Historians From France

"India seemed to have a powerful attraction for Michelet. In the "Journal" he kept, the following note is to be found: The little ruins of the Mediterranean world can no longer assuage the craving for ruins which is felt by my ravaged heart. I need the desolations, the cataclysms of the Orient, the annihilation of whole races, the deserts...• The Hall of the Nibelungen is not enough. I need the great plain of the Indian world where the Gurus perish by the hundred thousand ...."

"The year 1863 will remain cherished and blessed. It was the first time I could read India’s great sacred poem, the divine Ramayana.... This great stream of poetry carries away the bitter leaven left behind by time and purifies us. Whoever has his heart dried up, let him drench it in the Ramayana. Whoever has lost and wept, let him find in it a soothing softness and Nature’s compassion. Whoever has done too much, willed too much, let him drink a long draught of life and youth from this deep chalice.... Everything is narrow in the Occident. Greece is small — I stifle. Judea is dry — I pant. Let me look a little towards lofty Asia, towards the deep Orient. There I find my immense poem, vast as India’s seas, blessed and made golden by the sun, a book of divine harmony in which nothing jars. There reigns a lovable peace, and even in the midst of battle, an infinite softness, an unbounded fraternity extending to all that lives, a bottomless and shoreless ocean of love, piety, clemency. I have found what I was looking for: the bible of kindness. Great poem, receive me!… Let me plunge into it! It is the sea of milk."

"Follow the migrations of mankind from East to West along the sun's course and along the track of the world's magnetic currents; observe its long voyage from Asia to Europe, from India to France.... At its starting point, in India, the birthplace of races and of religions, the womb of the world ."

"That year will always remain a dear and cherished memory; it was the first time I had the opportunity to read the great sacred poem of India, the divine Rarnayana. If anyone has lost the freshness of emotion, let him drink a long draught of life, and youth from that deep chalice."

"My book is born in the full light of the sun among our forefathers, the sons oflight-Aryans, Indians, Persians and Greeks . . . . This trinity of light quite naturally met with opposition from the sombre genius of the South by way of Memphis, Carthage, Tyre and Judaea. Egypt in her monuments, Judaea with her scriptures, established their Bibles, tenebrous but of lasting influence.... Now that our parent Bibles have come to light it is more apparent to what extent the Jewish Bible belongs to another race. It is a great book, without doubt, and always will be- but how gloomy and full of gross equivocation-beautiful but full of doubt like death...."

"Out of India, [[French Revolution|until [17]89]] there fell a torrent of light—the river of Right and Reason."

"From India comes to us a torrent of light, a river of Right and Reason."

"France is the daughter of freedom. In human progress, the essential part, the main force, is called man. Man is his own Prometheus."

"Each year, it is necessary to respire, to take breath again, to revive ourselves at the great living sources that forever keep their eternal freshness. Where can we find them if not at the cradle of our race, on the sacred summits from where descend the Indus and the Ganges?"

"Whereas, in our Occident, the most dry and sterile minds brag in front of Nature, the Indian genius, the most rich and fecund of all, knows neither small nor big and has generously embraced universal fraternity, even the identity of all souls."

"If we look at the parpens piled up on the building site or at the block of bronze, nothing about them manifests that they are suited to being a house or a statue. ... Aristotle speaks of the materials considered as such in terms of "the buildable" (I, 201a 16, b Bf), coining an adjective whose suffix expresses capacity (what he calls dunamis). This capacity, as we have seen, cannot be grasped after the manner of that with which perception provides us (color, hardness, etc.); it requires a gaze capable of probing more deeply, of proceeding from the real to the possible—as when Michelangelo "sees" a David in the formless block abandoned by other sculptors."

"To know that a human being truly is, he must be examined in the arena where he most fully realizes his nature, thus where he is most truly himself. Excellence (arete) is the object of ethics. Anthropology is therefore inseparable from ethics."

"I would willingly give Thucydides for some authentic memoirs by Aspasia or by a slave of Pericles."

"Some good judges assert that his is the best French prose that can be found. Hugo's anagram, première prose, is apt and felicitous."

"Mérimée hated effects and pretense; he had no mercy for writers who strove to bring together words which were surprised to find themselves in the same company, who tried to polish their periods to give weird turns to trifling thoughts merely for the effect."

