I waded through all that pompous conservative windbaggery just for you. Happy now?
It’s a fascinating glimpse though. There are certainly some sharp observations that tie in with what @Baden and I have been thinking about, and I thought it was really remarkable that he was writing the following just as Karl Marx was beginning to write Capital.
What changes, too, this addition of power is introducing into the Social System; how wealth has more and more increased, and at the same time gathered itself more and more into masses, strangely altering the old relations, and increasing the distance between the rich and the poor, will be a question for Political Economists, and a much more complex and important one than any they have yet engaged with.
And there’s another almost Marxian moment when he implies an interdependency between ideas and material conditions (base/superstructure being only a crude representation of Marx):
We advert the more particularly to these intellectual propensities, as to prominent symptoms of our age, because Opinion is at all times doubly related to Action, first as cause, then as effect; and the speculative tendency of any age will therefore give us, on the whole, the best indications of its practical tendency.
More remarkably, the following is an early description of reification and alienation, in which an idea, which is a contingent product of social life, appears as natural, a solid thing in its own right (that’s the reification)—and one that “stands terrible before us” (that’s the alienation):
Considered merely as a metaphor [society as machine], all this is well enough; but here, as in so many other cases, the “foam hardens itself into a shell,” and the shadow we have wantonly evoked stands terrible before us and will not depart at our bidding.
And when I recently mentioned the penetration of capitalism into the self, it looks like an echo of Carlyle when he writes…
Not the external and physical alone is now managed by machinery, but the internal and spiritual also.
And his criticisms of scientific reductionism and mere quantitative science are also found in Adorno (although the latter’s critique is very different in some important ways).
This condition of the two great departments of knowledge — the outward, cultivated exclusively on mechanical principles; the inward, finally abandoned, because, cultivated on such principles, it is found to yield no result, — sufficiently indicates the intellectual bias of our time, its all-pervading disposition towards that line of inquiry.
The problem is the idea, still common, that…
what cannot be investigated and understood mechanically, cannot be investigated and understood at all.
I was also struck by his use of the concept of the infinite:
There is a science which treats of, and practically addresses, the primary, unmodified forces and energies of man, the mysterious springs of Love, and Fear, and Wonder, of Enthusiasm, Poetry, Religion, all which have a truly vital and infinite character
This has an affinity with the way that Levinas—who I’m reading at the moment—uses the concept: inifnity as another person you encounter, something you can never grasp entirely.
I also like the mechanical vs dynamical scheme.
He lost me when he waxed lyrical about wondrous destinies and faith in Christ stirring in the mystic deeps of man’s soul, and I have several harsh criticisms—but this is not the place for them. Generally it’s fascinating when thinkers from opposite directions make similar diagnoses.
