Tocqueville - Revolution and the Decline of Art and Literature

[Anonymous No.18405331]

"We must not forget, moreover, that the same energy that impels a man to rebel in a violent way against a common error almost always carries him beyond the bounds of reason; that in order for a man to declare war — even legitimate war — on the ideas of his time and country, he must have a certain violent and adventurous cast of mind, and men of this character, no matter what direction they take, rarely arrive at happiness and virtue. And in passing let it be said that this also explains why even in the most necessary and holy of revolutions, one encounters so few moderate and honest revolutionaries."

According to Tocqueville there is a tendency towards the decline of great revolutions, and at the same time the arts, values, and intellectual pursuits which depend on this revolutionary thinking.
Is he right? And what are the consequences of this?

This is from Democracy in America. But you can reference other works if they relate specifically to this topic.

[Anonymous No.18405339]

>/lit/ is my personal think-tank! It's like /pol/ for smarties!

[Anonymous No.18405363]

>>18405339
Unfortunately we are experiencing the worst cultural decline in history and this is the last place to even attempt intellectual discussions. I know you redditors want to end that, but in the meantime Tocqueville is necessary reading for anyone who wants to understand the decline.

[Anonymous No.18405419]

"The rich, for their part, are scattered and impotent. They have no privileges that draw attention to themselves. Even their wealth, no longer incorporated into the earth and represented by it, is intangible and almost invisible. Just as there are no longer races of paupers, so, too, are there no longer races of the rich. The wealthy emerge from the crowd daily and time and again lapse back into it. Hence they do not constitute a separate class easy to define and despoil. Besides, a thousand hidden threads connect them to the mass of their fellow citizens, so that the people can hardly strike at them without injuring themselves. Between these two extremes of democratic society stand a vast multitude of men who are almost alike and who, while not exactly rich or poor, own enough property to want order but not enough to arouse envy.

These men are of course enemies of violent movements. Their immobility keeps things quiet above and below them and ensures that society rests on a firm footing.

Not that they are satisfied with their present fortune or that they shrink with natural horror from a revolution whose spoils they would share without experiencing its woes. On the contrary, they want to get rich, with unparalleled ardor, but the difficulty is to know whose wealth they can lay hold of. The same social state that incessantly spurs their desires circumscribes those desires within necessary limits. It gives men more freedom to change and less of an interest in seeing change occur.

Men in democracies not only have no natural desire for revolutions, they also fear them."

[Anonymous No.18405440]

>>18405363
>all these mental gymnastics to justify making an off topic post on /lit/
>literally admitting that you just want to use your favorite meme philosopher to springboard a discussion on current events
>current events go on /pol/
I wonder why these threads always suck. It's almost like you're just shitposting.

[Anonymous No.18405472]

>>18405440
Why are you always online posting within seconds of these threads?
If Houellebecq says it's on-topic then it's on-topic.

[Anonymous No.18405548]

>>18405363
>we are experiencing the worst cultural decline in history
Are we?

[Anonymous No.18405711]

>>18405548
Yes, anyone saying otherwise is a complete soulless bugmen. What the hell are you even doing here? Just go watch netflix high on pot

[Anonymous No.18405755]

>>18405419
One of Marx's great mistakes was the theoretical division of the Third Estate. Much like the "intangible and invisible" relation to wealth the creation of an illusory party dedicated to civil war, and one based on class alone, created an unprecedented abstraction of thought. Class as a technical necessity is a weakening of the political body and must produce in theory what it lacks in substance. In it is the pantheism of private concerns, and the very opposition to the barbarous pantheism that Heine warned against - but still of the same political form. In this case, a German indifferentism to all the failures of the left, waiting for the world to return against the bourgeoisie and peasants in ruins. Through estate nihilism the technical concerns can only increase, become the whole of a political program.

One cannot blame the marxists entirely for the shift in aesthetics, the abstraction of values and literature. The elimination of the spirit through technical leverage affected everyone, even someone as respectable as Nietzsche, who thought the spirit and aesthetics could form the whole of life. The effects of inessential thought can be seen everywhere today, in political organisation, artistic values, and even the design principles which go into aesthetic creation. There is at once excess and emptiness, and the surface must take up greater territory for what is lacking in the depths.

The effect of this is that once the technical considerations of abstract thought are exhausted, as with novelty and great experimentation, nothing remains but the leveling of abstraction. This is equal to the return to the realities of class, and the fear of revolutionary principles in art itself. Malevich may only be understood outside of the canvas.

Hence the current limitations on art as social organisation alone. An entirely private affair in its total subjectivity, yet without anything essential in relation to the subject or the social body. The conditions must be generalised, contradictory, and waiting - this accounts for the recurring theme in contemporary literature of a lost book, the vague nihilism of the intellectual whose grand views of the world remain limited to the mystic experience of his private concerns.

Tocqueville reminds us that with the loss of the estates not only class but value becomes immobile. And that dissatisfaction can only increase where conflict remains within the illusory. The effect is then a deepening of the abstraction, a growth of fictitious conflict where immobility increases.

