Johan Huizinga Cultural history
Huizinga shifted his interest towards historical studies however, with a particular emphasis on studies in Cultural history in line with the school established by Jacob Burckhardt. After teaching in Haarlem and Amsterdam, he became professor of history at the University of Groningen in 1905 and at the Leiden University in 1915.
His most famous work is - The Waning of the Middle Ages (published in 1919 trans. 1924), in which he argues that the late Middle Ages were a period of weariness, pessimism and decadence.
Huizinga's The Waning of the Middle Ages is celebrated for its excellent literary quality and historical penetration, focuses on the 14th and 15th centuries in France and the Low Countries as exemplifying the last phase of the Middle Ages and discusses many aspects of medieval life: philosophy, literature, painting, chivalry, love, etc. Huizinga describes how medieval piety often found expression in rituals and external forms.
The Middle Ages are also discussed in his collection of essays Men and Ideas. One of these called, "The Task of Cultural History," argues that history should resurrect the past, and should give the reader a sense of what it was like to be alive during a particular period. Huizinga deplores the modern tendency to write romanticized history and romanticized biography, to try to make history entertaining and amusing holding that "No literary effect in the world can compare to the pure, sober taste of history."
Other essays are collected in a volume called Dutch Civilization in the Seventeenth Century and Other Essays. Much of this book is written not for the general reader, but for fellow Dutchmen and contemporaries. His preoccupation with the Netherlands reminds one of Ortega's preoccupation with Spain. In an essay called, "The Aesthetic Element in Historical Thought," Huizinga declares that he has "faith in the importance of the aesthetic element in historical thinking," and that he opposes the idea that history should attempt to be scientific. "The historian tries to re-experience what was once experienced by men like ourselves....The true study of history involves our imagination and conjures up conceptions, pictures, visions."
In the Shadow of Tomorrow isn't a historical work, but rather an analysis of Western civilization. It discusses the problems besetting the West, from moral anarchy to artistic decadence. Though it sometimes reminds one of Ortega's Revolt of the Masses, its less pertinent to our time than Ortega's work since much of it is a criticism of Fascism. It is, however, an interesting, brief and readable book, it argues that that modern education and the mass media both have harmful effects on culture: "Our time [is] faced by the discouraging fact that two highly vaunted achievements of civilization, universal education and modern publicity, instead of raising the level of culture, appear ultimately to produce certain symptoms of cultural devitalisation and degeneration."
In looking at modern art, Huizinga finds a trend toward the irrational in both modern literature and modern painting. Literature and painting are held to have become increasingly unintelligible - poetry is represented as having maintained throughout history "a certain connection with rational expression....It is not until the closing years of the [nineteenth] century that one sees poetry purposely steering its course away from reason."
Man and the Masses in America and also Life and Thought in America; are two books that are sometimes published together in one volume. They consider American history before 1925, and they also look at modern society in general, including newspapers, movies and literature. Special attention is paid to the economic forces that have shaped American history.
In many of Huizinga's works, he discusses the play element in culture. Finally, when his life was drawing to a close, and he was a prisoner of the Nazis, he collected his thoughts on this subject into a book called Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. Homo Ludens contains some very interesting ideas, but it presents these ideas in a rather dry and scholarly manner. He argues that play is one of fundamental facts of human life, and is at the root of poetry, music, philosophy - even jurisprudence and war. Anyone interested in plumbing the depths of human nature, anyone interested in the question of why people fight wars, create culture, etc., should take his ideas into account. Huizinga is discussing more than play, he is discussing human nature, the fundamental drives within human nature - "The spirit of playful competition is, as a social impulse, older than culture itself and pervades all life like a veritable ferment. Ritual grew up in sacred play; poetry was born in play and nourished on play; music and dancing were pure play....We have to conclude, therefore, that civilization is, in its earliest phases, played. It does not come from play...it arises in and as play, and never leaves it."
Other works include early studies of the literature and culture of India and a biography of Erasmus (1924).
From 1942 until his death in 1945 Johan Huizinga was held in detention by the Nazis.
Johan Huizinga quotes
"No other discipline has its portals so wide open to the general public as history."
"Every work of history constructs contexts and designs, forms in which past reality can be comprehended. History creates comprehensibility primarily by arranging facts meaningfully and only in a very limited sense by establishing strict causal connections."
"There are no instances known to me of cultures having forsaken Truth or renounced the understanding in its widest sense."
Ralph Waldo Emerson
RALPH WALDO EMERSON (1803-1882) was, in his time, the leading voice of intellectual culture in the United States. He remains widely influential to this day through his essays, lectures, poems, and philosophical writings.