"When the youthful Queen Victoria was in Paris in 1840, she said to the Queen of France, whose guest she was, 'Do you find my French accent bad?' The Queen made a polite reply, but the King, Louis-Philippe, said to Victoria playfully, 'My dear child, they say that we here in the Tuileries do not speak very good French either. Let us send for Prosper Mérimée..."

"the perverted picture as seen in opera and drama may not become our permanent impression of Mérimée's Carmen. Stage versions and adaptations minimize the misery, squalor, and tragedy of the gypsy girl's life and thereby lose the tremendous force of Mérimée's story. To know both may be good, but to mistake one for the other is not. As one critic has said, "Mérimée's Carmen is a gentleman's Carmen.""

"It is not that Dante intends to combat the cupiditas of the clergy in order to save the autonomy of the State; rather, “it is the struggle against cupiditas, the need to thoroughly permeate public life with religion, that leads him to distinguish between the orders.” In other words, the central point of his thinking, which leads him to overcome both Guelphism and Ghibellinism, is "the intuition of the concordance between the affirmation of the autonomy of the Empire, hitherto supported by heterodox thinkers, and that of the purification of the Church affirmed by spiritual writers," which is in line with what the best interpreter of Dante's philosophy, Étienne Gilson, defines as the singular and unique feature of his thought, irreducible to any source."

"All realism derives from the analysis of knowledge; all idealism derives from the analysis of a thought."

"Gilson criticizes attempts to trace Dante's position back to Thomism or Averroism. For St. Thomas, every hierarchy of dignity is at the same time a hierarchy of jurisdiction, while for Dante—except for God—a hierarchy of dignity is never the foundation of a hierarchy of jurisdiction, and this corresponds to Dante's specific philosophical problem, which is not so much to define the essence of philosophy as to determine functions and jurisdictions. The principle governing this determination is absolutely irreconcilable with Thomism. St. Thomas knows only one ultimate end: eternal bliss, which can only be attained through the Church; moreover, the spirituality of the ultimate end implies that between temporal and spiritual power there is a hierarchical subordination of the means to the end. For Dante, on the other hand, man can obtain, through the exercise of political virtues, a human happiness completely distinct from heavenly bliss, even if the latter represents a higher end. The thesis of the “duo ultima” legitimizes the complete distinction between the political order and the religious order, which is equally universal to that of the Church, but autonomous and pursuing an end of earthly happiness."

"The realist method starts with the whole in order to distinguish the parts."

"Most of our contemporaries think that, at bottom, being a philosopher and adopting an idealist method are one and the same thing."

"I maintain, therefore, that just as there is in Cartesianism a methodical idealism, the kind that starts with nosse [knowing], there can be a methodical realism, the kind that starts with esse [being]."

"If there is something more in a living being than a pure mechanism, Descartes is bound in advance to miss it."

"Hume's skepticism, therefore, descends in a direct line from Cartesian mathematicism."

"If there is a single initial error at the root of all the difficulties philosophy is involved in, it can only be the one Descartes committed when he decreed, a priori, that the method of one of the sciences of reality was valid for the whole of reality."

"Every given reality implies the thought which apprehends it. Therefore being is the condition of knowing; knowing is not the condition of being."

"The scientific sterility of the Middle Ages has to be condemned for the same reasons which make it necessary today to condemn the philosophic sterility of scientism."

"While Descartes finds being in thought, Saint Thomas finds thought in being."

"Up to Descartes' time, and particularly during the Middle Ages, it had always been agreed that philosophy consisted in a transposition of reality into conceptual terms"

"Reality can be grasped at levels of different depths. It is immediately given to us in a kind of block form, which is simply the "apprehended reality"."

"With Descartes the Cogito ergo sum [I think, therefore I am] turns into Cogito ergo res sunt [I think, therefore things are]."

"As used today, the word realism means in the first place the opposite to idealism when it claims that it is possible to pass from the subject to the object."

"Indeed, all idealism derives from Descartes, or from Kant, or from both together, and whatever other distinguishing features a system may have, it is idealist to the extent that, either in itself, or as far as we are concerned, it makes knowing the condition of being."

"Having left us with thought (not a soul), and extension (not a body), [Descartes] does not know how to account for the union of soul and body."

