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Richard Weaver citations
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Richard Malcolm Weaver, Jr est un universitaire américain qui a enseigné l'anglais à l'université. Il est connu pour son approche conservatrice et formelle de la rhétorique moderne.

Solitaire, devenu brièvement socialiste dans sa jeunesse, il devint conservateur lors de ses hautes études. Professeur d'écriture, Weaver est profondément influencé par la philosophie de Platon à propos des universaux. Weaver critique le nominalisme mais prône une critique littéraire et culturelle, dans une approche philosophique de la nature humaine et de la société. Young le décrit comme un « penseur original et radical », aspects qui ressortent dans son ouvrage Ideas Have Consequences et The Ethics of Rhetoric. Ces travaux ont influencé les théoriciens conservateurs ainsi que les universitaires du sud des États-Unis. Weaver fut également associé au mouvement des « New Conservatives » , un groupe d'universitaires qui ont prônés le conservatisme traditionnel dans les années 40 et 50. Wikipedia  

✵ 3. mars 1910 – 1. avril 1963
Richard Weaver: 110   citations 0   J'aime

Richard Weaver: Citations en anglais

“The eulogy of the non-lover in the speech of Lysias … stresses the fact that the non-lover … does not commit extreme acts under the influence of passions. Since he acts from calculation, he never has occasion for remorse. … The non-lover demonstrates his superiority through prudence and objectivity. … We must now observe how these points of superiority correspond to those of “semantically purified” speech, … the kind of speech approaching pure notation in the respect that it communicates abstract intelligence without impulsion. It is a simple instrumentality, showing no affection for the object of its symbolizing and incapable of inducing bias in the hearer. In its ideal conception, it would have less power to move than 2 + 2 = 4, since it is generally admitted that mathematical equations may have the beauty of elegance, and hence are not above suspicion where beauty is suspect. But this neuter language will be an unqualified medium of transmission of meanings from mind to mind, and by virtue of it minds can remain in an unprejudiced relationship to the world and also to other minds. … Instead of passion, it offers the serviceability of objectivity … It distrusts any departure from the literal and prosaic.”

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Richard M. Weaver

“The Phaedrus and the Nature of Rhetoric,” pp. 6-7.
The Ethics of Rhetoric (1953)

“The conclusion, so vexatious to democracy, that wisdom and not popularity qualifies for rule may be forced upon us by the peril in atomic energy.”

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Richard M. Weaver

Source: Ideas have Consequences (1948), p. 65.

“Rhetoric in its truest sense seeks to perfect men by showing them better versions of themselves, links in that chain extending up toward the ideal.”

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Richard M. Weaver

“The Phaedrus and the Nature of Rhetoric,” p. 25.
The Ethics of Rhetoric (1953)

“Part of life has a public orientation, but part of it does not. He has a private self that looks inward, and he should be able to feel with some distinctness the difference between public and private roles. It strikes me that those eighteenth century individuals who wrote letters to the newspapers signed “Publius” or something like that, were giving expression to this difference. When the writer appeared before the public in the common interest, he was conscious of stepping outside of his private considerations and entering into another capacity, of assuming a posture. The rest of the time he was his own man, which his thoughts and feelings reserved for himself.”

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Richard M. Weaver

“Individuality and Modernity,” Essays on Individuality (Philadelphia: 1958), p. 72.

“The theory of empiricism is plausible because it assumes that accuracy about small matters prepares the way for valid judgment about large ones. What happens, however, is that the judgments are never made. The pedantic empiricist, buried in his little province of phenomena, imagines that fidelity to it exempts him from concern with larger aspects of reality.”

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Richard M. Weaver

Source: Ideas have Consequences (1948), p. 60.

“Modern man … when he looks at his daily newspaper … sees the events of the day refracted through a medium which colors them as effectively as the cosmology of the medieval scientist determined his view of the starry heavens. The newspaper is a man-made cosmos of the world of events around us at the time. For the average reader it is a construct with a set of significances which he no more thinks of examining than did his pious forbear of the thirteenth century—whom he pities for sitting in medieval darkness—think of questioning the cosmology. This modern man, too, lives under a dome, whose theoretical aspect has been made to harmonize with a materialistic conception of the world. And he employs its conjunctions and oppositions to explain the occurrences of his time with all the confidence of the now supplanted discipline of astrology.”

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Richard M. Weaver

Source: Ideas have Consequences (1948), pp. 93-94.

“The most likely way to kill a tradition is to over-formalize it, which is to carry it on in the same way after everyone has ceased to defer to it. The way to revive it is to show that it has grown out of and is still related to our most cherished values. But this requires radical insight and the stripping away of many things which are mere accretions.”