[Anonymous No.18405771]

Go away rapture

[Anonymous No.18405778]

>>18405755
Or for the short version. "Anyone who does not speak Latin is of the people."
We may not be able to respond to Schopenhauer today, since we are all levelled as a people to some extent. However, the lesson remains: any return to literature and art will be equivalent to learning to speak Latin, removing oneself from the people.

[Anonymous No.18405805]

>>18405711
Commercial pop culture existing does not mean we are experiencing "the worst cultural decline in history."

[Anonymous No.18405828]

>>18405805
It does....


But thats nice, you do that often, taking a true statement and then switching it around to make it say the opposite.

>a massive murder sprew does not make your neighbourhood unsafe

Typical bugmen trick. Next.

[Anonymous No.18405897]

>>18405805
This isn't intended to be an either/or discussion, that aristocratic art is good and democratic bad. I'm not looking for /pol/ tier discussion as the one guy spams in every thread.
Tocqueville also discusses, or at least alludes to, some of the advantages of art in democracy. My own preferences, for example, lean towards folk music, which quite a few baroque listeners would consider plebeian.

More generally however, it is impossible to deny the extent of the decline. We have a system based on 13- 20 years of schooling, yet kids coming out of these schools today can barely read or write let alone come up with anything insightful.The

As I noted above, there is novelty and experimentation, which are to some degree illusory in themselves. But now even this is in decline and we are met with a second order of apparent artistry. For example with shilling, or memeing an author. experimentation and novelty comes in the form of marketing the product, attaching an image to what otherwise is only a hollow experience.

Just last night hundreds of millions tuned in to an obvious staged event. The extent to which the form of professional wrestling has become the whole of entertainment and even intellectual pursuits should be all the evidence anyone needs to know that this is indeed the lowest man has ever been.

[Anonymous No.18405910]

>>18405805
>This recent approach to book design where they're made to look pretty much like toys says a lot about our society.

[Anonymous No.18405971]

>>18405828
>It does
If so, then we have been experiencing "the worst cultural decline in history" for well over 200 years, which makes the statement useless.

[Anonymous No.18406015]

>>18405910
It's nice to see my post copypasted, but it was meant not without irony.

>>18405828
>>a massive murder sprew does not make your neighbourhood unsafe
The neighborhood is unsafe not because one bad thing happened there once, but because it might happen in the future.
Also, areas right after violent attacks tend to be safe because everyone's on their toes and consciously working to prevent the bad thing from happening again.
Your comparison doesn't make much sense, as it turns out.

[Anonymous No.18406036]

>>18406015
where's the irony? Are you American?
And you are giving a different meaning to his comparison.

[Anonymous No.18406115]

this Tocqueville poster guy must have some serious tism to keep making these threads and effort posting this guy. I’m never gonna read them but I respect your passion

[Anonymous No.18406159]

>>18406115
It's just a way to share literature and try to generate discussion. How is it autistic to carry out the purpose of the board?

[Anonymous No.18406178]

>>18405971
Are you by chance a vaper?

[Anonymous No.18406215]

>>18406178
No. You can shove your straw man back where you pulled it out from now.

Also, it's more like over 500 years, since the Protestant Reformation at least. Even though there was no sense of "commercial" back then, the same social forces behind commercial pop culture today were more or less behind the Reformation then. The point is that you're not seeing the forest for the trees; yes, decadence has grown since the Middle Ages, but so has individualism.

[Anonymous No.18406349]

>>18406215
What straw man?

[Anonymous No.18406422]

>>18406349
>vaper

[Anonymous No.18406656]

>>18405971
You should give us an idea of what you consider t o be the purpose of art, and at what point there is a decline. Otherwise your statements are useless.

[Anonymous No.18406688]

>>18405897

>just last night 100s of our youths went to the amphitheater to watch a low brow comedy with men dressed as women
>a mere several hours ago, hundred of thousands tuned in to a broadcast of Dark Shadows

Wrestling is a bad example to use, man. Dudes at their physical peak engaging in narrative based entertainment, along classic hero v. villain lines? Sounds good to me.

[Anonymous No.18406715]

"But men who live in comfort equally distant from opulence and misery set great store by their property. Since poverty still exists in their vicinity, they see its rigors up close, and are frightened by them. All that stands between it and them is a small patrimony to which they immediately pin their hopes and fears. Their interest in this patrimony increases regularly owing to the constant care they must devote to it, and the daily effort to add to it also rivets their attention. They regard as intolerable the idea of giving up the least bit of it and look upon losing the whole thing as the worst of misfortunes. Now, what equality of conditions does is to increase the number of these ardent and restless owners of small property constantly.The

Thus in democratic societies, the majority of citizens do not see clearly what they might gain by a revolution, yet in a thousand ways they are constantly aware of what they might lose."

[Anonymous No.18406726]

>>18406688
>Wrestling is a bad example to use, man. Dudes at their physical peak acting like jilted women is Homeric.

[Anonymous No.18406783]

>>18406656
The purpose of art is communication, and the purpose of communication is to create the illusion of being. Art is also something human-made, which means there is a measure of craftsmanship involved. There has been no decline of art as a whole, but there has been a decline of certain forms of art over time.

