Цитаты из произведения Against Dryness

T. S. Eliot and Jean-Paul Sartre, dissimilar enough as thinkers, both tend to undervalue prose and to deny it any imaginative function. Poetry is the creation of linguistic quasithings; prose is for explanation and exposition, it is essentially didactic, documentary, informative. Prose is ideally transparent; it is only…

Literature must always represent a battle between real people and images; and what it requires now is a much stronger and more complex conception of the former. *** Perhaps only Shakespeare manages to create at the highest level both images and people; and even Hamlet looks second-rate compared with Lear. Only the very…

The technique of becoming free is more difficult than John Stuart Mill imagined. We need more concepts than our philosophies have furnished us with. We need to be enabled to think in terms of degrees of freedom, and to picture, in a non-metaphysical, non-totalitarian, and non-religious sense, the transcendence of reality.…

We may recall the ideal of "dryness" which we associate with the symbolist movement, with writers such as T. E. Hulme and T. S. Eliot, with Paul Valery, with Wittgenstein. This "dryness" (smallness, clearness, self-containedness) is nemesis of Romanticism. Indeed it is Romanticism in a later phase. The pure, clean,…

IF WE CONSIDER 20th-century literature as compared with 19th-century literature, we notice certain significant contrasts. I said that, in a way, we were back in the I8th-century, the era of rationalistic allegories and moral tales, the era when the idea of human nature was unitary and single. The 19th-century novel (I use…

WHAT HAVE WE LOST HERE? And what have we perhaps never had? We have suffered a general loss of concepts, the loss of a moral and political vocabulary. We no longer use a spread-out substantial picture of the manifold virtues of man and society. We no longer see man against a background of values, of realities, which…

The Welfare State is the reward of "empiricism in politics." It has represented to us a set of thoroughly desirable but limited ends, which could be conceived in nontheoretical terms; and in pursuing it, in allowing the idea of it to dominate the more naturally theoretical wing of our political scene, we have to a large…

IF we turn to French philosophy we may see, at least in that section of it which has most caught the popular imagination, I mean in the work of Jean Paul Sartre, essentially the same picture. It is interesting how extremely Kantian this picture is, for all Sartre’s indebtedness to Hegelian sources. Again, the individual…

Upon Anglo-Saxon philosophy the two most profound influences have been Hume and Kant: and it is not difficult to see in the current philosophical conception of the person the work of these two great thinkers. This conception consists in the joining of a materialistic behaviourism with a dramatic view of the individual as…