “the infinitude of the private man.” When he looked about him, and back through history, Emerson reflected that the great lessons of nature are variety and freedom. Because of this, he said, all questions of ultimate justification are decided by the future, a future that cannot be definitively predicted, but can be hoped for. Ultimately, pragmatism replaces the notion of “reality,” “reason” and “nature” with that of a “better human future.” “When pragmatists are asked ‘Better by what criterion?’ they have no answer, any more than the first mammals could specify in what respects they were better than the dying dinosaurs. Better in the sense of containing more of what we consider good and less of what we consider bad. And by good they mean ‘variety and freedom’. . . . ‘Growth itself,’ Dewey said, ‘is the only moral end.’” ([Location 1148](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00DPM7QXO&location=1148)) - James and Dewey thought that the quest for certainty—even as a long-term goal—was an attempt to escape from the world. That quest must be replaced with the demand for imagination. “One should stop worrying about whether what one believes is well grounded and start worrying about whether one has been imaginative enough to think up interesting alternatives to one’s present beliefs. The telos [purpose] of movement and flux is not solely mastery, but also stimulation.” ([Location 1175](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00DPM7QXO&location=1175)) - If Darwinian biological evolution has no aim, it continuously produces new species, while cultural evolution produces new audiences; “but there is no such thing as a species which evolution has in view.” ([Location 1187](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00DPM7QXO&location=1187)) - Put another way, the pragmatist search is for an ever wider inclusion, rather than an exploration of “depth”; and this applies both to science and in the moral realm. Scientific progress involves integrating more and more data into a coherent overall account, but it is not a matter of penetrating appearance until one arrives at reality. Similarly, moral progress is a matter of seeking/achieving wider and wider sympathy. “You cannot aim at moral perfection, but you can aim at taking more people’s needs into account than you did previously.” ([Location 1241](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00DPM7QXO&location=1241)) - It follows that we should just give up the philosophical search for essences, unchanging reality. Moral progress is better understood as like sewing together a complex, multi-colored quilt of different human groups. “The hope is to sew such groups together with a thousand little stitches.” ([Location 1245](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00DPM7QXO&location=1245)) - Imagination is the final key here, to add to trust, moral ambition and social hope. This amalgam is what will produce new conceptions of possible communities and, in that way, make the human future richer than the human past. ([Location 1248](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00DPM7QXO&location=1248)) - Santayana accepted that there was a “spiritual” crisis at the beginning of the twentieth century, but claimed it was not a supernatural problem. Religion, he thought, is an ideal to which we would like reality to conform. Religion should be understood “poetically”; and it persists “because more distinctly than any other institution it contributed ‘moral symbols’ to culture that give people a way to live joyfully with the events that threaten meaninglessness: physical extremity or suffering, the limits of intellect or absurdity, and the dark edge of moral comprehension or evil.”28 Religious rituals create an “other world” and establish “a sense of joy” in things, throwing into relief the complex structures of the workaday world. “Festivity” and not social work, he maintained, was the hallmark of religion as a cultural institution; it was ritual, not certitude, that helped resolve the fear of meaninglessness. Religion lets people break away from social constraints, and religious practices, moreover, underscore the limit of human assertion. But he thought it a “beautiful and good” idea of religion that sin should exist in order to be “overcomeable”—it gave people a triumphant experience. ([Location 1273](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00DPM7QXO&location=1273)) - Philosophy, for Santayana, could not offer “incorrigible first principles” but was a kind of conversation whose aim was to redescribe the world in ever more imaginatively accurate terms—he called it “rectification by redescription.”30 Philosophy, for him, was “festive, lyrical, rhetorical.” The imagination had to operate with a cosmic sense, but that meant a sense, above all, of our finitude and impotence. The aim of life should be to live triumphantly with finitude. ([Location 1285](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00DPM7QXO&location=1285)) - Santayana had, on the other hand, what he called a “comic vision” of life (“comic,” not “cosmic”), which “celebrates the passing joys and victories in the world,” and a notion he called “radical comedy,” which involves “an admission that, in no small part, what links people is the powerlessness and mortality that they share; it is an acceptance of things that resist or defeat self-assertion”; or, put another way, radical comedy occurs… ([Location 1289](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00DPM7QXO&location=1289)) - Philosophical meditation and culture, he said, are ways of letting people momentarily break out “of the shabbiest surroundings in[to] laughter, understanding and small surrenders of folly to reason.” Santayana