“The Renaissance” by Walter Pater

Pater was an Oxford fellow in the nineteenth century. This a collection of essays on his somewhat idiosyncratic conception of the Renaissance. Foremost, he uses the history of the period for a larger discussion on his views of art, aesthetics, criticism, and the good life. He begins, “Beauty, like all other qualities presented to human experience, is relative…. To define beauty, not in the most abstract but in the most concrete terms possible, to find, not its universal formula, but the formula which expresses most adequately this or that special manifestation of it, is the aim of the true student of aesthetics…. The first step towards seeing one’s object as it really is, is to know one’s own impression as it really is.” Next, Pater defines his conception of the Renaissance, “For us the Renaissance is the name of a many-sided but yet united movement, in which the love of the things of the intellect and the imagination for their own sake, the desire for a more liberal and comely way of conceiving life, makes themselves felt, urging those who experience this desire to search out first one and then another means of intellectual or imaginative enjoyment…. In their search after the pleasures of the senses and the imagination, in their care for beauty, in their worship of the body, people were impelled beyond the bounds of the Christian ideal; and their love became sometimes a strange idolatry, a strange rival to religion.”

Pater discusses what makes the different forms of artistic expression similar and unique. “It is a mistake of much popular criticism to regard poetry, music, and painting—all the various products of art—as but translations into different languages of one and the same fixed quantity of imaginative thought…. Each art, therefore, having its own peculiar and untranslatable sensuous charm, has its own special mode of reaching the imagination, its own special responsibilities to its material. One of the functions of aesthetic criticism is to define these limitations…. Art, then, is thus always striving to be independent of the mere intelligence, to become a matter of pure perception, to get rid of its responsibilities to its subject or material.”

Next, Pater takes on the spirit of aesthetic criticism. “Criticism must never for a moment forget that ‘the artist is the child of his time.’ But besides these conditions of time and place, and independent of them, there is also an element of permanence, a standard of taste, which genius confesses. This standard is maintained in a purely intellectual tradition. It acts upon the artist, not as one of the influences of his own age, but through those artistic products of the previous generation which first excited, while they directed into a particular channel, his sense of beauty. The supreme artistic products of succeeding generations thus form a series of elevated points, taking each from each the reflexion of a strange light, the source of which is not in the atmosphere around and above them, but in a stage of society remote from ours. The standard of taste [for the Renaissance] was fixed in Greece…. Pagan and Christian art are sometime harshly opposed, and the Renaissance is represented as a fashion which set in at a definite period. That is the superficial view: the deeper view is that which preserves the identity of European culture. The two are really continuous; and there is a sense in which it may be said that the Renaissance was an uninterrupted effort of the middle age, that it was ever taking place.”

Finally, Pater concludes a bit philosophically, “Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end…. To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life…. We are all under sentence of death but with a sort of indefinite reprieve…. Some spend this interval in listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest, at least among ‘the children of this world,’ in art and song…. Of such wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire for beauty, the love of art for its own sake, has most…. The artist and he who has treated life in the spirit of art desires only to be shown to the world as he really is; as he comes nearer and nearer to perfection, the veil of an outer life not simply expressive of the inward becomes thinner and thinner…. It has the freshness without the shallowness of taste, the range and seriousness of culture without its strain and over-consciousness. Such a habit may be described as wistfulness of mind, the feeling that there is ‘so much to know,’ rather as a longing after what is unattainable, than as a hope to apprehend. Its ethical result is an intellectual guilelessness, or integrity, that instinctively prefers what is direct and clear…. The nature before us is a revolutionist from the direct sense of personal worth…. It is not the guise of Luther or Spinoza; rather it is that of Raphael, who in the midst of the Reformation and the Renaissance, himself lighted up by them, yielded himself to neither, but stood still to live upon himself.”