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Richard M. Weaver

“The Importance of Cultural Freedom,” p. 29.
Life Without Prejudice (1965)

“The bourgeoisie first betrayed society through capitalism and finance, and now labor betrays it by embracing a scheme of things which sees profit only, not duty and honor, in work. This view will seem hopelessly unrealistic to those who do not admit that sentiment toward the whole is the only ultimate means of measuring value.”

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Richard M. Weaver

Source: Ideas have Consequences (1948), p. 75.

“Nothing is more certain than that whatever has to court public favor for its support will sooner or later be prostituted to utilitarian ends. The educational institutions of the United States afford a striking demonstration of this truth. Virtually without exception, liberal education, that is to say, education centered about ideas and ideals, has fared best in those institutions which draw their income from private sources. They have been able … to insist that education be not entirely a means for breadwinning. This means that they have been relatively free to promote pure knowledge and the training of the mind. … In state institutions, always at the mercy of elected bodies and of the public generally, and under obligation to show practical fruits for their expenditure of money, the movement toward specialism and vocationalism has been irresistible. They have never been able to say that they will do what they will with their own because their own is not private. It seems fair to say that the opposite of the private is the prostitute.”

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Richard M. Weaver

Source: Ideas have Consequences (1948), pp. 136-137.

“The idea that work is something apportioned out by men leaves people discontent with their portion and dubious about whether work is a good thing at all. … The ancient injunction to labor fades when we regard our work as cut out for us by men, who, by present dogma, are no better than ourselves. That curious modern hypostatization “service” is often called in to substitute for the now incomprehensible doctrine of vocation. It tries to secure subordination by hypothesizing something larger than the self, which turns out, however, to be only a multitude of selfish selves. The familiar change from quality to quantity may again be noted; one serves not the higher part of the self (this entails hierarchy) … but merely consumer demand. And who admires those at the top of a hierarchy of consumption? Man as a consuming animal is thus seen to be not enough.”

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Richard M. Weaver

Source: Ideas have Consequences (1948), p. 77.

“One of the first major steps in the direction of modern skepticism came through the victory of Occam over Aquinas in a controversy about language. The statement that modi essendi were replaced by modi significandi et intelligendi, or that ontological referents were abandoned in favor of pragmatic significations, describes broadly the change in philosophy which continues to our time. From Occam to Bacon, from Bacon to Hobbes, and from Hobbes to contemporary semanticists, the progression is clear: ideas become psychological figments, words become useful signs.”

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Richard M. Weaver

“The Power of the Word,” p. 36.
Language is Sermonic (1970)

“Practically all traditional distinctions, whether economic, moral, social, or aesthetic, are today under assault as founded on a prejudice.”

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Richard M. Weaver

“Life without prejudice,” p. 4.
Life Without Prejudice (1965)

“There is a sentimental poetry, and it will have to be exposed (not censored. certainly; for to omit criticism of it would deprive us of our fairest chance to combat the sentimental rhetoric of the student’s environment).”

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Richard M. Weaver

“The Power of the Word,” p. 52.
Language is Sermonic (1970)

“Poetry offers the fairest hope of restoring our lost unity of mind.”

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Richard M. Weaver

“The Power of the Word,” p. 53.
Language is Sermonic (1970)

“The discipline of poetry may be expected first to teach the evocative power of words, to introduce the student, if we may so put it, to the mighty power of symbolism, and then to show him that there are ways of feeling about things which are not provincial either in space or time.”

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Richard M. Weaver

“The Power of the Word,” pp. 52-53.
Language is Sermonic (1970)

“In dialectic the student … will get training in thinking, whereas the best that he gets now is a vague admonition to think for himself.”

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Richard M. Weaver

“The Power of the Word,” p. 55.
Language is Sermonic (1970)

“One of the most important revelations about a period comes in its theory of language, for that informs us whether language is viewed as a bridge to the noumenal or as a body of fictions convenient for grappling with transitory phenomena.”

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Richard M. Weaver

Source: Ideas have Consequences (1948), p. 150.

“In any piece of rhetorical discourse, one rhetorical term overcomes another rhetorical term only by being nearer to the term which stands ultimate. There is some ground for calling a rhetorical education necessarily aristocratic education in that the rhetorician has to deal with an aristocracy of notions.”