"Thomas considers that a religious may legitimately aspire to the title and functions of master, but since he could only teach divine things, it is only in relation to the science of divine things that secular sciences can legitimately interest him. This is demanded by the very essence of the contemplative life, the teaching of which is nothing but its immediate extension into the order of the active life."

"What, then, will this philosophy be? Thomas only employed it for the service it renders Christian wisdom. No doubt this is why he never thought of separating it from this wisdom and giving it a name. He probably did not foresee that the day would come when people would go through his works to extract the elements of a philosophy from his theology. He himself never attempted this synthesis."

"We can only choose between two kinds of life, the active and the contemplative."

"Philosophy always buries its undertakers."

"The mathematician always proceeds from thought to being or things. Consequently, critical idealism was born the day Descartes decided that the mathematical method must henceforth be the method for metaphysics."

"What is most apparent and constant in Thomas' personality, the image he most likely had of himself, is the teacher. The saint was essentially a Doctor of the Church; the man was a teacher of theology and philosophy; the mystic never entirely separated his meditations from his teaching, which drew its inspiration from them."

"Having expelled quality from the field of extension, [idealists] do not know how to account for it when it reappears in thought."

"I am about to take a rapid review of the history of the French Revolution, which began the era of new societies in Europe, as the English Revolution had begun the era of new governments. This revolution not only modified the political power, but it entirely changed the internal existence of the nation. The forms of the society of the Middle Ages still remained. The land was divided into hostile provinces, the population into rival classes. The nobility had lost all their powers, but still retained all their distinctions: the people had no rights, royalty no limits; France was in an utter confusion of arbitrary administration, of class legislation and special privileges to special bodies. For these abuses the revolution substituted a system more conformable with justice, and better suited to our times. It substituted law in the place of arbitrary will, equality in that of privilege; delivered men from the distinctions of classes, the land from the barriers of provinces, trade from the shackles of corporations and fellowships, agriculture from feudal subjection and the oppression of tithes, property from the impediment of entails, and brought everything to the condition of one state, one system of law, one people."

"The good taste we speak of, which is that of literature, is not limited to what we call the sciences, but extends itself imperceptibly to other arts, such as architecture, painting, sculpture, and music. 'Tis the same discerning faculty which introduces universally the same elegance, the same symmetry, and the same order in the disposition of the parts; which inclines us to a noble simplicity, to natural beauties, and a judicious choice of ornaments. On the other hand, the depravation of taste in arts has been always a mark and consequence of the depravation of taste in literature. ... The good taste of literature reaches also to public customs, and the manner of living. An habit of consulting the best rules upon one subject, naturally leads to the doing it also upon others."

"It is not reasonable they should be solely employed in the study of the Greek and Latin authors, and having no curiosity to become acquainted with the writers of their own nation, remain always strangers in their own country."

"Nothing gives history a greater superiority to many branches of literature, than to see in a manner imprinted, in almost every page of it, the precious footsteps and shining proofs of this great truth, viz. that God disposes all events as supreme Lord and Sovereign; that he alone determines the fate of kings and the duration of empires; and that he transfers the government of kingdoms from one nation to another, because of the unrighteous dealings and wickedness committed therein."

"Mon siège est fait."

"Frank, you are, without doubt, a scarcity. Anyone who looks at the historical record of the juncture of art and technology finds you nearly unaccompanied when it comes to documenting this historical record between the years of the late-1960's up to the early 1990s. Basically there is you, Jack Burnham's book Beyond Modern Sculpture (1968), and Gene Youngblood's reference work Expanded Cinema (1970). Specifically, your books Origins and Development of Kinetic Art (1968), Art, Action and Participation (1975) and Art of the Electronic Age (1993) are indispensable research tools in helping us figure out how art got to where it is today - in your terms virtualized."

"Roy Ascott was among the first artists to launch an appeal for total spectator participation: for him, the strict antinomy between action and contemplation needed to be abolished."

"As far as the sensory experience of the spectator goes, the most outstanding American kinetic artist is unquestionably the Chinese-born Wen-Ying Tsai. His pieces, which are perfect on the technological level, serve the primary purpose of giving a complete visual experience to the spectator, whose sound solicitations provoke a choreographic, chromatic and rhythmic response in the ‘cybernetic sculptures’. [...]"