“The World of Yesterday” by Stefan Zweig (translated by Anthea Bell)

Zweig wrote this memoir in the midst of the Second World War. He would commit suicide before its end. He grew up in a prosperous Jewish family, at perhaps the pinnacle of the Habsburg Empire, in the heart of its capital, Vienna. “Nowhere was it easier to be a European, and I know that in part I have to thank Vienna, a city that was already defending universal and Roman values in the days of Marcus Aurelius, for the fact that I learnt early to love the idea of community as the highest ideal of my heart.” He was also raised with art at his bosom, “Austrian art had lost its traditional guardians and protectors: the imperial house and the aristocracy…. It was the particular pride and indeed the ambition of the Jewish bourgeoisie to maintain the reputation of Viennese culture in its old brilliance…. It was their love of Viennese art that had made them feel entirely at home, genuinely Viennese…. It was only in art that all the Viennese felt they had equal rights, because art, like love, was regarded as a duty incumbent on everyone in the city.”

Zweig first moved to Paris shortly after finishing university and quickly ran in a bohemian circle. Of his friends, he remembers, “They were not ashamed to live in a modest way so that they could think freely and boldly in their artistic work…. No money was wasted on prestige and outward show.” Eventually moving back to Salzburg, he still traveled back and forth between all the great European cities. Zweig reminisces on his greatest writing mentors, “Think how inspiring it was for us young people to be in the presence of such stern servants and guardians of language, admirably true to themselves, loving only the resonant word, a word meant not for today and the newspapers but for what would last and endure…. One lived in Germany, another in France, yet another in Italy, but they all inhabited the same homeland, for they really lived only in their poetry…. Each also made a work of art out of his own life.”

The interwar years were a time of turmoil for Zweig and his family. With the rise of Hitler and Nazism next door in Germany, Zweig realized his time living in Austria was numbered. “For the first time I really came to understand the eternal character of the professional revolutionary who feels that he is raised from his personal insignificance merely by adopting a stance of opposition.” On persevering in his craft, Zweig offers, “Art was never more popular in Austria than at that time of chaos. Money had let us down; we sensed that what was eternal in us was all that would last.” Eventually emigrating permanently to London, he still stayed away from involvement in politics, “Nothing in me has been stronger since my early youth than an instinctive wish to stay free and independent.” Zweig concludes, “If there is one new art that we have had to learn, those of us who have been hunted down and forced into exile at a time hostile to all art and all collections, then it is the art of saying goodbye to everything that was once our pride and joy…. In the last resort, every shadow is also the child of light, and only those who have known the light and the dark, have seen war and peace, rise and fall, have truly lived their lives.”

“The Hebrew Bible: Ezra—Nehemiah” (translated by Robert Alter)

In Alter’s translation he chooses to combine the introduction to these two books of the Hebrew Bible. However, in the text he separates the books. As he explains, “There is a tradition going back to Late Antiquity that sees Ezra and Nehemiah as a single book, often simply referred to as “Ezra.” The two books, however, differ in form and are certainly not the work a single writer. Ezra is a third-person narrative reporting historical—at least possibly historical—events affecting the returned exiles in the fifth century B.C.E. It includes the only extended passage (chapters 4-6) in the Bible outside of Daniel written in Aramaic…. In all likelihood, it was composed at the very end of the fifth century…. Nehemiah was probably written a little earlier, in the last quarter of the fifth century. A good portion of it consists of Nehemiah’s memoirs, written in the first person, and there is no equivalent to this form elsewhere in the Bible. It also incorporates Persian imperial documents, and these are probably authentic.”

In his introduction, Alter next explains what unites these two books, “All this writing, moreover, is driven by a powerful political motive, which is not exactly the case in earlier Hebrew narrative…. Political power is divided between two figures working in complementary fashion—Ezra the scribe and priest, who is concerned with the all-important project of the restoration of the cult and the canonization of the newly redacted Torah through the institution of its public reading, and Nehemiah, coming to Jerusalem from a high position in the Persian court, the political leader who addresses security issues of rebuilding the walls of the city and confronting armed enemies…. The community of returned exiles found itself in sharp conflict with other groups in the country, and the ideology promoted by both Ezra and Nehemiah was stringently separatist…. Another policy dictated by Ezra and Nehemiah’s separatist view was the sweeping resistance to intermarriage…. The separatist view embodied in Ezra and Nehemiah is the one that seems to have prevailed in its time: no foreign wives, no Samaritans or others of uncertain ethnic and religious background, were tolerated in the rebuilding of the walls of Jerusalem and the renewal of the Temple.”