[Anonymous No.18406802]

>>18406715
This explains many things, but most importantly that accumulation has very little to do with capitalism. Rather, economic industry is the puppet show of equalisation and neutralisation.

One may see the same thing in art: one increasingly holds to the property of aesthetics, the technical concerns, where equalisation and the loss of bourgeois relations are under threat. Socialism and middle class concerns, interestingly enough, rise in kind.

Schmitt discusses the three cultural incursions of the species into the posthistorical world, through technological destruction, psychology as a loosening of bonds, and modernist painting as rearmament. One sees the popularity of literature where it exists in the interim, as representative of all three incursions. Dostoevsky and Nietzsche being the most clear examples of this type of literature while attempting to tear away at what lies behind it.

In the rearmament phase literature is incapable of the same blind abstraction that we see in painting. It would have to abandon all principles. Instead, it forms its own abstraction as mere property, entertainment. An addendum.

[Anonymous No.18406814]

>>18406783
>The purpose of art
lmao...stopped reading right their

[Anonymous No.18406823]

>>18406814
Read the post I replied to.

[Anonymous No.18406896]

>>18406783
If art's purpose is communication does this mean that every act of communication begins from an aesthetic perspective. Is asking for a big mac at the drive thru art?
And given your definition it would seem that great art would amount to great communication, which is to create the illusion of being. From this viewpoint video games can be considered great art, but also the man who does nothing but tricks himself into thinking he has being. In this case one is only communicating with himself, but in a way that is really an end to all communication. The ego defense of the schizophrenic.
This would mean that art is, or at least can be, entirely subjective, and has no definite characyer of its own which separates it from other human activity. So this definition won't do.

Something human-made is an element of art, as is the measure of craftsmanship. But even within these minor elements there is a steep decline, as we see much of art now has very little human input let alone skill. The transition from handmade to computer generated cartoons, as one example, and the popular music whichnuses machines to write out mostbof the human elements.
One will even see pop bands with guitar, bass, and drums, which are only there as an illusion. They contribute nothing to the music. So it's worth asking if an illusion is itself a good form of communication, and if this illusion can create another illusion of being.

It seems that your definition of art is simply taken from its most declined state, which guarantees it can never be seen as in decline.

[Anonymous No.18407001]

>>18406726

Remind me, how did Agamemnon and Achilles respond to losing Chriseis and Briseis again?

[Anonymous No.18407026]

>>18405440
>I don't want to read nor think abut what I've read

No wonder why everything is going to shit

Now, OP >>18405331

I reckon that is quite true the fact that revolutionaries have an "altered" state of mind, filled with hatred and anger. It is a very juvenile mind set in my opinion. Although, that can arise some interesting thoughts. The political revolutionary is someone who can understand very well the avantgarde ideas of others, but it cannot create, as a general norm, something new. This is because is more interested in the creation of that "new thing". Therefore, the politization of the mind and the body operates in a constrictory way into the creativiness.
On the other hand, there are thinkers that, although they might want to be part of a revolution, don`t have the capacity of that and they just stay on the "ideas". In that sense, Marx, for example, is one of the first type, because he is more preocupied with politics than with the creation of a whole system of thought. Afterall, Marx is the logical conclusion of classical economic thought and some part of german philosophy.
Hegel or Kant, on the other hand, is part of the second type of creative mind.

The fact that political and revolutionary thinking demand a complete subjection of the individual to the school of thought and the revolutionary effort, makes the revolutionary time one of less "original creativity" and more of a "subject creativity" on demand of the revolution. They just two types of it, but I reckon that the second type tends to be a little bit more "mediocre" because of it's subjection

[Anonymous No.18407068]

>>18405331
>According to Tocqueville there is a tendency towards the decline of great revolutions, and at the same time the arts, values, and intellectual pursuits which depend on this revolutionary thinking.
What are you talking about? He's just saying revolutionaries aren't happy, virtuous, honest, or moderate. Doesn't say anything about arts or "decline of great revolutions" (?).

[Anonymous No.18407140]

>>18406896
>If art's purpose is communication does this mean that every act of communication begins from an aesthetic perspective. Is asking for a big mac at the drive thru art?
Communication is always about creating the illusion of being. It doesn't matter what you're trying to communicate. When you try to communicate, you develop a language, signs intended to represent the existence of something. All language is a form of art.

>but also the man who does nothing but tricks himself into thinking he has being. In this case one is only communicating with himself, but in a way that is really an end to all communication.
Communication with yourself isn't communication, it's masturbation. Communication in the sense I used it requires two or more minds: it is an exchange between separate minds. What we create in our imagination is not art while in our heads, but when we successfully communicate it, it becomes art. Whether it is great art or not depends on how successful the communication is and how complex (read: convincing) the illusion of being that was communicated is.

>But even within these minor elements there is a steep decline, as we see much of art now has very little human input let alone skill. The transition from handmade to computer generated cartoons, as one example, and the popular music whichnuses machines to write out mostbof the human elements.
As I said before, art has not declined, but forms of art have declined. You are talking about forms of art here. Technology streamlines and replaces the artistic process for those individual forms of art (like drawing or music), but the total work (like a movie or a videogame) is still art (and is greater art than the single illustration or song, for it communicates a greater illusion), because the technology is employed by humans to communicate an illusion. So art has not declined, only certain individual forms of art have.

