6 Jacques Barzun Quotes on Philosophy

Jacques Barzun quotes on philosophy

9. The one thing that unifies men in a given age is not their individual philosophies but the dominant problem that these philosophies are designed to solve.

17. He sent me a letter from India, where I think he got a fellowship to spend a year or so. He sent me a letter that read, I've just met a wonderful guru who can read minds. 'I want you to' - Allen had a way of saying 'I want you to do this, I want you to do that' - 'I want you to get him a position in the Philosophy Department.' I wrote back, 'Dear Allen, the members of the Philosophy Department want nothing so little as to have their minds read.'

23. Shaw does not merely decorate a proposition, but makes his way from point to point through new and difficult territory. This explains why Shaw must either be taken whole or left alone. He must be disassembled and put together again with nothing left out, under pain of incomprehension; for his politics, his art, and his religion - to say nothing of the shape of his sentences - are unique expressions of this enormously enlarged and yet concentrated consciousness.

28. Like Nietzsche, he rails at romanticism, but it is evident that what they both mean by the word is the cliches of second-hand romance. Historic romanticism is in fact the ground-work of their philosophy.

32. Philosophers no longer write for the intelligent, only for their fellow professionals. The few thousand academic philosophers in the world do not stint themselves: they maintain more than seventy learned journals. But in the handful that cover more than one subdivision of philosophy, any given philosopher can hardly follow more than one or two articles in each issue. This hermetic condition is attributed to 'technical problems' in the subject. Since William James, Russell, and Whitehead, philosophy, like history, has been confiscated by scholarship and locked away from the contamination of general use.

37. Can an idea - a notion as abstract as Relativism - produce by itself the effects alleged? cause all the harm, destroy all the lives and reputations? I am as far as anyone can be from denying the power of ideas in history, but the suggestion that a philosophy (as Relativism is often called) has perverted millions and debased daily life is on the face of it absurd. No idea working alone has ever demoralized society, and there have been plenty of ideas simpler and more exciting than Relativism.