Archive for the ‘Quotations’ Category
Veiled
You store up powers of discretion and of decision by reading poetry. Poetry has always to deal with your future. And I’m already able to know what I positively cannot know about myself, in this very strange garment woven as a dream about the future. If you wanted to know the same truth, which the poet offers you, in the form of an ethical code, in the form of a lecture on morality, without this poetic veil, you would become a solemn ass.
It is asinine to study a course of ethics in advance. No situation which you will have to meet will ever have anything to do with all the abstract notions, and sentences, and phrases, which you have picked up in the process of learning about yourself, directly. But it is very different when you have read Goethe’s Werther, or Moby–Dick or Pierre, and then become despondent. Your despondency will be illuminated. You can strengthen and fortify your heart in this simile. (Eugen Rosenstock–Huessy, Make Bold To Be Ashamed, 1953)
Love language
Adam McIntosh writes:
Self-sacrifice [is] the Bible’s love language (John 15:13).
She’s unusual
Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy attributes to Ben Franklin and his contemporaries the great error of destroying ends by turning them into mere means. Thus, religion becomes merely a means to happiness rather than an end in itself. A walk in the woods becomes a means to greater health rather than something simply to be enjoyed. And at the end of the road, people become a means to our own ends rather than something of fundamental value (see, we struggle to express ourselves any other way!) in themselves. Fixating on “usefulness,” far from elevating the value of something, eviscerates it of any transcendent or enduring worth.
Thus, speaking of romance:
The same thing in every changing moment [is now] treated as end or as means. This is the terror of life. And Franklin has said dogmatically, and you all believe it—23 hours a day you believe it—except when you are in love, you always believe it. The only person where you say she is unusual is the girl. Now what is unusual? Something that can’t be put to any use. What is usual? Something that is in usu, that is, that we know the use for. . . A girl, you cannot. It’s certainly not a girl that counts for something. The harlot, you know her use. But a real person, you cannot. She’s absolutely useless. (Eugen Rosenstock–Huessy, Hinge of Generations, 1953)
In the best possible sense of the word; because one desires her, not what he can get from her.
Later, he comments on how the end of this is tyranny:
We are not means. Once you’ve begun to conceive of other people as means, you end with all the systems of tyranny. You can’t have it, you see. It’s too tempting. It’s too obvious. (Eugen Rosenstock–Huessy, Hinge of Generations, 1953)
He then goes on to relate this to how literature has descended to fiction, using James Fenimore Cooper as his foil. He lays on the shoulders of Cooper and the rest of the Romantic School the blame for descending, from literature as a reflection of life, to fiction as vain longing for the ends that we have lost.
Mr. Franklin is the beginning of great things. He’s certainly the beginning of Mr. Hitler. But Mr. Cooper is the beginning of the burlesque show, because man cannot live by reason, so he has to create fiction. And the fiction world is after all always the exact complementary part to the world in which we actually live. So the heroes of the fiction story are very different from the heroes of great literature. I mean, Tolstoy’s War and Peace or Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, they are [ourselves], you see, in earnest. But this Natty Bumppo of course is not Mr. Cooper at all, you see. It’s the other half, his wish, his desire.
