Philosophers no longer write for the intelligent, only for their fellow professionals. The few thousand academic philosophers in the world do not stint themselves: they maintain more than seventy learned journals. But in the handful that cover more than one subdivision of philosophy, any given philosopher can hardly follow more than one or two articles in each issue. This hermetic condition is attributed to “technical problems” in the subject. Since William James, Russell, and Whitehead, philosophy, like history, has been confiscated by scholarship and locked away from the contamination of general use.
Jacques Barzun (1907-2012) French-American historian, educator, polymath
“Culture High and Dry” (1984), The Culture We Deserve (1989)
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An earlier version of this essay was published as "Scholarship versus Culture," Atlantic Monthly (1984-11).
Quotations by:
Barzun, Jacques
Scholarship has yielded to the irresistible pull that science exerts on our minds by its self-confidence and the promise of certified knowledge. But, to repeat, the objects of culture are not analyzable, not graspable by the geometric mind. Great works of art are great by virtue of being syntheses of the world; they qualify as art by fusing form and contents into an indivisible whole; what they offer is not “discourse about,” nor a cipher to be decoded, but a prolonged incitement to finesse. So it is paradoxical that our way of introducing young minds to such works should be the way of scholarship.
Jacques Barzun (1907-2012) French-American historian, educator, polymath
“Culture High and Dry” (1984), The Culture We Deserve (1989)
(Source)
An earlier version of this essay was published as "Scholarship versus Culture," Atlantic Monthly (1984-11).
My notion about any artist is that we honor him best by reading him, by playing his music, by seeing his plays or by looking at his pictures. We don’t need to fall all over ourselves with adjectives and epithets. Let’s play him more.
Jacques Barzun (1907-2012) French-American historian, educator, polymath
“Jacques Barzun on Robert Schumann,” interview by John C. Tibbetts (1986-12-04)
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To say this is also to say that the age of ready reference is one in which knowledge inevitably declines into information. The master of so much packaged stuff has less need to grasp context or meaning than his forbears: he can always look it up. His active memory is otherwise engaged anyway, full of the arbitrary names, initials, and code figures essential to carrying on daily life. He can be vague about the rest: he can always check it out.
Jacques Barzun (1907-2012) French-American historian, educator, polymath
“Look It Up! Check It Out!” (1986), The Culture We Deserve (1989)
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An earlier version of this essay was published in The American Scholar (1986, Autumn).
The need for a body of common knowledge and common reference does not disappear when a society is largely pluralistic, as ours has become. On the contrary, it grows more necessary, so that people of different origins and occupation may quickly find familiar ground and, as we say, speak a common language. It not only saves time and embarrassment, but it also ensures a kind of mutual confidence and good will. One is not addressing an alien, blank as a stone wall, but a responsive creature whose mind is filled with the same images, memories, and vocabulary as oneself.
Jacques Barzun (1907-2012) French-American historian, educator, polymath
“Of What Use the Classics Today?,” Lecture, St. John’s College (1987-07-17)
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Collected in Begin Here: The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and Learning (1991).
Everybody keeps calling for Excellence — excellence not just in schooling, throughout society. But as soon as somebody or something stands out as Excellent, the other shout goes up: “Elitism!” And whatever produced that thing, whoever praises that result, is promptly put down. “Standing out” is undemocratic.
Jacques Barzun (1907-2012) French-American historian, educator, polymath
Begin Here: The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and Learning, ch. 1 “Schooling No Mystery” (1991)
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History, like a vast river, propels logs, vegetation, rafts, and debris; it is full of live and dead things, some destined for resurrection; it mingles many waters and holds in solution invisible substances stolen from distant soils. Anything may become part of it; that is why it can be an image of the continuity of mankind. And it is also why some of its freight turns up again in the social sciences: they were constructed out of the contents of history in the same way as houses in medieval Rome were made out of stones taken from the Coliseum.
Jacques Barzun (1907-2012) French-American historian, educator, polymath
Clio and the Doctors: Psycho-History, Quanto-History, & History, ch. 5 “History as Counter-Method and Anti-Abstraction” (1974)
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Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball, the rules and realities of the game — and do it by watching first some high school or small-town teams.
Jacques Barzun (1907-2012) French-American historian, educator, polymath
God’s Country and Mine, Part 2, ch. 8 (1954)
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Many of us affect a tone of irony about gadgets, as if we lived always in realms above and dealt with trifles only during rare descents from sublime thoughts. The truth is that more and more of the important things in life turn on pinpoints. Our frustrations begin in trivialities — a telephone out of order, a car that will not start, a claim check whose number has been misread. The thing in cellophane that cannot be got at — plain to the sight but sealed like an egg — is the modern version of the torture of Tantalus. Catastrophes we will deal with like heroes, but the bottle top that defies us saps our morale, like the tiny arrows of the Lilliputians that maddened Gulliver and set his strength at naught.
Jacques Barzun (1907-2012) French-American historian, educator, polymath
God’s Country and Mine, Part 3, ch. 12 (1954)
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The one thing that unifies men in a given age is not their individual philosophies but the dominant problem that these philosophies are designed to solve.
Jacques Barzun (1907-2012) French-American historian, educator, polymath
Romanticism and the Modern Ego, ch. 1 (1943)
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The test and use of a man’s education is that he finds pleasure in the exercise of his mind.
Jacques Barzun (1907-2012) French-American historian, educator, polymath
Saturday Evening Post, “Science vs the Humanities” (3 May 1958)
The greatest artists have never been men of taste. By never sophisticating their instincts they have never lost the awareness of the great simplicities, which they relish both from appetite and from the challenge these offer to skill in competition with popular art.
Jacques Barzun (1907-2012) French-American historian, educator, polymath
The Energies of Art: Studies of Authors Classic and Modern, “Whirligig: Last Words on Berlioz” (1956)
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Old age is like learning a new profession. And not one of your own choosing.
Jacques Barzun (1907-2012) French-American historian, educator, polymath
In Arthur Krystal, “Age of Reason,” The New Yorker (2007-10-15)
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I have always been — I think any student of history almost inevitably is — a cheerful pessimist.
Jacques Barzun (1907-2012) French-American historian, educator, polymath
Quoted in Thomas Vinciguerra, “Jacques Barzun ’27: Columbia Avatar,” Columbia College Today (2006-01)
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Barzun is being quoted in this particular instance from an unclear source, possibly the Independent Women's Forum in 2000.