[Anonymous No.18407148]

>>18407068
They're connected. Read the book.
>>/lit/thread/S18259659#p18278530
The last threads had more commentary on the change of art in democracy.

[Anonymous No.18407210]

>>18407148
>Read the book
I read your OP and it didn't make sense. Next time make a proper thread you low IQ dipshit.

[Anonymous No.18407267]

>>18407140
So two people convince themselves that they have the illusion of being.
There's not really any difference.

In any case, art is not dependent on communication. If that were the case it would mean that the loss of the ability to understand Hesiod and Homer would mean the works are not great.

Your idea of art is backwards, it places art in the eyes of the observer, the audience. This works within some secular definitions, but nothing outside of that.

As Plato said, the judge of artistic contests has to bring the audience into harmony with the law, which often means a violence against everything the audience has known. This act destroys communication as it presently exists.
From this viewpoint, to communicate the illusion of being would be a violation of all aesthetic judgement. If there is no being there is no art. Only illusion.

[Anonymous No.18407323]

>>18407148
"Revolution" does not only refer to political revolution. It can also mean artistic, legal, technological, world, and natural revolutions. There can even be divine revolutions which change the way we respond to the world at the deepest levels.
Again, read a book before arguing about culture.

[Anonymous No.18407435]

>>18407267
>So two people convince themselves that they have the illusion of being. There's not really any difference.
No, one (the artist) convinces another (the recipient of the work of art) of an illusion (the art).

>If that were the case it would mean that the loss of the ability to understand Hesiod and Homer would mean the works are not great.
That is correct. If there is no one around to appreciate art, it does not exist as art any longer. Music is just noise to other animals, for example.

>Your idea of art is backwards, it places art in the eyes of the observer, the audience.
Once again you are misunderstanding what communication means. Communication is an exchange, meaning there must be more than one involved. My idea of art does not just consider the audience, but BOTH the artist and the audience and the relationship between the two.

>If there is no being there is no art. Only illusion.
Illusion is art. Plato was a type of artist, and his art was his ideas.

[Anonymous No.18407446]

>>18407435
Human-made illusion is art.*
Just to reiterate and clarify.

[Anonymous No.18407668]

>>18407435
But often one 'communicates' a deep reality through art, and with history to create an illusion is to be a bad artist. Although you may want to explain what you mean by illusion, to me it implies something of falsity, or the imaginary.

And with the highest art the act is against memory, it intends to forget. Or, it is a type of laying to rest. In this case it is a ceasing of communication.
This is in the very myths of Mnemosyne and the Muses, who will often approach men with what is a lie. In this case the communication itself is illusory, a test of wisdom and judgement.

I have not misunderstood you. I was making a greater point. The focus on communication only comes about where the artist and observer rise in prominence, as with humanism, the museums and Enlightenment thought.The
The paradox in art is that man cannot be so central. It is a passageway and harmonisation, what allows one live in another world, not just think it or catch a glimpse of it.

And you misunderstood the point about ancient poets. I did not suggest the death of man.
But even then it is similar to the old problem "if a tree falls in the forest." The aesthetic of a lost antiquity, as in the ruins being overrun by nature, or the gods in retreat, is an important aesthetic turn. And there is something beautiful in this. Perhaps one of the great questions of aesthetics is how to leave something behind after our deaths, or even to create landscapes worthy of death. Never having to return.
The triumph of the spirit over the will

Which aesthetic writers do you like?

[Anonymous No.18407803]

>>18405331
I'm pretty much sold on reading this guy. Which translation is the best?

[Anonymous No.18407905]

>>18407026
The avant-garde is quite interesting. In some way there is a great shift that occurs, but it seems that this can only occur once. This would make the avant-garde the shortest possible type of artistic movement, which seems to deepen the desire for it to be repeated.
Malevich copies are essentially everywhere, but there is no sense of a movement with them, nothing revolutionary. And interestingly with Bataille's theory of art it is all outside of the art, in the experience and character of the artist. There is nothing essential in the work itself, only the man and his experience of becoming. Van Gogh cutting off his ear is his becoming Prometheus. (Hopefully I have this right, read it long ago)

One may cut off his big ear to become everything, to stop his being determined by one thing, a fatal strength. But this would be the opposite of Prometheus whose strength and character is determined by a certain and final limit.
Strangely, the avant-garde image loses all character of art itself. In cutting off its one thing it becomes a grotesque nothing.

FG Jünger discusses the difference between drama and film, that with each performance the stage play can be experienced anew, each is unique. One may even say that there are revolutionary performances.
Even with Homer it is unlikely that he was entirely unique in his storytelling, rather there was a recurring contest, the agon of antiphony - poets calling and recalling the songs to their perfection. This also answers the conflict of his being a single man or an anonymous collective in a mythic way.

