“It is characteristic of the barbarian … to insist upon seeing a thing “as it is.” The desire testifies that he has nothing in himself with which to spiritualize it; the relation is one of thing to thing without the intercession of the imagination. Impatient of the veiling with which the man of higher type gives the world imaginative meaning, the barbarian and the Philistine, who is the barbarian living amid culture, demands the access of immediacy. Where the former wishes representation, the latter insists upon starkness of materiality, suspecting rightly that forms will mean restraint.”

Source: Ideas have Consequences (1948), p. 24.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "It is characteristic of the barbarian … to insist upon seeing a thing “as it is.” The desire testifies that he has noth…" by Richard M. Weaver?

Richard M. Weaver110

American scholar 1910–1963

August Heckscher II (1913–1997) American writer

Address, Kenyon College (April 4, 1957)

“The true barbarian is he who thinks every thing barbarous but his own tastes and prejudices.”

William Hazlitt (1778–1830) English writer

No. 333
Characteristics, in the manner of Rochefoucauld's Maxims (1823)

“There is nothing worse than a cultural barbarian with pretensions.”

Hubert Selby Jr. Requiem for a Dream

Requiem for a Dream (1978)

“Civilization gives the barbarian or tribal man an eye for an ear and is now at odds with the electronic world.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 30

“There are, for example, so many kinds of tongues in this world; and none is without voice. If then I know not the power of the voice, I shall be to him to whom I speak a barbarian; and he that speaketh, a barbarian to me.”

Paul of Tarsus book First Epistle to the Corinthians

1 Corinthians 14:10-11 (as quoted in Catholic Bible Douay-Rehims http://www.biblebible.com/text-bible/Catholic-Bible/1_corinthians_14.asp) <br class="br">First Epistle to the Corinthians

“The member of a culture … purposely avoids the relationship of intimacy; he wants the object somehow depicted and fictionalized. … He is embarrassed when this is taken out of its context of proper sentiments and presented bare, for he feels that this is a reintrusion of that world which his whole conscious effort has sought to banish. Forms and conventions are the ladder of ascent. And hence the speechlessness of the man of culture when he beholds the barbarian tearing aside some veil which is half adornment, half concealment.”

Richard M. Weaver (1910–1963) American scholar

Source: Ideas have Consequences (1948), p. 26.

“The man of culture finds the whole past relevant; the bourgeois and the barbarian find relevant only what has some pressing connection with their appetite.”

Richard M. Weaver (1910–1963) American scholar

Ideas have Consequences (1948)