Reflections on Violence
by Georges SorelDover Publications, Inc - published 1906
This time I did read the Introduction (by Edward A. Shils) first. The introduction is so rich in material I could play with it for days. But I'm going to refrain until I read at least some of the man himself. My reading these days is being determined by what I can locate in local bookstores, and City Lights had this and Hannah Arendt's The Life of the Mind. I started with this because it was shorter, but, regardless of the reason, I chose correctly. This book should be perfect. And it looks like it will fill the gap between Dostoevsky and Mann.
Introduction - by Sorel
Letter to Daniel Halevy
He starts with a defense of his style of writing addressed to Halevy. This book is going to be a daunting task as I can't go more than a page without finding something I need to quote. Here he's defending the "defects of my method of writing,"
p27 It is only recently that the rules of the art of writing have imposed themselves in a really imperative way; contemporary authors appear to have accepted them readily, because they wished to please a hurried and often very inattentive public, and one which is desirous about all of avoiding any personal investigation. These rules were first applied by the people who manufacture scholastic books. Since the aim of education has been to make pupils absorb an enormous amount of information, it has been necessary to put in their hands manuals suitable to this extra rapid instruction; everything has had to be presented in a form so clear, so logically arranged, and so calculated to dispel doubt, that in the end the beginner comes to believe that science is much simpler than our fathers supposed. In this way the mind is furnished in a very little time, but it is not furnished with implements which facilitate individual effort. These methods have been imitated by political publicists and by the people who attempt to popularize knowledge. Seeing these rules of the art of writing so widely adopted, people who reflect little have ended by believing that they were based on the nature of things themselves.
I am neither a professor, a popularizer of knowledge, nor a candidate for party leadership. I am a self-taught man exhibiting to other people the notebooks which have served for my own instruction. That is why the rules of writing have never interested me very much.
During twenty years I worked to deliver myself from what I retained of my education; I read books, not so much to learn as to efface from my memory the ideas which had been thrust upon it. It is only during the last fifteen years that I have really worked for the purpose of learning, but I have never found any one to teach me what I wanted to know. I have had to be my own master, and in a way to educate myself. I make notes in which I formulate my thoughts as they arise; I return three or four times to the same question, adding corrections which amplify the original, and sometimes even transform it from top to bottom; I only stop when I have exhausted the reserve of ideas stirred up by recent reading...
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p29 ...it is a good thing that some are content to work, simply that they may submit their reflections to a few studious people, whilst others love to address the great mass of busy humanity. All things considered, I do not think mine the worst lot, for I am not exposed to the danger of becoming my own disciple, as has happened to the greatest philosophers when they have endeavored [I'm going with American spelling simply to curtail the nagging of my spellchecker] to give a perfectly symmetrical form to the intuitions they brought into the world...
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People have often laughed at Hegel's belief -- that humanity, since its origins, had worked to give birth to the Hegelian philosophy, and that with that philosophy Spirit had at last completed its development... [Good to know this wasn't just me.] ...philosophy is after all perhaps only the recognition of the abysses which lie on each side of the footpath that the vulgar follow with the serenity of somnambulists. [That metaphor certainly works well for phenomenology.]
p30 ...There is probably in the mind of every man, hidden under the ashes, a quickening fire, and the greater the number of ready-made doctrines the mind has received blindly the more is this fire threatened with extinction; the awakener is the man who stirs the ashes and thus makes the flames leap up... ...I have sometimes succeeded in liberating the spirit of invention in my readers; and it is the spirit of invention which it is above all necessary to stir up in the world...
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p32 The optimist in politics is an inconstant and even dangerous man, because he takes no account of the great difficulties presented by his projects; these projects seem to him to possess a force of their own, which tends to bring about their realization all the more easily as they are, in his opinion, destined to produce the happiest result. [This would seem to support Burke, in opposition to what Shils said about Sorel in his introduction. It also sounds Faustian.] He frequently thinks that small reforms in the political constitution, and above all, in the personnel of the government, will be sufficient to direct social development... to mitigate those evils of the contemporary world which seem so harsh to the sensitive mind. As soon as his friends come into power, he declares that it is necessary to let things alone for a little, not to hurry too much... [this sounds more like what Shils was saying] The optimist passes with remarkable facility from revolutionary anger to the most ridiculous social pacificism. [sic]
If he possesses an exalted temperament, and if unhappily he finds himself armed with great power, permitting him to realize the ideal he has fashioned, the optimist may lead his country into the worst disasters. He is not long in finding out that social transformations are not brought about with the ease that he had counted on; he then supposes that this is the fault of his contemporaries, instead of explaining what actually happens by historical necessities; he is tempted to get rid of people whose obstinacy seems to him to be so dangerous to the happiness of all. During the Terror, the men who spilt most blood were precisely those who had the greatest desire to let their equals enjoy the golden age they had dreamt of, and who had the most sympathy with human wretchedness; optimists, idealists, and sensitive men, the greater desire they had for universal happiness the more inexorable they showed themselves. [Back to Burke]
p33 Pessimism... is a philosophy of conduct rather than a theory of the world; it considers the march towards deliverance as narrowly conditioned, on the one hand, by the experimental knowledge that we have acquired from obstacles which oppose themselves to the satisfaction of our imaginations (or, if we like, by the feeling of social determinism), and, on the other, by a profound conviction of our natural weakness. These two aspects of pessimism should never be separated, although, as a rule, scarcely any attention is paid to their close connection.
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Totally lost me there. And I have to pause here as we are about to get into a discussion of Pessimism and Protestantism which I need to be refreshed to handle.
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