made the claim that, “disregarding the quest for eternal life and transcendent infinitude altogether, both public and private… ([Location 1293](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00DPM7QXO&location=1293)) - A life worth living, he believed, required “unworldiness”: that is to say, in his context, a life away from the workaday world. This is why we need what he called “a holiday life,” a time and place to get away from the workaday world and play. “Spirit,” for him, is the cultural location for solitary, personal revitalization, a cultural space for the sense of beauty to resolve moral cramps. Santayana thought that the new emphasis on self-realization and technical rationality was “failing to give sufficient weight to spiritual and moral life.” There was no space for “spontaneous affirmation” or for appreciating what is “lovely and lovable.” Well-being—which is the aim of life—occurs in “reflective episodes of consummate joy that give point to things,” and giving point to things enables people to “feel triumphant rather than defeated or brutalized or unreal.”32 And this is what cultural space is, said Santayana, this is what spirituality is: a playful holiday in which people can depart from the workaday worlds of, say, policy formulation, in order to engage in reflective, imaginative activities that stretch them and discipline them to celebrate and live triumphantly, at least for a time, with finitude. The appreciation of beauty belongs to our holiday life, “when we are redeemed for the moment.”33 Beauty—natural beauty or created beauty—is divine in his vocabulary, not in any supernatural sense but simply because of the feelings it engenders in us. Art shows that we can experience varieties of “finite perfection” without encountering a deity, audiences are made happier by empathizing with characters in unhappy situations, artists render suffering sufferable, tragic characters delight people by letting them identify with images of perfection they approach but miss; imperfection has value as “incipient perfection.” Imagination, said Santayana, allows us to realize possibilities not available to experience, and in this the momentum of our imagination will carry us beyond ourselves. There is no absolute reality or supreme good, “intermittence is intrinsic to life” and so is partiality and finitude, but art allows us to imagine excellence, shows us forms of the “whole,” and apposite endings. Spiritual redemption, in his world, depends on the “suspension of self-assertion.” “There is no cure for birth and… ([Location 1297](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00DPM7QXO&location=1297)) - Beauty, joy, comedy, play, mirth, humor, laughter—these are what we should aim for, not everlasting bliss. This is what he means by “comic faith,” something less grand and more reasonable than infinite or permanent happiness and blessed immortality. If we can combine this with making a difference—an improvement—to the worlds of our fellow humans, this is the only immortality… ([Location 1322](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00DPM7QXO&location=1322)) - What Valéry and Husserl were both trying to urge on us is a denial of the view that the particular is somehow less consequential than the general. “In giving our attention to the particular, we fear the risk of fixing ourselves upon an exception to the rule; art by its nature is existential; it is concerned with particulars, while rationalism is interested only in their relationships.” ([Location 1414](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00DPM7QXO&location=1414)) - For Clive Bell, art “is an expression of and a means to states of mind as holy as any that men are capable of experiencing. . . . It is towards art that the modern mind turns, not only for the most perfect expression of transcendent emotion, but for an inspiration by which to live.” Art was the “queen of endeavors” for Moore. “Its object—beauty—is something one can care about, something one can strive to bring into the world or encourage others to do so, something by means of which the world can be made better in just the sense in which Moore understands the notion of moral goodness: better in itself.” ([Location 1512](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00DPM7QXO&location=1512)) - H. G. Wells, who, in The Outline of History (1920), described history as “a race between education and catastrophe.” ([Location 1711](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00DPM7QXO&location=1711)) - Or, as Shaw wrote to Tolstoy in 1910: “To me God does not yet exist. . . . The current theory that God already exists in perfection involves the belief that God deliberately created something lower than Himself. . . . To my mind, unless we conceive God as engaged in a continual struggle to surpass himself . . . we are conceiving nothing better than an omnipotent snob.” ([Location 1930](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00DPM7QXO&location=1930)) - Shaw took hope seriously—it is for him, as Robert Whitman has pointed out, a form of moral responsibility. “To be in hell is to drift (a denial of purpose); heaven is to steer. . . . Life is a force which has made innumerable experiments in organizing itself . . . into higher and higher individuals.” Shaw’s superman, in contrast to Nietzsche’s, is not a goal, an end product; rather, it is a process, a stage of development: “Heaven is not a place but a direction.” ([Location 1949](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00DPM7QXO&location=1949)) - “My doctrine is that God proceeds by the method of ‘trial and error.’ . . . To me the sole hope of human salvation lies in teaching Man to regard himself as an experiment in the realization of God.” ([Location 1960](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00DPM7QXO&location=1960)) - In almost all of Shaw’s plays the change that comes over the main characters is threefold, and in the direction of “more.” In one sense “more” means broader, richer, more complete, more adjusted to reality (more “adapted” in a Darwinian sense). The second sense is that the characters become more aware that their fulfillment, their salvation, lies outward rather than inside themselves. Third, and allied to this, is the development of reciprocal enlightenment, in which each character discovers him- or herself in his opposite. ([Location 1975](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00DPM7QXO&location=1975)) - In fact, Chekhov helped initiate the great change that took place after Nietzsche, which would echo down the twentieth century: namely, he was less interested in philosophical (to include religious) or sociological questions than in the interplay between morality and (individual) psychology. ([Location 2022](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00DPM7QXO&location=2022)) - In the Impressionist world God was not missed. More than that, the Impressionists showed us that pleasures, truths, are fugitive, evanescent, may not outlast the moment. In Impressionism there is no difference between the moment and eternity. ([Location 2111](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00DPM7QXO&location=2111)) - The loveliness of the whole is part of the point; this is a self-contained work, celebrating the self-contained world that art can offer, a “republic of pleasure, a parenthesis within the real world—a paradise.” ([Location 2160](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00DPM7QXO&location=2160)) - In his Futurist Manifesto, published in 1909, he announced: “We intend to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness. Courage, audacity and revolt will be the essential ingredients of our poetry. We affirm that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty; the beauty of speed. . . . We will sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, and by riot.” ([Location 2183](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00DPM7QXO&location=2183)) - Thus twentieth-century art—and this applies to Impressionism, Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism—seeks not so much to represent reality as to rival it; it strives to be its own subject. The boundaries, the frameworks, were overrun, the two universes, art and not-art, engaged in “mutual interference,” a major device whose lineaments have never been properly assimilated. “When the distinction between art and reality has broken down, we are ourselves incorporated into the structure of a work of art. Its very form importunes us to enter an expanded community of creation which now includes artist and spectator, art and reality.” ([Location 2321](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00DPM7QXO&location=2321)) - The point of juxtaposition is that “we cannot expect to reach a point of rest or understanding” in the conventional sense. The absurd is, essentially, an expression of the lack of connectivity in experiencing the world—play, nonsense, abruptness, surprise now become the order of the arts, rather than verification of certain general truths in the old tradition. “We can no longer expect to find in the arts only verification of knowledge or values deeply rooted within us. We will, instead, be surprised or dismayed.” ([Location 2336](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00DPM7QXO&location=2336)) - Juxtaposition arranges fragments of experience, perishable rather than possessing the stability of monuments, in which the (often) conflicting elements are to be experienced/understood simultaneously rather than successively, as was traditionally the case. “The aspiration of simultanism is to grasp the moment in its total significance or, more ambitiously, to manufacture a moment which surpasses our usual perception of time and space.” Simultanism establishes sources of meaning other than causal sequence, and seizes upon what is, for us in the twenty-first century, a new kind of coherence, a new unity of experience, not progression but intensification—intensification by standing still. ([Location 2344](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00DPM7QXO&location=2344)) - Any form of the sacred appropriate to this modern age will be, as for William James, one that is effective because people accept it. ([Location 2513](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00DPM7QXO&location=2513)) - “The essential fact in man’s history to my sense is the slow unfolding of a sense of community with his kind . . . between us and the rest of mankind there is something, something real, something that rises through us and is neither you nor me, that comprehends us, and that is thinking and using me and you to play against each other.” ([Location 2602](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00DPM7QXO&location=2602)) - “I saw then [during his period in the Fabian Society] what hitherto I had merely felt—that there was in the affairs of mankind something unorganized which is greater than any organization. This unorganized power is the ultimate Sovereign in the world. . . . It is something transcending persons. . . . This Collective Mind is essentially an extension of the spirit of science to all human affairs, its method is to seek and speak and serve the truth and to subordinate oneself to one’s ([Location 2606](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00DPM7QXO&location=2606)) - conception of a general purpose. . . . We are episodes in an experience greater than