To return to drama and film, what changes with film is that there can be only one true experience, after that it is always the same, and apart from analysis and critique our experience dwindles with each viewing. The very opposite of any revolutionary storytelling occurs, there is no drive towards great stories, only the technically perfect representation of many stories.
This itself dwindles down with innovation and clever tricks rather than wonderful stories. And the viewer comes to appreciate the actors and the technical qualities rather than the stories themselves.
This is likely one of the reasons for all the remakes we experience today, to some degree recapturing the liveliness of drama. However this is inappropriate for the medium, and occurs too late since most of storytelling has been hollowed out.

[Anonymous No.18407932]

>>18405440
Shut up, OP is one of the best posters on /lit/

[Anonymous No.18407943]

>>18407803
My French is very limited so I can't say much, but I think Goldhammer captures exactly what Houellebecq says are Tocqueville's strengths.
And I think he is the only one to translate Recollections.

[Anonymous No.18407994]

>>18405331
I actually enjoy these threads alot! One little question, does he argue from a bourgeois perspective? I have yet to read him.

[Anonymous No.18408694]

>>18405419
>Just as there are no longer races of paupers, so, too, are there no longer races of the rich. The wealthy emerge from the crowd daily and time and again lapse back into it. Hence they do not constitute a separate class easy to define and despoil.
I disagree with this, in the UK you can easily see the classes but the lines between them are blurred in the middle.
Council Estates for instance are modern pauper class,

[Anonymous No.18409225]

>>18405363
I look at like this.

The monarchy fell when people reasoned their way from divine right. Now, we've used that some reason to see through the myth of a perfect system or a society that nurtures anything but death and reproduction.

We've pretty much deboonked "the good life."

Man cannot unwake from the post-Darwinian nightmare.

[Anonymous No.18409404]

>>18407994
No, more from an aristocratic perspective. He was of the last generation of aristocrats in France

[Anonymous No.18409656]

not /lit/ but you would have to be very disingenuous to deny the decline of music.
There is no music worse than modern hip hop, trap, reggaeton, using objective parameters such as variety, melodic complexity, or whether it features people who can sing and play instruments or not.
Internet broke the music industry, music without hundreds of millions of people buying overexpensive cds lost most of its profit margin, and in the new businessmodel only the lowestcommon denominator is profitable.


I'm not even comparing the current situation to classical music or old rock bands. Modern popular music is worse than any folk music from any civilized region of the planet

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6n1ym3vAEI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gcxv7i02lXc

[Anonymous No.18410298]

>>18408694
"I think that democratic peoples have a natural taste for liberty. Left to themselves, they seek it out, love it, and suffer if deprived of it. For equality, however, they feel an ardent, insatiable, eternal, invincible passion. They want equality in liberty, and if they cannot have it, they want it still in slavery. They will suffer poverty, servitude, and barbarity, but they will not suffer aristocracy.
This is true in all ages, and especially in our own. All men and all governments that seek to combat this irresistible power will be overthrown and destroyed by it. Nowadays, liberty cannot be instituted without its support, and even despotism cannot reign without it."

I think I remember another part where he says that welfare and pauperism can become the whole of democracy. I'll try to find it.

[Anonymous No.18410311]

Posting Schmitt since it is related.

"For these opponents of revolution, human society already contains a historical determination. It has become the nation. Without this, the unlimited community is essentially a revolutionary god that eliminates all social and political barriers and proclaims the general brotherhood of humanity as a whole. If the removal of all limits and the need for totality were sufficient in itself to define the romantic, then there would be no finer example of a romantic politics than the resolution of the National Convention, which on November 19, 1792, decrees "that it will grant fraternity and aid to all peoples who want their liberty, and it charges the executive power to provide the generals with the orders necessary to aid these peoples." Such a politique sansculotte abolishes all national boundaries and inundates the politique blanche, the international policy of the Holy Alliance and the legitimist status quo.

The corrective to revolutionary license lay with the other, second demiurge, history. It is the conservative god who, restores what the other has revolutionized. It constitutes the general human community as the historically concretized people, which becomes a sociological and historical reality by means of this delimitation and acquires the capacity to produce a particular law and a particular language as the expression of its individual national spirit. Therefore, what a people is "organically" and what the Volksgeist signifies can be ascertained only historically. In addition, here the people is not its own master, as in Rousseau, but rather the result of historical development. The idea of an, arbitrary power over history is the real revolutionary idea. It has as its content "fabricating" whatever it wants, and being able to create itself. It can, of course, be found in any human activity. The unrestrained fanaticism of the Jacobin was "unhistorical" thought. The quietism of the restoration period could justify itself with the claim that everything that happens is good because it is a historical event. What exists is rational because it is the work of the world spirit that produces itself historically. What history has done is done well. The voluntas Dei in ipso facto (the will of God in the very fact itself), which earlier could justify everything, had to give way to historical justification ex ipso facto (from the very fact itself)."

[Anonymous No.18410314]

>>18410311
A short version of this may be Simone Weil's "Revolution is the opiate of the masses."

[Anonymous No.18410334]

>>18409225
The other side may also be true. That divine right has been generalised. This is essentially what Tocqueville means by the will to equality, modernity's origins go back to the 13th century with the active assemblies of constitution and the monachies' missteps in handling power.
What characterizes the modern period more than anything else is absolute polarity. And I always use the same example because I am unaware of anything better
By the ears and the eyes and the brain,
By the limbs and the hands and the wings,
We are slaves to our masters the guns;
But their slaves are the masters of kings!

