Interview http://www.amielandmelburn.org.uk/collections/mt/pdf/85_01_20.pdf in Marxism Today, January 1985.
Context: I'm interested in the division that Judeo-Christianity has made between human nature and animal nature. None of the other great faiths in the world have got quite that division between us and them. None of the others has made this enormous division between birds and beasts who, as Darwin said, would have developed consciences if they'd had the chance, and us. I think it's one of the scars in Western Europe. I think it's one of the scars in our culture that we have too high an opinion of ourselves. We align ourselves with the angels instead of the higher primates.
“To a high degree we are, through art and science, cultured. We are civilized — perhaps too much for our own good — in all sorts of social grace and decorum. But to consider ourselves as having reached morality”
for that, much is lacking. The ideal of morality belongs to culture; its use for some simulacrum of morality in the love of honor and outward decorum constitutes mere civilization. So long as states waste their forces in vain and violent self-expansion, and thereby constantly thwart the slow efforts to improve the minds of their citizens by even withdrawing all support from them, nothing in the way of a moral order is to be expected. For such an end, a long internal working of each political body toward the education of its citizens is required. Everything good that is not based on a morally good disposition, however, is nothing but pretense and glittering misery. In such a condition the human species will no doubt remain until, in the way I have described, it works its way out of the chaotic conditions of its international relations.
Seventh Thesis
Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View (1784)
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Immanuel Kant 200
German philosopher 1724–1804Related quotes
The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), I : The Man of Flesh and Bone
To the Japanese Parliament on January 21, 1936. Quoted in "The Virginia quarterly review: A National Journal of Literature and Discussion" - Page 164 - by University of Virginia - 1936.
“We, holding Art in our hands, confidently consider ourselves to be its masters”
Nobel lecture (1970)
Context: We, holding Art in our hands, confidently consider ourselves to be its masters; boldly we direct it, we renew, reform and manifest it; we sell it for money, use it to please those in power; turn to it at one moment for amusement — right down to popular songs and night-clubs, and at another — grabbing the nearest weapon, cork or cudgel — for the passing needs of politics and for narrow-minded social ends. But art is not defiled by our efforts, neither does it thereby depart from its true nature, but on each occasion and in each application it gives to us a part of its secret inner light.
Source: The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Twelve, Human Connections: Relationships Changing, p. 402
Source: Discipleship (1937), The Disciple and Unbelievers, p. 185.
Source: The Cost of Discipleship
Wort des Heils, Wort der Heilung. p 149 (1989)
