Ideas Have Consequences

by Richard M. Weaver

The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language. —EMERSON

More like 'preceded by'

All metaphysical community depends on the ability of men to understand one another.

I have mentioned, earlier, people who are so frightened over the existence of prejudice that they are at war with simple predication.

ultimate definition is, as Aristotle affirmed, a matter of intuition.

“It is part of my general thesis that all meaning is ultimately linguistic and that although science, in the interests of purer notation and manipulation, may break through the husk of language, its nonlinguistic symbols must again be translated back into natural language if intelligibility is to be possible.”

Those who regard the synthesizing power of language with horror are the atomists.

those who wish to confine themselves to experience must oppose symbolism.

The discourse of poetry is winged; the nominal legislators plod along empirically on foot.

the people of the Western world “do not know the meaning of certain words, which had been assumed to belong to the permanent vocabulary of mankind, certain ideals which, if ignored in practice under pressure, were accepted in theory. The least important of these words is Freedom. The most important are Justice, Mercy, and Truth.

Drift and circumstance have been permitted to change language so that the father has difficulty in speaking to the son; he endeavors to speak, but he cannot make the realness of his experience evident to the child. This circumstance, as much as any other, lies behind the defeat of tradition. Progress makes father and child live in different worlds, and speech fails to provide a means to bridge them.

Nothing so successfully discourages slovenliness in the use of language as the practice of translation.

Let parents, then, bequeath to their children not riches, but the spirit of reverence. —PLATO

see no way to sum up the offense of modern man except to say that he is impious.

here we must confront the paradox that this continual warring upon nature is not a sign of superiority to her; it is a proof of preoccupation with nature, of a sort of imprisonment by her.

Santayana has observed that we should take leave of life as Ulysses took leave of Nausicaä, blessing it but not in love with it;

Not until we have admitted that personality, like nature, has an origin that we cannot account for are we likely to desist from parricide and fratricide.

Are those who died heroes’ and martyrs’ deaths really dead? It is not an idle question. In a way, they live on as forces, helping to shape our dream of the world. The spirit of modern impiety would inter their memory with their bones and hope to create a new world out of good will and ignorance.

Woman has increasingly gone into the world as an economic “equal” and therefore competitor of man (once again equality destroys fraternity).

Taken from a natural sphere in which they are superior, they are set to wandering between two worlds. Women can neither have the prestige of the former nor, for the fact of stubborn nature, find a real standing in the latter.

With her superior closeness to nature, her intuitive realism, her unfailing ability to detect the sophistry in mere intellectuality, how was she ever cozened into the mistake of going modern? Perhaps it was the decay of chivalry in men that proved too much. After the gentleman went, the lady had to go too. No longer protected, the woman now has her career, in which she makes a drab pilgrimage from two-room apartment to job to divorce court.

he indicts the modern displaced female, the nervous, hysterical, frustrated, unhappy female, who has lost all queenliness and obtained nothing.

The most vocal part of modern impiety is the freely expressed contempt for the past.

we have paid sufficient tribute to reason, but we have also insisted that the area of its profitable operation is an island in a sea of prerational sentiment.