The heroes of great literature, gentlemen, are the undesirable: real creatures. And the heroes of so-called fiction are, you see, our wish-dreams. . . They fill out the void. Now, the greater the void you create in your philosophy, the more distorted must be the other person. That is the price of empty philosophy. If usefulness is the criterion for the real life, then uselessness must be the criterion of the other half, of fiction, which it is. [Cooper’s] Indians are no use to anybody. They can’t even be integrated into the historical existence of society, you see. And therefore, they are so beloved. And the waterfalls, and the moonlight, and all these things are, you see, so much on the other side, that the Romantic School says, “This is for the feelings.” Can you see this? Half and half. But they are two halves that never get together. The one is therefore called “fiction.” Of course, Mr. Cooper didn’t dare to call it “fiction” in his days. This was great art. It was “the novel,” as it was called. We call it today, brutally, “fiction.” (Eugen Rosenstock–Huessy, Hinge of Generations, 1953)
Disciples
Now, you are so much victims of modern propaganda, that you even believe that all propaganda is of the same brand, and that only those who do not propagate their faith are decent, and everybody who wants to make disciples is indecent. Gentlemen, I want to make disciples. Certainly. But it is claimed as bad taste in this college: “You mustn’t make disciples.” Gentlemen, then I couldn’t teach. And therefore you have no teaching in this college, because nobody wants to do anything but make suggestions, and perhaps it’s a good idea. Perhaps you look at it in your own way. I think that’s silly; it’s a complete waste of time. If I am not convinced, that is, if I do not think that my thought must bear fruit, I certainly am not adequate for teaching. Teaching means the propagation, you see, of the truth, and can only propagate it if you get hold of this truth, because I say so. (Eugen Rosenstock–Huessy, Hinge of Generations, 1953)
Dogma
Dogma is in the world against dogma. And you will not understand the dogma of any creed, or any faith, if you do not see that you are dogmatic. The men who talk against dogma are always the people who are the most dogmatic. And they don’t know it. The point is, gentlemen, the immersion in the spirit of your own age is unconscious. . . . The going-beyond the spirit of your age can only be achieved by breaking out, so to speak, into consciousness. You have to burst forth into full consciousness. That’s why the church, for example, has always demanded a confession. But the confession makes no sense for people who haven’t lived and haven’t found themselves to be prisoners of their own age. It is only when you have to break the prison of the dogma of your age that you discover the larger freedom. (Eugen Rosenstock–Huessy, Hinge of Generations, 1953)
Vaunting
The concern for victims has become a paradoxical competition of mimetic rivalries, of opponents continually trying to outbid one another.
The victims most interesting to us are always those who allow us to condemn our neighbors. And our neighbors do the same. They always think first about victims for whom they hold us responsible.
We do not all have the same experience as St. Peter and St. Paul, who discovered that they themselves were guilty of persecution and confessed their own guilt rather than that of their neighbors. It’s our neighbors who kindly remind us that we should be compassionate, and we render them the same service. . . .
From now on we have our antisacrificial rituals of victimization, and they unfold in an order as unchangeable as properly religious rituals. First of all we lament the victims we admit to making or allowing to be made. Then we lament the hypocrisy of our lamentation, and finally we lament Christianity, the indispensable scapegoat, for there is no ritual without a victim, and in our day Christianity is always it, the scapegoat of last resort. As part of this last stage of the ritual, we affirm, in a nobly suffering tone, that Christianity has done nothing to “resolve the problem of violence.” (René Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, 164)
De profundis
The book of Job is, in effect, an immense psalm. (René Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, 117)
Multiformity
The soul has to do with the invisible, with the things that are not expressed either in dollars and cents, or in a locality. For the soul of man, . . . it doesn’t matter that you have to pack up and leave New York. It didn’t matter to my soul that I had to leave Germany and come to this country. It mattered very much to my . . . role in society, you see; it mattered very much to my mind, because I had to think new things, you see; and it mattered very much to my environment, to my natural fight for existence, to my bodily existence. It didn’t matter at all to my soul. Quite the contrary: only because I left this other space, you see, could I save my soul. . . .
Gentlemen, you have not learned to use the term “soul” right. . . . The one condition . . . attached to the use of the word “soul” is that you ascribe to the soul the power to survive change of environment, change of body, and change of mind, and change of role. . . . It is very difficult to understand that a dishonored person can have all the more soul, because society doesn’t reclaim him and doesn’t recognize him, you see. Your integrity as a soul . . . can only be tested if you can survive environmental change, mental change.
[We are given] the occasion of turning [our] experience into an asset simply by discovering that [we are] not to be identified with any external position in society. You see, this is the challenge. The soul always comes to our rescue with a new pride, and says, “If I’m humiliated, if I’m humbled . . . then I discover my real powers.”
You see, the soul thrives on the invisible, which is nothing mystical. But it is the power, Goethe has called it, . . . “to place ourselves in times into nonexistence in order to come into existence.” And take this down, because it is your best weapon against . . . modern existentialism. . . . These existentialists always say that we exist. But gentlemen, . . . the nonexistence is the experience of the soul. . . . The soul is still in being when the man doesn’t seem to exist, because “exist” is materially visible in the senses. Every one of you has to be able to live through a cocoon stage in which, in the eyes of the world, he’s somebody else. He isn’t yet the one who one day will shake the foundations of the universe by his actions. In this moment, he seems to be nonexistent. He’s out in pasture. And this nonexistence, gentlemen, is the state of the soul. . . . Any one of us at times at least has to be tested in this manner.