In Ezra 2:1, Alter points out the historical and linguistic fact of the returned Jews being a subject people within the Persian Empire, “the people of the province. The “province” would be Yehud, or Judah, now having the status of a province in the Persian empire.” In Ezra 2:63, he notes another linguistic point, “the satrap. The Hebrew tirshata is clearly a loanword, probably Persian, designating a high official. One may infer that the official in question was Nehemiah, appointed to govern the province of Judah.”

Alter explains the possible background process behind the canonization of the Torah detailing Ezra 7:10, “the teaching of the LORD. It is possible that this phrase, torat YHWH, is an explicit designation of the Torah, or Pentateuch, especially in light of Ezra’s role in making it canonical for the returned exiles.” Alter continues his historical explanation of Ezra 10:3, “the Teaching. By this late date, “the Teaching” (torah) was probably coming into use as a designation for the Five Books of Moses, which Ezra would endow with canonical authority.”

In Nehemiah 2:8, Alter annotates another linguistic tidbit, “the king’s park. The Hebrew term pardes is a loanword from the Persian and has entered many languages, including English, where it occurs as “paradise.” In modern Hebrew it means “orchard.”” In Nehemiah 5:4, he adds a historical note to his explanation of vocabulary, “money. In earlier texts, this Hebrew word, kesef, is consistently translated as “silver,” but the archaeological evidence is that by the fifth century B.C.E. coins were used in Judah and elsewhere in the region.”

Finally, in Nehemiah 8:1, Alter again describes the process of the canonization of the Torah, “the Book of the Teaching of Moses. The Hebrew is sefer torat mosheh. This is probably still a descriptive rubric rather than a true title. The word for teaching, torah, would in time become the standard designation for the Five Books of Moses. The Torah was evidently edited in the Babylonian exile, with Ezra perhaps playing a key role in the final compilation, and this is the text now presented to the people. If rebuilding the walls and the Temple consolidates the physical security and the cultic viability of the people returned to its land, the public reading of the Torah—essentially, a confirmation of its newly minted canonicity—consolidates the spiritual coherence of the people.”

“Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals” by Immanuel Kant (translated by Mary Gregor and Jens Timmermann)

This short treatise is Kant’s explication of his categorical imperative and the basis for his entire system of morals. He begins by explaining why morality is only linked with duty, “To do the action without any inclination, solely from duty; not until then does it have its genuine moral worth…. It is just there that the worth of character commences, which is moral and beyond all comparison the highest, namely that he be beneficent, not from inclination, but from duty.” He continues with a definition of duty, “Duty is the necessity of an action from respect for the law…. Only what is connected with my will merely as ground, never as effect, what does not serve my inclination, but outweighs it, or at least excludes it entirely from calculations when we make a choice, hence the mere law by itself, can be an object of respect and thus a command. Now, an action from duty is to separate off entirely the influence of inclination, and with it every object of the will; thus nothing remains for the will that could determine it except, objectively, the law and, subjectively, pure respect for this practical law…. I ought never to proceed except in such a way that I could also will that my maxim should become a universal law…. The necessity of my actions from pure respect for the practical law is that which constitutes duty, to which every other motivating ground must give way, because it is the condition of a will good in itself, whose worth surpasses everything.”

Kant continues by asserting that it is not consequentialism, but the inner motive of the individual that pertains to morality, “When moral worth is at issue what counts is not the actions, which one sees, but their inner principles, which one does not see.” He continues on the concept of the Will, “Only a rational being has the capacity to act according to the representation of laws, i.e. according to principles, or a will. Since reason is required for deriving actions from laws, the will is nothing other than practical reason…. The will is a capacity to choose only that which reason, independently of inclination, recognizes as practically necessary, i.e. as good.”

The categorical imperative is the central concept of Kant’s entire moral system. He begins, “The categorical imperative would be the one that represented an action as objectively necessary by itself, without reference to another end…. All imperatives are formulae for the determination of an action necessary according to the principle of a will that is good in some way…. The categorical imperative, which declares the action to be of itself objectively necessary without reference to any other purpose, i.e. even apart from any other end, holds as an apodictically practical principle…. There is therefore only a single categorical imperative, and it is this: act only according to that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law…. So act as if the maxim of your action were to become by your will a universal law of nature.”

