/lit/ - Literature

"DEMOCRACY not only instills a taste for literature in the industrial classes but also introduces the industrial spirit into the heart of literature.

In aristocracies, readers are demanding and few in number. In democracies, they are less difficult to please, and their number is prodigious. In aristocratic nations, therefore, there is no hope of success without immense effort, and such effort may yield considerable glory but not much money, whereas in democratic nations, a writer may boast of achieving a modest renown and a substantial fortune at little cost. He does not need to be admired to accomplish this; it is enough if people have a taste for his work.
The ever-growing multitude of readers and their constant need for novelty ensure that even books that readers hold in low esteem will sell.
In democratic times, the public often treats its authors as kings commonly treat their courtiers: it makes them rich but holds them in contempt. What more is needed by the venal souls born in courts or worthy of living in them?

Democratic literatures are always crawling with authors who see literature as nothing more than an industry, and for every great writer there are thousands of retailers of ideas."

"As conditions become more equal and each man in particular becomes more similar to all others, weaker and smaller, one stops looking at citizens and becomes accustomed to considering only the people; one forgets individuals and thinks only of the species.
In such times, the human mind is keen to embrace a host of diverse objects simultaneously. It invariably aspires to associate a multitude of consequences with a single cause.
The mind becomes obsessed with the idea of unity and looks for it everywhere, and when it thinks it has found it, there it is content to dwell. Upon discovering in the world but one creation and one Creator, it finds even that primary division of things troubling and deliberately seeks to enlarge and simplify its thought by subsuming God and the universe in a single whole. If I encounter a philosophical system which holds that everything in the world, material or immaterial, visible or invisible, is merely part of one immense being, which alone remains eternal amid constant change and continuous transformation of all its component parts, I may conclude straightaway that even though such a system destroys human individuality — or, rather, because it does — it will hold a secret charm for men who live in democracy. All their intellectual habits prepare their minds for it and pave the way for them to adopt it. It naturally draws and captivates their imagination. It feeds their intellectual pride and flatters their intellectual sloth.
Among the various systems that philosophy employs to explain the universe, pantheism seems to me one of the most apt to seduce the human mind in democratic centuries. All who are still enamoured of man’s true greatness should join forces to combat it."

>China seems to me the most perfect symbol of the kind of social well-being that a highly centralized administration can offer to peoples who submit to it. Travelers tell us that the Chinese have tranquillity without prosperity, industry without progress, stability without force, and material order without public morality. Their society always gets on fairly well but never very well. I imagine that when China is opened to Europeans, they will find the finest model of administrative centralization that exists in the universe.

How would Spengler respond? edition

"HISTORIANS who write in aristocratic centuries generally attribute everything that happens to the will and humor of certain individuals, and they are likely to impute the most important revolutions to the merest of accidents. They shrewdly elucidate the smallest of causes and often fail to notice the greatest.
Historians who live in democratic centuries exhibit quite opposite tendencies.
Most of them attribute almost no influence over the destiny of the species to the individual and no influence over the fate of the people to citizens. On the other hand, they ascribe great general causes to the most insignificant particular facts. These opposing tendencies can be explained."

>China seems to me the most perfect symbol of the kind of social well-being that a highly centralized administration can offer to peoples who submit to it. Travelers tell us that the Chinese have tranquillity without prosperity, industry without progress, stability without force, and material order without public morality. Their society always gets on fairly well but never very well. I imagine that when China is opened to Europeans, they will find the finest model of administrative centralization that exists in the universe.

"Not only is meditation difficult for men who live in democratic societies, but they are inclined by nature to hold it in relatively low esteem. The democratic social state and institutions encourage most people to be constantly active, and the habits of mind appropriate to action are not always appropriate to thought. The man who acts is often forced to settle for approximations, because he would never achieve his goals if he insisted on perfection in every detail. He must constantly rely on ideas that he has not had the leisure to delve into, for what helps him is far more the timeliness of an idea than its rigorous accuracy. All things considered, it is less risky for him to invoke a few false principles than to waste time trying to show that all his principles are true. Long and learned proofs do not determine how the world is run. Quick assessments of specific facts, daily study of the shifting passions of the multitude, momentary chances and the skill to grasp them — these are the things that decide how affairs are dealt with in democratic societies."

Just a friendly reminder that the man of action stems from democratic instincts. (And Nietzsche lost.)
Discuss Tocqueville's literature on war and becoming for the aristocratic and democratic man.

>>18702275
Wrong.