[Anonymous No.18410436]

>A girl turns her father’s house into a place of freedom and pleasure, whereas a wife lives in her husband’s home as in a cloister.
What did he mean by this?

[Anonymous No.18410481]

"And yet again this morning I am adjured to ''Have a nice day,'' this time from a horse thief about to be hanged, and then, moments later, from his widow. The American spirit of optimism is unquenchable!"

[Anonymous No.18410551]

"We enter the log house. The interior is in no way reminiscent of the peasant cottages of Europe. There is more of the superfluous and less of the necessary.

There is only one window, with a muslin curtain hanging in it. Crackling on the hearth of packed earth is a large fire, which illuminates the whole inside of the house. Above the hearth one can see a beautiful carbine, a deerskin, and some eagle feathers. To the right of the fireplace a map of the United States is displayed, and the wind blowing through chinks in the wall lifts it up and causes it to flap about. Nearby, on a shelf of rough-hewn lumber, sit several volumes, among which I notice a Bible, the first six cantos of Milton, and two plays by Shakespeare. Chests rather than wardrobes line the walls. In the center of the room a crudely made table has feet of green wood with the bark still attached, feet that seem to grow out of the earth they stand on. On this table I see a teapot of English porcelain, silver spoons, some chipped cups, and newspapers.

The master of these premises has the angular features and lank build that mark him out as a New Englander. It is obvious that this man was not born in the solitude in which we have found him. His physical constitution alone is enough to suggest that his early years were spent in an intellectual society and that he belongs to that restless, calculating, and adventurous race of men who coolly undertake to do what only the ardor of the passions can explain and who for a time subject themselves to a savage life, the better to conquer and civilize the wilderness.
When the pioneer sees us cross the threshold of his home, he comes to meet us and reaches out his hand, as custom dictates, but his face remains rigid. He is the first to speak, questioning us about what is happening in the world, and when his curiosity is satisfied, he falls silent. Perhaps the importunate visitors and the noise have tired him. We question him in turn, and he gives us all the information we need. Then, without alacrity but not without diligence, he sets about taking care of our needs. As we watch him perform these acts of kindness, our gratitude runs cold in spite of ourselves. Why? Because in showing his hospitality he seems to be bowing to a painful necessity of his lot: he sees what he is doing as a duty required of a man in his position rather than a pleasure."

[Anonymous No.18410560]

>>18410551
"At the opposite end of the hearth a woman sits dandling a baby in her lap. She nods to us without interrupting what she is doing. Like the pioneer, this woman is in the prime of life, looks to be superior to her condition, and dresses in a way that speaks of a lingering taste for finery. But her delicate limbs seem frail, her features drawn, and her gaze meek and grave. Her whole face is suffused with an air of religious resignation, a profound peace exempt from passion, and I know not what natural and quiet determination to confront all of life’s woes without fear or defiance.

Her children crowd around her, and they are full of health, rambunctiousness, and energy. They are true sons of the wilderness. From time to time their mother glances at them with a look of mingled melancholy and delight. To judge by their strength and her weakness, it might seem that she has been draining herself to give them life, yet she seems to feel no regret about what they have cost her.

The house these immigrants live in has no inside partitions or loft. At night, the entire family seeks refuge in the sole apartment it contains. Their dwelling is like a small world unto itself. It is the ark of civilization, lost in a sea of foliage. A hundred paces beyond, the eternal forest spreads its shade, and solitude resumes."

This is a great image of the revolution of earth forces that one will encounter in the thought of Schmitt and Jünger.

[Anonymous No.18412645]

B

[Anonymous No.18413529]

>>18409404
Ah, thank you! I was a bit uneasy about him being a bourgeois; now I'll definitely read "Democracy in America"

[Anonymous No.18414624]

>>18413529
His wife

[Anonymous No.18415524]

>>18409656
Any good music today?

[Anonymous No.18415716]

>>18409656
So don't listen to pop music. Pleb.

[Anonymous No.18416175]

>>18405548
Yes.

[Anonymous No.18416188]

>>18405910
Looks like a book to me

[Anonymous No.18416219]

>>18416175
What if the culture has just moved away from you and what you value?

[Anonymous No.18416243]

Thank you for making this thread, OP. I appreciate your sincere attempt to discuss Toqueville—if the thread's still up tomorrow, I'll try to post something of substance.

[Anonymous No.18416559]

>>18409656
All of what is called "pop culture" today is perfectly exemplary of decline, in fact.