Next, Kant discusses treating every rational agent as an end. “A human being and generally every rational being exists as an end in itself, not merely as a means for the discretionary use for this or that will…. Rational beings are called persons, because their nature already marks them out as ends in themselves, i.e. as something that may not be used merely as a means…. These are therefore not merely subjective ends, the existence of which, as the effect of our action, has a worth for us; but rather objective ends, i.e. entities whose existence in itself is an end…. The ground of this principle is: a rational nature exists as an end in itself…. So act that you use humanity, in your own person as well as in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means.” Kant connects this back with his categorical imperative, “Autonomy is thus the ground of the dignity of a human and of every rational nature…. The categorical imperative can also be expressed as follows: act according to maxims that can at the same time have as their object themselves as universal laws of nature. Such, then, is the formula of an absolutely good will…. A rational nature is distinguished from the others by this, that it sets itself an end.”

Kant might be described as the progenitor of German idealism. He talks of the world of appearances, where humans rely on their senses, and the world of things in themselves, defined through reason and understanding, but never quite grasped. “A human being cannot even—according to the acquaintance he has with himself by inner sensation—presume to cognize how he himself is in himself.” Kant concludes, “As a rational being, hence as one that belongs to the intelligible world, a human being can never think of the causality of his own will otherwise than under the idea of freedom…. When we think of ourselves as free, we transfer ourselves as members into the world of understanding, and cognize autonomy of the will, along with its consequence, morality; but if we think of ourselves as bound by duty we consider ourselves as belonging to the world of sense and yet at the same time to the world of understanding…. Categorical imperatives are possible, because the idea of freedom makes me a member of an intelligible world.”

“The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought” by Wang Hui (translated by Michael Gibbs Hill et al.)

In Wang’s treatise, he seeks to show how different Chinese dynasties adopted the precepts of Confucius’ philosophy to their own times and made his thoughts their own, through interpretation and selection of emphasis. Wang begins by discussing the School of Principle, during the Song Dynasty, reinterpreted Confucius from the older tradition, “Confucian learning starts off centered on morality, with an epistemology linking government, economy, culture, and nature in one basic framework of rites and music, a moral-political narrative centered on renewing the connection between Heaven and humanity…. In the categories of Confucianism, morality had strong and specific relationships with systems of ritual, institutions, and customs…. Among Confucian ideological stances, the School of Principle especially emphasized the internal aspect of the evaluative process…. The Ru learning of Confucius took ritual, “the rites and music” (liyue) as its core…. But the Song and Ming School of Principle takes Heavenly Principle, Mind, and Nature as its core…. To the School of Principle, moral evaluations are produced within an order that is universal and yet internal. This order is called “internal” because it cannot be equated to the existing rituals, institutions, or laws, but rather emerges only in subjective cognition and embodied awareness…. The School of Principle turns the central issue away from rites/music and institutions and toward methods to attain knowledge.”

Wang next discusses how the Confucian disciple, Mencius, viewed humaneness as compared to his mentor. “In contrast to how Confucius interpreted humaneness between ritual and humaneness, Mencius connects humaneness directly to Heaven…. Mencius’s system of thought, humaneness, righteousness, ritual propriety, and wisdom all accrue to the “nature of the superior man,” or else are “rooted in the mind.”” Mencius elaborated, “To preserve one’s mind, and cultivate one’s nature, is the way to serve Heaven.” Mencius continued, “Humaneness, righteousness, ritual propriety, and wisdom are not infused into us from without. We are certainly furnished with them.” Wang explains, “Ascribing the inner strength of humanity directly to ontology or the Way of Heaven and not to institutions of rites and music also meant rejecting Confucius’s ideas about adhering to Western Zhou ritual forms.”