. . .
I wish you to understand that all these forms are purely secular forms, of passing importance: the worker, the businessman, the farmer. No one can save his soul by just being a worker, or by just being a farmer, or just being a businessman. Comes an emergency, you see, he must have another power. . . Man is only in [the] course of his life one, when he can join together the various phases of his life into oneness, you see. . . .
And therefore, . . . any one of these groups, any one of these groups carries some eternal truth about you and me into the field of their purely social passing, business activity. . . . [They] identif[y] a reflection of this real quality of you and me, you see, in the course of our lives, from child to death, with any special situation on which you can put, you see, your finger and say, “This is it.” . . . [And so] you get all the sects. Any sect, any sectarian movement, you see, identifies a partial solution of infinity with a total solution of infinity. That’s why you shouldn’t be sectarians, gentlemen. Don’t be sectarians. A sect is always confusing infinity . . . into which we are moving, that all men in a certain extent belong to each other: with . . . some relative realization. (Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Cross of Reality, 1953)
Coming true
By what means is attachment established? Very simple now. By a word spoken, may it be only three letters, “yes,” by which a person is willing to stand by this one word for the rest of his life, or her life—that is speech. To . . . speak with potency, with fertility, with fecundity, with procreational power, comes from our opportunity to throw ourselves behind our own word, to verify this word. . . .
If that word is true, then it has to come true. The English, wonderful phrase for verification is “to come true.” You have to make it come true. So the truth is always planted into this world, gentlemen, by a word, and the acts follow. And that’s how the spirit becomes flesh. You say, “I am this girl’s bridegroom.” And it takes you 50 years to become it. And that’s why the declaration is so important. The declaration in itself would be nonsense, if you wouldn’t do anything with it. It allows you now to make it come true. That’s why you have to say it. Before, she will not budge. That’s why at that moment you are the bridegroom, because you go at anchor, and you declare which direction from now on your various steps shall have, or in which light they shall be interpreted. . . .
For example, you take two men. One, engaged; and the other, married. And they take ship, and sail from New York to New Zealand. Well, the engaged one everybody will suspect of running to New Zealand, so that he has not to marry the girl. The husband we’ll investigate and we’ll say, “The poor man has to make a living. He can only . . . make it by selling sewing machines in New Zealand. So now they are separate for a long time.” But he got married before to express his willingness to stick it out.
The same act, gentlemen, like separation, for a lover . . . and a bridegroom are very different, because the bridegroom has already declared that all his steps from now on must be seen as circling around his power to build this nest, to come back, to send money, to raise his children, or what-not, to acquire a new citizenship, if you want, or a place in New Zealand. That’s all possible, but then the wife and children will come after him. That is, not one step a man takes, for example, after his wedding, can be understood except in the light of this first declaration. (Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Cross of Reality, 1953)
Personhood
Rosenstock-Huessy contests the ideal of a full and perfect outward authentic expression of the self:
The fiction of today is that everybody by birth is a person. That’s a very dangerous fiction. That’s why we today are in such trouble with our religious education, with our political parties, with Mr. McCarthy, with Eisenhower. It isn’t true that a man wakes up and is a person. A person is a man who can cope with opposites, who can decide when is the time for what in his life. If you are a playboy, and you don’t know when to become serious and become soldiers, you aren’t a person. You are a playboy. As we say, you see. Or when you are a brute . . . a man who is always on the warpath, I mean, who has to “fight the Japs,” . . . ? Well, he’s not a person. He’s just again a boy, a pirate, a—or a wild Westerner. Not a person.
A person is something you have completely lost sight of. . . . A person is something very clear, who . . . can decide, the mask, or the role which is on his face. . . . Persona in Latin means to sound through the mask. The person is originally the actor on the tragic scene who wears the mask of the hero, you see. And a person is that man who therefore knows when to wear one mask or the other. (Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Cross of Reality, 1953, emphasis added)
I gotta have my orange juice. 