An artist, in of themselves, may have an incidental genius. But a culture's genius lays in an entirely different thing: its cultural potentials. What causes the decline of art is the exhausting of potentials. Truly, the artist of the most liquid form of modernity firstly seeks novelty. The vast and subversive new art forms we see up until today are merely a want of novelty.
The artist of today in a time of exhausted cultural potentials, has no hope to be like the old master, only emulate them. So, the unconscious avenue is to deconstruct what has come before. This comes in different forms, be it the destruction of structure in form in painting into grand collections of meaningless color and shape, or the deconstruction of the literature into a deranged empty, a death of theme.
The truth is lost on both the artist and the self-ascribed "cultured" person of today. They see an ocean's depth in this modernist art, where deconstruction becomes thematic itself. Rather, the total sum of this kind of art is shallow, mental masturbation disconnected from the human experience. The scholar is more attuned to art than this artist. All the modern artist has left is to play a game, a rootless pretension. All the novelist has left is to copy, to become a second Joyce while feigning ignorance. The literary fiction writer is often more derivative and dull than the genre kind.
Now herein comes pop culture. One of the most pervasive elements of popular culture is repetition. It's derivative. This is ultimately a sign of exhausted potentials. All things take inspiration from before, which is true and fine enough. The claim of derivative is itself a cliche, a shallow and near meaningless term. However, there is some substance in examining where.
For example, the major trend of movies for the last 10-20 years has been to use older published music, mostly popular music, in place of creating an original soundtrack. In a lack of self-awareness, this is the style of what critics consider the most inventive of directors. And this trend, most people are familiar with. This often comes with endless and purposefully on-the-nose homage. [Quentin Tarantino]
Also of note is that, in mainstream music, we've seen the birth of "sampling," where the artist will cut entire portions of studio recorded music and reuse it.
There are subtler examples, often in the subtle difference from inspiration and essence. All creativity is done by inspiration. But the artist in decline copies by essence. The essence of his work will already exist, and his work is not done by inspiration but blending and reusing essences. Less philosophically, the artist might define his work as filling a fabricated niche. [The new Star Wars movies. The novel "Tampa" by Alissa Nutting occasionally mentioned here, which is merely a copy of "Lolita."]

[Anonymous No.18416582]

>>18416219
It has, which is how it's declining.

[Anonymous No.18417617]

B

[Anonymous No.18417654]

>>18409656
I hate this Tocquevilleposting faggot but I agree. This is the effect of mass media on art in its entirety. The confluence of late capitalism and mass media have created a dynamic where the ability to reach theoretically everyone with content has coincided with the ability to sell them that content. When you toss in modern advertising, which in a large way now actually CREATES the demographics to which it is ostensibly "advertising," you get the current postmodern artistic miasma. Corporations, having the power of comparatively limitless currency, can comfortably propone not just the bland, milquetoast art-as-product with which we're all familiar, but also maintain and even supplant the preconditions for its own success, creating this ouroboric cultural black hole that wants nothing more than to eat the entire world. We're all so many sleepwalkers crossing the event horizon in a dazed, benign confusion at the superficial "competition" amongst only nominally differentiated PRODUCTS (which we're all engaged in conflating for our identities as human beings) and EVENTS.

It's all so fucked and I think I'm going to kill myself.

[Anonymous No.18417735]

>>18417654
>I hate this Tocquevilleposting faggot
>late capitalism
Yep you're a pseud.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnKhsTXoKCI

[Anonymous No.18417745]

>>18417735
>Yep you're a pseud.

[Anonymous No.18417790]

>>18405331
What do you think of Spengler and /lit/'s recent obsession with him, fellow autist?

[Anonymous No.18417834]

>>18416582
Or it's just different and you refuse to understand it.

[Anonymous No.18417846]

>>18416219
To games with 1991 levels of AI?

[Anonymous No.18417875]

>>18417846
AI isn't everything in a game, you know.

[Anonymous No.18418093]

>>18417790
To be honest, my impression of Spengler is a bit negative. The basic argument against him is that he reduces morphology to its technical aspects.
Schmitt's comment may be useful"

"Even more than from the Hegelian delusion of a general dialectic of concepts, we must guard against the nineteenth-century illusion of legalism to which the greatest modern sociologists and historians of the West, with the exception of Alexis de Tocqueville, have succumbed. The need to make every concrete historical idea into a general law of historical procedure has shrouded even the best and most relevant ideas of the nineteenth century in a dense fog of generalizations. The transformation of concrete historical thought into a general law for humanity was the reward that the century of scientific positivism was expected to bring. It was incapable of understanding and accepting truth other than in the thought form of a general, predictable, and somewhat calculable functional process. Auguste Comte, the modern historian of brilliant intuition, correctly identified his own era when he noted that it developed in three stages: from theology via metaphysics to scientific positivism. This was an extremely accurate observation, and it corresponded to a unique shift, completed in three events, through which European thought passed from the thirteenth to the nineteenth century. But the positivist and scientist Auguste Comte himself would not have believed his historically correct intuition had he not absolutised it into a general law, operating in three stages, for all mankind. Similarly, Karl Marx, although protected from blind science by his Hegelian education, elevated the corresponding diagnosis of the situation - resulting from mechanisation and the industrial revolution in mid-nineteenth century Western and Central Europe - to the universal and historical necessity of concentration and centralisation, and to the last and simplest class struggle of humanity, when in reality it was only a concrete, definite moment of techno-industrial revolution, connected with the railway, the cable network, and the steam engine. Even Oswald Spengler neutralised the correct intuition behind the great historical parallel between our present age and the age of Roman civil wars and Caesarism with the general doctrine of the cultural circle of all humanity, thus killing its real historical nerve."