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Richard M. Weaver

“The Phaedrus and the Nature of Rhetoric,” p. 23.
The Ethics of Rhetoric (1953)

“The young come to us creatures of imagination and strong affection; they want to feel, but they don’t know how—that is to say, they do not know the right objects and the right measures. And it is entirely certain that if we leave them to the sort of education obtainable today for extra-scholastic sources, the great majority will be schooled in the two vices of sentimentality and brutality. Now great poetry, rightly interpreted, is the surest antidote to both of these. In contrast with journalists and others, the great poets relate the events of history to a pure or noble metaphysical dream, which our students will have all their lives as a protecting arch over their system of values.”

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Richard M. Weaver

“The Power of the Word,” p. 51.
Language is Sermonic (1970)

“The realization that just as no action is really indifferent, so no utterance is without its responsibility introduces, it is true, a certain strenuosity into life.”

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Richard M. Weaver

“The Phaedrus and the Nature of Rhetoric,” p. 24.
The Ethics of Rhetoric (1953)

“Now, with the general decay of religious faith, it is the scientists who must speak ex cathedra, whether they wish to or not.”

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Richard M. Weaver

“Ultimate Terms in Contemporary Rhetoric,” p. 93.
Language is Sermonic (1970)

“In the countries of Europe, one after another, the gentleman has been ousted by politicians and entrepreneurs, as materialism has given rewards to the sort of cunning incompatible with any kind of idealism.”

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Richard M. Weaver

Source: Ideas have Consequences (1948), p. 55.

“The Communist … chooses some feature of an order where there is a potential resentment, or he may choose some feature about which people are simply soft-headed—that is to say, confused or uncertain. It may be the existence of rich men; it may be the right to acquire and use property privately; it may be the idea of discipline and regard in education; it may be some system of preferential advancement which produces envy in the less successful. His most common maneuver … is to vilify this as founded upon “prejudice.” The burden of his argument usually is that since these do not have perfectly rationalized bases, they have no right to exist.”

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Richard M. Weaver

“Life without prejudice,” p. 5.
Life Without Prejudice (1965)

“The former distrust of specialization has been supplanted by its opposite, a distrust of generalization. Not only has man become a specialist in practice, he is being taught that special facts represent the highest form of knowledge.”

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Richard M. Weaver

Source: Ideas have Consequences (1948), p. 59.

“In proportion as man approaches the outer rim, he becomes lost in details, and the more he is preoccupied with details, the less he can understand them.”

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Richard M. Weaver

Source: Ideas have Consequences (1948), p. 53.

“Today we have media … which actually specialize in the kind of obscenity which the cultivated, not the prurient, find repugnant. … It is contended that such material is the raw stuff of life, and that it is the duty of the organs of public information to leave no one deceived about the nature of the world. The assertion that this is the real world begs the most important question of all. The raw stuff of life is precisely what the civilized man desires to have refined, or presented in a humane framework, for which sentiment alone can afford the support. … One of the great conspiracies against philosophy and civilization, a conspiracy immensely aided by technology, is just this substitution of sensation for reflection.”

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Richard M. Weaver

Source: Ideas have Consequences (1948), pp. 28-30.

“Since liberalism has become a kind of official party line, we have been enjoined against saying things about races, religions or national groups, for after all, there is no categorical statement without its implication of value, and values begin divisions among men. We must not define, subsume, or judge; we must rather rest on the periphery and display “sensibility toward the cultural expressions of all lands and peoples.””

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Richard M. Weaver

This is a process of emasculation.
Source: Ideas have Consequences (1948), p. 59.

“When Boswell confessed to Johnson that he feared some things he was entering in his journal were too small, the latter advised him that nothing is too small for so small a creature as man. This is good evidence that Johnson had achieved what I referred to as perspective, which carries with it a necessary humility. And while some may be startled to hear Mencken called a modest man, I can infer nothing but a real condor and humility from those bombastic and ironical allusions to himself which comprise much of the humor of his writings. The tone he adopted was a rhetorical instrument; he had faced his limitations.”

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Richard M. Weaver

“Life without prejudice,” p. 11.
Life Without Prejudice (1965)

“Many of us who read the literature of social science as laymen are conscious of being admitted at a door which bears the watchword “scientific objectivity” and of emerging at another door which looks out upon a variety of projects for changing, renovating, or revolutionizing society. In consequence, we feel the need of a more explicit account of how the student of society passes from facts to values or statements of policy.”

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Richard M. Weaver

“Concealed Rhetoric in Scientistic Sociology,” p. 139.
Language is Sermonic (1970)

“Until the world perceives that “good” cannot be applied to a thing because it is our own, and “bad” because it is another’s, there is no prospect of realizing community.”

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Richard M. Weaver

“The Power of the Word,” p. 54.
Language is Sermonic (1970)