/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.21880724]

So why do rightwingers think being an aristocrat means you just to get to act like a Karen all day and aren't obliged to act like an actual leader? All of the good aristocrats that survived into modernity took care of their people, or even became social democrats/marxists afterwards

[Anonymous No.21880736]

>>21880724
Lefties think that, which is why they're opposed to aristocracy. The Right knows all about noblesse oblige.

[Anonymous No.21880758]

>>21880724
Wow interesting. Any books about your claims?

[Anonymous No.21880765]

>>21880724
sounds like you are projecting, since you are describing the caricature of aristocrats projected by bourgeoisie as their ideal of the "high life"

[Anonymousn No.21880852]

>>21880724
That's just the worst of both worlds. All the 'good' aristocrats survived because they were boring, responsible pragmatists with no sense of the spectacular doom that their class was privileged to face. The true ones met that doom with vengeful wit and splendour, and their spirit lived on in the modernism of writers like Rimbaud and Nietzsche and DH Lawrence and Wyndham Lewis: it's the absolute sovereignty of consciousness for its own sake in the face of an indifferent world. The landed gentry of Henry James novels don't fret about how to convert their fading feudal wealth into productive, socially useful capital: they delicately plot of the boldest and most aesthetically intricate schemes by which to squander it.

Any good Marxists recognise that *that* is what's really valuable in the image of the aristocracy, at least as it flared up from its pyre in the final era of its obsolescence. Adorno, of course, recognises this free, autonomous spark of aesthetic value that could find no place in the administrated world. The question is not how to efface all those inconvenient, irrational, intractable aspects in favour of grim compromise, not to carefully breed an artificial race of administrator-mascots, but to try to make a civilisation that can face up to the tension between the practical necessity of production and the untameable sovereignty of consciousness.

[Anonymous No.21880935]

>As today his surroundings do not so force him, the eternal mass-man, true to his character, ceases to appeal to any authority other than himself, and feels himself lord of his own existence. Conversely the select man, the excellent man is urged by interior necessity to appeal to some standard beyond himself, superior to himself, into whose service he freely enters. ... Contrary to what is usually thought, it is the man of excellence, not the common man who lives in essential servitude. Life has no savour for him unless he makes it consist in service to something transcendent. Hence he does not look upon the necessity of serving as an oppression. When, by chance, such necessity is lacking, he grows restless and invents some new standard, more difficult, more exigent, with which to coerce himself. This is life lived as a discipline — the noble life.

>Nobility is defined by the demands it makes on us — by obligations, not by rights. Noblesse oblige. "To live as one likes is plebeian; the noble man aspires to order and law" (Goethe). The privileges of nobility are not in their origin concessions or favours; on the contrary, they are conquests. And their maintenance supposes, in principle, that the privileged individual is capable of reconquering them, at any moment, if it were necessary, and if anyone were to dispute them. ... It is annoying to see the degeneration suffered in today's speech by a word so inspiring as "nobility." For, by coming to mean for many people hereditary "noble blood," it is changed into something similar to common rights, into a static, passive quality which is received and transmitted, something inert. But the strict sense, the etymon of the word nobility, is essentially dynamic. Noble means the "well known," that is, known by everyone, famous, he who has made himself known by excelling the anonymous mass.

>As one advances in life, one realises more and more that the majority of men — and of women — are incapable of any other effort than that strictly imposed on them as a reaction to external compulsion. And for that reason, those few individuals we come across who are capable of spontaneous and joyous effort stand out isolated, monumentalised, so to speak, in our experience. These are the select men, the nobles, the only ones who are active and not merely reactive, for whom life is a perpetual striving, an incessant course of training. Training = askesis. These are the ascetics.

[Anonymous No.21881275]

>why do X think
Proprietary shill language.

[Anonymous No.21881302]

That’s how the southern aristocracy saw themselves but it was a complete sham lol