ourselves. . . . I believe in the great and growing being of the species, from which I rise, to which I return, and which, it may be, will ultimately even transcend the limitation of the species and grow into the conscious Being of all things . . . what the scheme as a whole is I do not clearly know; with my limited mind I cannot know. There I become a mystic.”30 ([Location 2609](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00DPM7QXO&location=2609)) - The sociologist in Durkheim saw that, with the enormous forces of modernity coming together—urbanization, industrialization, materialism, massification and the growth of technology—it was more necessary than ever to view the individual as sacred: the individual is “the touchstone according to which good must be distinguished from evil, is considered as sacred. . . . It has something of that transcendental majesty which the churches of all times have given to their Gods.”36 The individual life thus becomes the focus of social forces. ([Location 2669](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00DPM7QXO&location=2669)) - What Durkheim and Proust share, according to Lewis, is not a concern with the individual’s relationship with God, but rather “the sacred power [that] bonds the individual to modern society and to its new gods.” These new sacred universal principles are, for Durkheim, such things as “Fatherland,” “Liberty,” “Reason” (especially powerful in France after the Enlightenment and the Revolution). While not denying these, Proust shows that les moments bienheureux are invariably individual, even solitary, but “each one opens up a portal to a whole social world.” ([Location 2683](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00DPM7QXO&location=2683)) - Another feature of À la recherche is the narrator’s repeated experience of disillusionment, his discovery that the sacred rituals of the communities he joins turn out, invariably, to have no transcendent power; they are social forces, no more, and salvation, the bliss of les moments bienheureux, is the only transcendence on offer. ([Location 2696](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00DPM7QXO&location=2696)) - Although critics thought that Proust made a religion of art, in fact he was arguing that both religion and art have social cohesion as their primary social function. ([Location 2699](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00DPM7QXO&location=2699)) - Proust is observing that, with the death of God, the death of a monotheistic Christian God, more primitive forms of religious ritual—totemism—may fill the gap. This is because humans like the experience of the sacred: “the modern sacred is still sacred.” But he is also saying that such experiences are essentially hollow: they offer no transcendence, but merely confirm our membership of communities. This may be no small thing, but it is not a big thing either; it is experienced, for the narrator, as a disappointment. ([Location 2703](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00DPM7QXO&location=2703)) - It is the power of desire that binds us to other people. And for that reason, it is desire that is sacred. The desire to be part of a community is one thing, an important thing, but desire, of one individual for another, is a very different experience. Communal life, Proust is saying, no matter how desirable from the community’s point of view, to establish stability, identity and all the rest, is nowhere near as interesting, fulfilling, enchanting as the private experience of desire. Desire is particular, just as involuntary memory is particular. The insistence of desire, as Henry James and Proust and the established churches well recognized, is disruptive and dangerous, and that is why it becomes the basis of the sacred. ([Location 2714](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00DPM7QXO&location=2714)) - “All art is in the last analysis an endeavor to condense as out of the flying vapor of the world an image of human perfection, ([Location 3211](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00DPM7QXO&location=3211)) - And so this is Yeats’s significance for us. He hated the nineteenth-century material world, the world of particle physics, evolution and the deconstruction of the Bible; but try as he might, he could find no other realm, nowhere else to go; the supernatural world refused steadfastly to reveal itself to him, whatever occult practice he turned to. ([Location 3280](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00DPM7QXO&location=3280)) - Nationalism, says Roland Stromberg, was in some ways a substitute religion, quoting the potter and art historian Quentin Bell: “Cambridge, like the great majority of the nation, had been converted to the religion of nationalism; it was a powerful, a terrible, at times a very beautiful magic.”16 ([Location 3522](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00DPM7QXO&location=3522)) - Theosophy and spiritualism may be thought of as having attempted to rescue religion by giving it a “scientific” credibility that Christianity was seen to lack.31 According to H. R. Rookmaaker in Modern Art and the Death of a Culture, “Mondrian and others were building a beautiful fortress for spiritual humanity, very formal, very rational . . . they did so on the edge of a deep, deep abyss, one into which they did not dare to look.”32 But, he said, another school emerged that did look into the abyss—Surrealism. ([Location 3640](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00DPM7QXO&location=3640)) - Surrealism sought to self-consciously re-enchant a world that had been de-sacralized by science and, to that extent, it was essentially therapeutic. ([Location 