As earlier stated, the Song Dynasty scholars interpreted Confucius in a new manner. They viewed morality, ethics, and humaneness in a more subjective light. “From Han-dynasty cosmology to the establishment of the Northern Song Way of Heaven was a transition, with the center of focus no longer on the correspondence of Heaven and human, but rather on the internal moral qualities of humans, and their conduct…. Cosmology took an inward turn, and moral and political practice went from following the mastery or commands of Heaven to following internal nature…. For the Song and Ming Confucians, however, principle took on a distinctly secular orientation…. Heavenly Principle and the Heavenly Way were absolute truths that transcended and yet were also internal to the myriad things of the universe. The function of understanding and the internal turn of moral judgment were products of the historical judgment that institutions had separated from morality…. In the eyes of Confucians, the so-called connection between institutions and ritual reflected the historical evolution from enfeoffment to the system of centralized administration. Their theory of institutions took the imperial power-centered system of centralized administration as legitimate, while School of the Way scholars took ritual views of the patriarchal clan system and enfeoffments as the basis for moral-political judgment. Here, the propensity of the times had become an element internal to Heavenly Principle…. Oppositions between “is” and “ought,” and “fact” and “value,” in Song and later Confucian theory were products of historically evolving moral-political judgment, namely the separation of institutions from ritual.”

Confucius was interpreted yet differently in the times of the Qing Dynasty. Wang contrasts Qing Confucian thought with that of the Song, “Critiques of Song Confucianism were mainly focused on methods of pursuing learning, and were definitely not directed at such universally recognized concepts and presuppositions of Qing Confucianism (including Zhu Xi learning) as the unity of governance and the Way, the unity of principle and ritual, and the unity of ritual and ceremonial implements…. From the standpoint of this “unity,” both equally rejected the Cheng-Zhu dualisms of li and qi, of governance and the Way, and of principle and ritual, and through arguments about the connections between ritual and principle, governance and the Way, and the Way and its vessels, they rejected Lu-Wang explanations of principle as grounded in the heart…. Song Confucianism used Heavenly Principle to stand in opposition to the actual order of things, and thereby manifested a world in which ritual and music and institutions, status identity, and moral condition were separated from each other; for them, the opposition between Heavenly Principle and the actual world was precisely the source of criticism.”

The crux of the Qing Dynasty was that, for many ethnically Han scholars, it was viewed as foreign. “For a Han literatus during the Qing dynasty, it was impossible to ignore the fact that the Qing was a foreign regime: without the Will of Heaven…. Force alone could not legitimize the “new king.” By starting with terms “Receiving the Mandate of Heaven” and “Emperor,” the Rectification clearly implies that imperial power is the highest authority. “Royal affairs” are simply a substitute for Heaven. If the ruler were to violate the Will of Heaven and thus anger All-under-Heaven, he would have lost his legitimacy…. The Qing was widely regarded as a conquest dynasty…. The Qing empire’s erasure of the inner-outer divide, and its treatment of Manchu and Han as one, could not fit with the principle of patriarchal inheritance, as the privileges of the Manchu nobility were based precisely on blood lineage.” Wang continues, “After the first Opium War, the Sino-British Treaty of Nanjing, and a series of subsequent wars and treaties, the “internal-external” categories as they had been understood in late-Qing society underwent fundamental change. No longer did they refer to internal and external relationships with the empire or in the tributary system, but rather to those between nation-states…. Late-Qing scholar-officials saw clearly that if Confucian thought could only establish a Doctrine for All (wanshi fa) within China, then China’s only option in an era of competition among states would be to close off its borders and, even then, eventually lose the doctrinal and practical basis for gaining a foothold in this competition.”

Finally, Wang exposits on the only recourse available to late Qing-Confucian scholars, universal Confucianism. “If one views the rites-centric Confucian knowledge system as a kind of universal knowledge, then one must establish universal connections between rites and the world, thereby also subverting the intrinsic or historical connection between the Confucian rites and China…. Venerating the rites does not mean adhering to the old ways. This therefore relaxed the relationship between the universal nature of the rites and specific code of rites.” Kang Youwei stated, “Rites are established by the ruler and serve as a model for all.” Wang explains, “The universal nature of knowledge or rites did not originate from authoritative practice but from an a priori and abstract essence.” Kang Youwei recounts, “Confucius said: “For setting the rulers at peace and making the people orderly, nothing compares to the rites.” Rites are the natural human way and a necessity in the laws of nature…. Although ancient times are different from the present, China and the external tribes are different, and the rites cultivate good and eliminate evil. Their principles are the same.”