Reflections on History by Jacob Burckhardt (PDF)

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Text: English, German (translation)

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⭐This book has an index, and the index lists one page for Zarathustra, but even Zarathustra might wonder how he ever ended up being the last word in the paragraph:”Aryan polytheism, in its reversion to pantheism, was the source of the religion of the Brahmans; the Zend religion, on the other hand, transformed it into an unparalleled dualism. And that change can only have been operated in one sudden movement by one great (very great) individual. Hence there can be no doubt of the personality of Zarathustra.” (p. 152).There is a lot in this book, attempting to “cover the ground” (p. 59) of “state, religion, and culture in their mutual bearings. . . . The state and religion, the expressions of political and metaphysical need, may claim authority over their particular peoples at any rate, and indeed over the world. For our special purpose, however, culture, which meets material and spiritual need in the narrower sense, is the sum of all that has spontaneously arisen for the advancement of material life and as an expression of spiritual and moral life–all social intercourse, technologies, arts, literatures, and sciences.” (pp. 59-60). Considering ownership (or worse, the desire of individuals to copy such things in a manner that was previously restricted to commercial manufacturing processes) of such things the major factor behind all the great struggles of our own time, we ought to be able to see how much has happened since the paragraph quoted above from the lectures given off and on from 1868 to 1885, included in Chapter 3, “The Reciprocal Actions of the Three Powers,” and that more than a hundred pages later, even Jacob Burckhardt, the famous historian and friend of the young professor Friedrich Nietzsche at the University of Basel, in Chapter 4, “The Crises of History,” needs to ask those who are listening to his lecture, “Or is everything to turn into big business, as in America?” (p. 266) only a page before observing, “The socialist systems have been the first to abandon the quest for power and to place their specific aims before anything else.” (p. 267).Political systems have been fumbling over the kind of power of personality question that put Zarathustra in the perplexing paragraph quoted above, as if anyone who claimed to possess knowledge of good and evil, “in the extreme sense, theocratic in intention” (p. 152) could easily divide the world “between two personified principles and their trains (hardly personified at all). And that in a predominantly pessimistic sense, beloved of the gods, ends his life evilly in the toils of Ahriman. Yet at this very point, we must again note how easily religion and the state change places in their mutual interaction. All this did not prevent the actual monarchs of Persia (the Achaemenidae at any rate) from arrogating to themselves the representation of Ormuzd on earth and believing themselves to stand under his special and permanent guidance, while the monarchy itself was in reality a horrible Oriental despotism. Indeed, on the strength of that delusion, the monarch assumed that he could do no wrong, and subjected his enemies to the most infamous tortures.” (pp. 152-53). America might be the state that found religion to be so unfree, in the manner in which it is usually practiced, that the typical American assumption would be, “On the whole, state and religion were here associated to the great detriment of both.” (p. 153).According to the Introduction by Gottfried Dietze, Jacob Burckhardt gave up writing books at an early age. “That he ceased publishing before he had reached the age of fifty and that his publications came to an end with descriptions of art indicate a desire to let his fellowmen share in the enjoyment of beauty, to let them escape to the beautiful land which Goethe, whom Burckhardt admired, had described. For what Burckhardt saw develop throughout Europe . . . was, he feared, in many respects unpleasant and augured ill for the future of mankind, because it seemed to him to threaten the kind of culture individual effort had achieved throughout history.” (pp. 12-13).Education has widely been assumed to produce useful abilities, but as society has come to reward entertainment values with a fickle finger of fate that would astound previous students of culture, education also ought to have some emphasis on producing a state of mind to which an individual can regress, after discovering that everything which had previously been assumed to be useful, including the concept of good and evil itself, is but a snare designed to trap those who still cling to their illusions. Burckhardt was a great teacher at a time when a few teachers could be counted on to know this kind of thing, and this book, REFLECTIONS ON HISTORY, shows it.

⭐This is an important and fundamental essay around a fascinating and controversial issue.The story according Burckhardt is “The breakthrough with the nature caused by the awakening of the conscious.”In this sense, the story really begins when the men think in the elapsed time not in function of natural processes, but around a set of specific facts in which they are deeply committed consciously and simultaneously can influence.The further and derived conclusions you can extract are countless. Go for this rewarding, vigorous and passionate essay.

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