3654](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00DPM7QXO&location=3654)) - “Some argue that Marx is heir of the tradition of the great Jewish prophets, thundering forth at mankind. . . . But Marx received that tradition in its Lutheran form, as a result of being raised a believing Christian. Marx, needless to say, did not remain a believing Christian, any more than Luther was a forerunner of communism. . . . What they do share . . . is a rhetorical structure, namely the characteristic articulation of the apocalyptic tradition that moves step by step . . . from the original condition of domination and oppression to the culmination of perfect community.” ([Location 3718](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00DPM7QXO&location=3718)) - Marx was always a philosopher as much as an economist. His basic contention, culminating in Das Kapital, was that the worker becomes “all the poorer the more wealth he produces.” He insists that the worker is poorer “even if better paid,” because of an increase in alienation—the worker has become impoverished as a human being. And so Marx developed the concept of alienation, arguing that it originated in labor and had four defining aspects: (1) labor is no longer the worker’s own under capitalism—it is an alien entity, dominating him; (2) the very act of production alienates the worker from his own nature—he becomes less than a man; (3) the needs of the market—and of the factory—estrange men from other men; and (4) from his surrounding culture. ([Location 3725](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00DPM7QXO&location=3725)) - The Five-Year Plan of anti-religious propaganda adopted in 1932 envisioned eventually one million such cells, outnumbering the old parishes by sixty to one. The number of Russian Orthodox churches was reduced from 54,000 in 1914 to 39,000 in 1928 (and to 4,200 in 1941). And it wasn’t only Christianity that was hit; the number of Islamic courts was reduced from 220 in 1922 to just seven in 1927. The early Communists particularly hated the supernatural element in religion. In its place, Marxism-Leninism was held to have exclusive access to the truth, through the “sacred” writings of Marx and Engels, which for them had the status of divine revelation, placing economic relations, and exchange, at the center of the belief system. ([Location 3760](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00DPM7QXO&location=3760)) - For example, Dionysian theatre should replace the churches and “inner experience” should replace dogma. In the original Dionysian theatre, he claimed, there were no spectators—each participant took part in the “orgy of action,” which became an “orgy of purification.” “The chorus was a mystical entity, an embodiment of sobornost, in which the participants shed their separateness, to achieve a ‘living union,’ which Ivanov hoped to extend to society at large. The chorus, not the newly created Duma, was the authentic voice of the people.” ([Location 3811](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00DPM7QXO&location=3811)) - Weber argued that science can make a contribution to self-awareness but cannot relieve us of the decision on how to live our lives. Our civilization, he said, “has so thoroughly and comprehensively moved into a belief in rationality that it undermines the individual’s confidence in his own ability to make decisions.” ([Location 4063](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00DPM7QXO&location=4063)) - According to Heidegger, we are “thrown” into the world, in circumstances not of our own choosing, a world which is already well under way, and we must adjust as best we can, learn the rules, the implicit ones as well as the explicit ones, while also acknowledging that the world is full of an “undisclosed abundance” that we will never conquer totally. There is no inherent human nature, no essence to man, and as we confront this lack of essence, and are learning the rules—so far as they go—we also realize that we shall one day die. This set of circumstances means that one of the most important principles of life is decisiveness, that we are the product of our decisions and actions as much as (if not more than) our thoughts. Much of Heidegger’s philosophy was given over to the idea of intensification, that to live life intensely—more intensely than we did, as intensely as possible—is as close to meaning as we will/can get. ([Location 4101](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00DPM7QXO&location=4101)) - Part of the intellectual climate in the wake of “the death of God” has been a parallel concern, a dissatisfaction with the explanations offered by science as somehow irrelevant to the concerns many have regarding how to live their lives, what values and moral attitudes to embrace, how to behave. Heidegger stands firmly in that strong strand of thought running through the twentieth century—the idea of phenomenology—leading from Husserl to the existentialists to the counterculture and to pragmatic philosophy (which we shall be exploring later). His ideas of Gelassenheit, of caring for the world—letting it be, submitting to its abundance, experiencing it poetically, breaking out of the everyday, being content to “dwell” in the world, to be at home in it—have proved ever more prescient as the decades have passed. ([Location 4164](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00DPM7QXO&location=4164)) - Thus, the real theme of the book is what it means to be human in a scientific age. If all we can believe in are our senses, if we can know ourselves only as scientists know us, if all generalizations and talk of values, ethics and aesthetics are meaningless, as the philosophers of the Vienna Circle were saying (see chapter 14), how