>>18596093
>>18596238
You should have read the Tocqueville threads.
>>/lit/thread/S18333149
>>/lit/thread/S18405331

"DEMOCRACY not only instills a taste for literature in the industrial classes but also introduces the industrial spirit into the heart of literature.

In aristocracies, readers are demanding and few in number. In democracies, they are less difficult to please, and their number is prodigious. In aristocratic nations, therefore, there is no hope of success without immense effort, and such effort may yield considerable glory but not much money, whereas in democratic nations, a writer may boast of achieving a modest renown and a substantial fortune at little cost. He does not need to be admired to accomplish this; it is enough if people have a taste for his work.
The ever-growing multitude of readers and their constant need for novelty ensure that even books that readers hold in low esteem will sell.
In democratic times, the public often treats its authors as kings commonly treat their courtiers: it makes them rich but holds them in contempt. What more is needed by the venal souls born in courts or worthy of living in them?

Democratic literatures are always crawling with authors who see literature as nothing more than an industry, and for every great writer there are thousands of retailers of ideas."

"We must not forget, moreover, that the same energy that impels a man to rebel in a violent way against a common error almost always carries him beyond the bounds of reason; that in order for a man to declare war — even legitimate war — on the ideas of his time and country, he must have a certain violent and adventurous cast of mind, and men of this character, no matter what direction they take, rarely arrive at happiness and virtue. And in passing let it be said that this also explains why even in the most necessary and holy of revolutions, one encounters so few moderate and honest revolutionaries."

According to Tocqueville there is a tendency towards the decline of great revolutions, and at the same time the arts, values, and intellectual pursuits which depend on this revolutionary thinking.
Is he right? And what are the consequences of this?

This is from Democracy in America. But you can reference other works if they relate specifically to this topic.

Tocqueville on how poetry changed with democracy.

"Aristocracy naturally leads the human mind to contemplate and dwell on the past. By contrast, democracy inspires in men a kind of instinctive distaste for all that is old. In this respect, aristocracy is far more favorable to poetry, because distance usually magnifies things and shrouds them in obscurity and thus on both counts renders them more suitable for depiction of the ideal.

Having deprived poetry of the past, equality then strips away part of the present.

In aristocratic nations, certain privileged individuals enjoy an existence that is in a sense outside the human condition, and above it. Among their seemingly exclusive prerogatives are power, wealth, glory, wit, delicacy, and distinction of every sort. The multitude never see them up close or have any detailed knowledge of what they do. It takes little effort to portray such men in a poetic way.

In the same nations, however, one also finds ignorant, humble, and subjugated classes who lend themselves to poetry by the very extremity of their coarseness and wretchedness, quite as much as the others do by virtue of their refinement and grandeur. Furthermore, the various classes that make up an aristocratic people are so distant from one another, and know so little of one another, that the imagination in representing them can always add something to or subtract something from reality.

In democratic societies, where all men are insignificant and very much alike, each person looks at himself and instantly sees everyone else. Hence poets who live in democratic centuries can never take a particular individual as the subject of their work, for a mediocre object that one sees distinctly from every possible angle can never lend itself to representation of the ideal."

>>18221610

"It is impossible to imagine anything as insignificant, dull, or encumbered with petty interests — in a word, as antipoetic — as the life of an American. Among the thoughts that guide such a life, however, one is invariably pregnant with poetry, and that one is like the hidden sinew that gives vigor to all the rest.

Wrong quote and pic. Sorry.

This kills the Nietzschean.

Specifically that democracy itself is a providential relation of man. His thinking is thus in line with Schmitt's politics of strength and Christian theology as a relation to time and metamorphosis.
Nietzsche never even attempts to understand Christian theology, or at least adapt the knowledge from his early life into his late philosophy. He is firmly in the camp of critique, no matter how much he dresses up the language. Tocqueville's Death of God is not only much stronger, but of affirmation and wealth. It also aligns with Christian theology.

Compared to Tocqueville, Hölderlin, Goethe, and others, Nietzsche's death of god is weak and impoverished. One can only conclude from its popularity that something in it appeals to the democratic sensibility, the instincts of the herd.

Read the Tocqueville thread. Schmitt's idea of democracy is very similar.
Democracy is a providential relation, the formation of a new species. Even where democracy may appear as a great sham something like voting acts as a force of neutralisation, which is itself the forming of a new ground of law.
No matter how destructive and lost man becomes in this, especially with pantheistic feeling, there remains the force of the elements and a theological nomos. What is so difficult to capture in an image of democracy, and what is so tyrannical in its presence, is the dissipation of all law and strength which only seems to increase its power.