Download On Looking Into the Abyss: Untimely Thoughts on Culture and by Gertrude Himmelfarb PDF
By Gertrude Himmelfarb
In those provocative essays, certainly one of our so much exclusive historians appears into the abyss of the current. Himmelfarb exposes the highbrow and religious impoverishment of a few of our most trendy present ideas--and indicates how the fashion for ancient structuralism has made it attainable to trivialize the tragedy of the Holocaust.
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Example text
I was never a student of Trilling’s, but I was an admirer and a friend. ) In recent years I find myself returning to his writings more and more, not so much for inspiration as for solace. The inspiration came many years ago when I learned to appreciate a mode of thought that I now recognize—I did not know this at the time—to be uniquely his: a seriousness about ideas that was not “academic” (defying both the language of academia and the compartmentalization of disciplines); a seriousness about public affairs that went beyond (or stopped short of) politics in the ordinary sense; a moral gravitas that was surely unseemly when I was younger but that may be more appropriate at my present age (and in the present time).
8 Believing England to be the most modern as well as one of the most civilized of countries, Hegel would not have expected to find heroes there. But he might have found a species of hero in the Eminent Victorians—a modern, civilized, Anglicized version of the hero. The Eminent Victorians were not Hegelian heroes, and still less, for all their admiration of antiquity, Greek heroes. They would have thought it presumptuous to claim for themselves, or to have others claim on their behalf, the quality of “greatness of soul” (megalopsychia) that Aristotle attributed to the hero.
Few readers, she says, are likely to interpret it as a dedication to the dead, since one cannot dedicate anything to the dead, but only to their memory; moreover, the book jacket identifies the author as an assistant professor at Princeton, suggesting that he was too young to be the son of parents who perished in the camps. ” The dedication is thus a “strategy” by which the author reclaims the past. ” The implications of this mode of thought, exhibited in the writing and teaching of some of our most eminent literary critics, philosophers, and historians, have not been fully appreciated.