are we to live? The writing is a tour de force, full of acerbic, original and witty observations: “In times to come, when more is known, the word ‘destiny’ will probably have acquired a statistical meaning.” “The difference between a normal person and an insane one is precisely that the normal person has all the diseases of the mind, while the madman has only one.” “One should love an idea like a woman; be overjoyed to get back to it.” ([Location 4313](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00DPM7QXO&location=4313)) - Musil was at pains to say that this state of grace, the other condition, can never be made into a norm, and we shouldn’t try. “The normal human pattern is to take a vacation from one condition of being into the other.” We will know when we are in this state of grace, he says, because we experience it as a rising feeling, rather than the normal condition, one of sinking. When it occurs, this makes us “not so much Godless as much more God-free.” ([Location 4365](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00DPM7QXO&location=4365)) - The critic Irving Howe had this to say about Anderson’s Winesburg inhabitants: “They are distraught communicants in search of a ceremony, a social value, a manner of living, a lost ritual that may, by some means, re-establish a flow and exchange of emotion.” ([Location 4449](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00DPM7QXO&location=4449)) - “Enchanting should be understood literally, as singing the world into existence.” At its best, poetry “offers an experience of the world as meditation, the mind slowing in front of things, the mind pushing back against the pressure of reality through the minimal transfigurations of the imagination.” There was, he thought, a kind of “soul-peace” to be had through poetry.18 ([Location 4558](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00DPM7QXO&location=4558)) - The way in which a poem can suddenly “enlarge” our lives, effect a change in us that is like going from winter straight into spring, is the creation of meaning; of approaching—however briefly—a feeling of wholeness. “There is no wing like meaning,” he said. And we must hold within us the realization that “[i]t is not every day that the world arranges itself in a poem.” ([Location 4570](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00DPM7QXO&location=4570)) - “Reality is a cliché / From which we escape by metaphor.”20 ([Location 4575](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00DPM7QXO&location=4575)) - And perhaps this is Stevens’s most significant observation, which coincides with and extends Valéry’s main point: “We never arrive intellectually. But emotionally we ([Location 4585](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00DPM7QXO&location=4585)) - arrive constantly (as in poetry, happiness, high mountains, vistas).”23 Once we understand this distinction, he is saying, once we accept that we will never feel whole intellectually or philosophically, we can get on and enjoy the emotional (artistic, imaginative) wholenesses, the “sudden rightnesses,” that are available to us. ([Location 4586](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00DPM7QXO&location=4586)) - The nearest we can get to a spiritual feeling, Woolf is saying, is intense intimacy. By definition, therefore, we live most intensely in our families and with our friends. Indeed, this is the purpose of friendship, to search for, to create, intimate moments of being. The moments of bliss from our childhood create the benchmark; adult intimacy both recalls and overtakes that earlier experience. It is the purpose of art to identify these elements and preserve them, but the moments themselves are available to everyone. ([Location 4837](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00DPM7QXO&location=4837)) - the Joycean epiphany, which does not so much confirm a truth “as disrupt what one has grown comfortable in accepting as true.” ([Location 4870](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00DPM7QXO&location=4870)) - Lead your life so that, looking back on it when you are old, you will be able to say that you have become a person you would want to be, that you have actively chosen the self you are, without unreflectively acquiescing in the plans of others; life is to obtain its meaning by what we do, not what is demanded of us by some “long-distance laird” ([Location 4879](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00DPM7QXO&location=4879)) - A successful achievement is a stable identity that has been chosen and earned. ([Location 4905](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00DPM7QXO&location=4905)) - (Jesus never lived with a woman; “Surely living with a woman is one of the most difficult things a man has to do, and he never did it.”) ([Location 4927](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00DPM7QXO&location=4927)) - Lawrence’s two main criteria “for the living of life” were, first, “the need to unite with another in the alternately straining and easing relationship of love”; and second, the need for “passionate purpose,” quite separate from erotic engagement and its release, passionate purpose being about making “something new and better in the world.” ([Location 4996](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00DPM7QXO&location=4996)) - For Lawrence, love and otherness are the twin divinities: these are what we must show if we are to lead exemplary lives, always aware that this may reveal itself in “patches of compromise,” and that the desire for possession (of the loved other) is offset by the need to be free (of the other). ([Location 5009](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00DPM7QXO&location=5009))