Read Anywhere and on Any Device!

Subscribe to Read | $0.00

Join today and start reading your favorite books for Free!

Create Free Account

Quick and Easy Sign Up!

It takes less then 1 minute to sign up, then you can enjoy Unlimited eBooks.

Sign Up Browse

Popular Genres

Read Anywhere and on Any Device!

  • Download on iOS
  • Download on Android
  • Download on iOS

On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life

On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life

Tatár György
3.9/5 ( ratings)
Read Download
"Moreover I hate everything which merely instructs me without increasing or directly quickening my activity.” These are Goethe’s words with which, as with a boldly expressed ceterum censeo, we may begin our consideration of the worth and worthlessness of history. Our aim will be to show why instruction which fails to quicken activity, why knowledge which enfeebles activity, why history as a costly intellectual excess and luxury must, in the spirit of Goethe’s words, be seriously hated; for we still lack what is most necessary, and superfluous excess is the enemy of the necessary. Certainly we need history. But our need for history is quite different from that of the spoiled idler in the garden of knowledge, even if he in his refinement looks down on our rude and graceless requirements and needs. That is, we require history for life and action, not for the smug avoiding of life and action, or even to whitewash a selfish life and cowardly, bad acts. Only so far as history serves life will we serve it: but there is a degree of doing history and an estimation of it which brings with it a withering and degenerating of life: a phenomenon which is now as necessary as it may be painful to bring to consciousness through some remarkable symptoms of our age."
Language
English
Pages
70
Format
Paperback
Publisher
Hackett Pub Co
Release
June 15, 1980
ISBN
0915144948
ISBN 13
9780915144945

On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life

Tatár György
3.9/5 ( ratings)
Read Download
"Moreover I hate everything which merely instructs me without increasing or directly quickening my activity.” These are Goethe’s words with which, as with a boldly expressed ceterum censeo, we may begin our consideration of the worth and worthlessness of history. Our aim will be to show why instruction which fails to quicken activity, why knowledge which enfeebles activity, why history as a costly intellectual excess and luxury must, in the spirit of Goethe’s words, be seriously hated; for we still lack what is most necessary, and superfluous excess is the enemy of the necessary. Certainly we need history. But our need for history is quite different from that of the spoiled idler in the garden of knowledge, even if he in his refinement looks down on our rude and graceless requirements and needs. That is, we require history for life and action, not for the smug avoiding of life and action, or even to whitewash a selfish life and cowardly, bad acts. Only so far as history serves life will we serve it: but there is a degree of doing history and an estimation of it which brings with it a withering and degenerating of life: a phenomenon which is now as necessary as it may be painful to bring to consciousness through some remarkable symptoms of our age."
Language
English
Pages
70
Format
Paperback
Publisher
Hackett Pub Co
Release
June 15, 1980
ISBN
0915144948
ISBN 13
9780915144945

More books from Tatár György

Rate this book!

Write a review?

loader