[Anonymous No.18418164]

>>18418093
Jünger says something very similar, that Spengler's morphology is like a group photo of boys without their father. A great photo, with strong character repesentation of the boys, would give us an impression of the father. And it is this impression that is missing in Spengler, the historical nerve. Not the genealogical signs, but the inner strength and the conflict of law which forms like the elements.
Tocqueville stands at the other side. His method is very simple, and his descriptions are unlike that of a photo, but we see much more clearly what would be missed by the perspective of a camera lens. This is the difference between character and physiognomy, the mien and the scar or surface trait. Tocqueville's juxtoposition between aristocratic and democratic man gives us the sense of the whole of politics, not as govern!ental types, but their providential creation.
This is like the literary description of two individuals, perhaps nameless, which can nonetheless tell us of their whole family, the community and landscape, and perhaps their nation. The journal notes on the log cabin above give this impression.

[Anonymous No.18418210]

>>18418164
On the other hand

"Finished: Spengler, "Zur Weltgeschichte des zweiten vorchristlichen Jahrtausends", one of his last works, in which the threads are drawn rather crudely. However, this author is more remarkable in his faults than his opponents are in their truths. The secret of his language is that it has heart and does not yield to the great catastrophes. There is a vein in his prose that leads toward the obstacles."

Right now I am planning to collect all of Jünger's commentary on Spengler, and then go back through An der Zeitmauer along with Decline and Nietzsche's work on history.

[Anonymous No.18419195]

>>18416243
No problem. I am glad there is interest.
>>18416559
This isn't directed at you, but anyone interested in aesthetics and decline should read Goethe's "On German Architecture" as well as his other aesthetics essays. Decline can occur in the form well before its material representation. And in the same way, there can be an important harmony or metamorphosis even in ugly art.

[Anonymous No.18419222]

>>18419195
"“What immature taste,” says the Italian and walks on. “Childish nonsense,” parrots the Frenchman and triumphantly flicks open his snuffbox à la Grècque. What right have you to show contempt?
Did not the genius of the ancients rise from the grave and fetter your own, Italian? You crept among the mighty remains like a beggar, hoping to learn of proportion, you patched together villas from sacred rubble, and you consider yourself the custodian of the secrets of art because you are able to give an account of the measurements of gigantic buildings, down to the last inch! Had you felt more and measured less, had you been inspired and not simply overawed by these massive structures, you would not have merely imitated them because they were created by the ancients and are beautiful. You would have created your own plans with their own inherent truth, and natural living beauty would have emanated from them.

Instead you applied a thin veneer of truth and beauty to your buildings. You were struck by the magnificent effect of columns, so you wanted to put them to use and embedded them in walls. You wanted colonnades too, so you encircled St. Peter’s Square with marble walks which lead nowhere. And mother nature, who despises the inappropriate and hates the superfluous, drove your rabble to prostitute all that splendor by transforming it into a public sewer. Now everyone averts his eyes and holds his nose when approaching this wonder of the world.

And so things go: the artist’s fancy serves the rich man’s caprice, the travel writer gapes, our esthetes, called philosophers, always fashion principles and histories of art from the stuff of fairytales, while their evil genius murders true human beings at the threshold of revelation.
Principles are even more damaging to the genius than examples. Individual artists may have worked on individual parts before him, but he is the first from whose soul the parts emerge grown together into an everlasting whole. Yet school and principle fetter all powers of perception and activity. Of what use to us is the knowledge, you philosophizing expert of the new French school, that the first man, inventive in his need for shelter, rammed four stakes into the ground, joined them with four poles and made a roof of branches and moss? From this you derive the appropriateness of our own buildings, as if you wanted to rule your new Babylon with a simplistically patriarchal attitude!

And it is wrong to boot. This hut of yours was not the first in the world. Two poles crossed at the top in front, two in the back and a fifth as a ridgepole, as we can see every day from huts in fields and vineyards, that is clearly a far earlier invention, from which you could not even derive a principle for your pigsties."

[Anonymous No.18420497]

>>18417654
>I hate this Tocquevilleposting faggot
Filtered

[Anonymous No.18421811]

B

[Anonymous No.18421840]

>>18416243
don't worry, the thread will be up till the heat-death of the universe

[Anonymous No.18421841]

>>18421811
A

[Anonymous No.18422783]

>>18421840
Why does he cause so much seething?

[Anonymous No.18422809]

>>18422783
Because he keeps making threads twisting Tocqueville 's words for his own retarded ideology. And he keeps bumping his threads and not letting them die.

[Anonymous No.18422825]

>>18422809
>twisting Tocqueville 's words
Where?

[Anonymous No.18422937]

>>18405548
Yea

[Anonymous No.18422971]

>>18418093
What is this from?

[Anonymous No.18423890]

>>18422809
It's been a month and you still haven't posted your threads.

[Anonymous No.18425291]

>>18416219
>>18417834
Gaslighting isn't going to convince them you're right.

[Anonymous No.18425336]

>>18422971
Schmitt's commentary on one of Jünger's essays.

[Anonymous No.18426485]

>>18421841
S

[Anonymous No.18428369]

>>18422809
Seethe