In the later eighteen-twenties Ralph Waldo Emerson read, and was very significantly influenced by, a work by a French philosopher named Victor Cousin.
A key section of Cousin's work reads as follows:
"What is the business of history? What is the stuff of which it is made? Who is the personage of history? Man : evidently man and human nature.
There are many different elements in history. What are they? Evidently again, the elements of human nature. History is therefore the development of humanity,
and of humanity only; for nothing else but humanity develops itself, for nothing else than humanity is free. …
… Moreover, when we have all the elements, I mean all the essential elements, their mutual relations do, as it were, discover themselves. We draw from the nature of these different elements, if not all their possible relations, at least their general and fundamental relations."
Introduction to the History of Philosophy (1829)
… Moreover, when we have all the elements, I mean all the essential elements, their mutual relations do, as it were, discover themselves. We draw from the nature of these different elements, if not all their possible relations, at least their general and fundamental relations."
Introduction to the History of Philosophy (1829)
Even before he had first read Cousin, (in 1829), Emerson had expressed views in his private Journals which suggest that he accepted that Human Nature, and Human Beings, tend to display three identifiable aspects and orientations:
Imagine hope to be removed from the human breast & see how Society will sink, how the strong bands of order & improvement will be relaxed & what a deathlike stillness would take the place of the restless energies that now move the world. The scholar will extinguish his midnight lamp, the merchant will furl his white sails & bid them seek the deep no more. The anxious patriot who stood out for his country to the last & devised in the last beleagured citadel, profound schemes for its deliverance and aggrandizement, will sheathe his sword and blot his fame. Remove hope, & the world becomes a blank and rottenness.
(Journal entry made between October and December, 1823)
In all districts of all lands, in all the classes of communities thousands of minds are intently occupied, the merchant in his compting house, the mechanist over his plans, the statesman at his map, his treaty, & his tariff, the scholar in the skilful history & eloquence of antiquity, each stung to the quick with the desire of exalting himself to a hasty & yet unfound height above the level of his peers. Each is absorbed in the prospect of good accruing to himself but each is no less contributing to the utmost of his ability to fix & adorn human civilization. (Journal entry of December, 1824)
Our neighbours are occupied with employments of infinite diversity. Some are intent on commercial speculations; some engage warmly in political contention; some are found all day long at their books … (This dates from January - February, 1828)
In all districts of all lands, in all the classes of communities thousands of minds are intently occupied, the merchant in his compting house, the mechanist over his plans, the statesman at his map, his treaty, & his tariff, the scholar in the skilful history & eloquence of antiquity, each stung to the quick with the desire of exalting himself to a hasty & yet unfound height above the level of his peers. Each is absorbed in the prospect of good accruing to himself but each is no less contributing to the utmost of his ability to fix & adorn human civilization. (Journal entry of December, 1824)
Our neighbours are occupied with employments of infinite diversity. Some are intent on commercial speculations; some engage warmly in political contention; some are found all day long at their books … (This dates from January - February, 1828)
The quotes from Emerson are reminiscent of a line from another "leading voice of intellectual culture" - William Shakespeare.
There's neither honesty, manhood, nor good fellowship in thee.
William Shakespeare: Henry IV (Pt 1), Act I, Scene II
William Shakespeare: Henry IV (Pt 1), Act I, Scene II
We can recommend a page which effectively combines Cousin's assertion that "the elements of Humanity" are linked to Historical Developments with Emerson and Shakespeare's identification of an - honesty, manhood and good fellowship - "Tripartism" in Human Nature.
Plato, Socrates and Shakespeare endorse a 'Tripartite Soul' view of Human Nature. Platos' Republic
Popular European History pages
at Age-of-the-Sage
The European Revolutions of 1848 begin
The French Revolution of 1848
Italian Unification - Cavour, Garibaldi and the Unification of Risorgimento Italy
Otto von Bismarck & The wars of German unification
The French Revolution of 1848
Italian Unification - Cavour, Garibaldi and the Unification of Risorgimento Italy
Otto von Bismarck & The wars of German unification
The preparation of these pages was influenced to some degree by a particular "Philosophy of History" as suggested by this quote from the famous Essay "History" by Ralph Waldo Emerson:-
There is one mind common to all individual men...
Of the works of this mind history is the record. Its genius is illustrated by the entire series of days. Man is explicable by nothing less than all his history. Without hurry, without rest, the human spirit goes forth from the beginning to embody every faculty, every thought, every emotion, which belongs to it in appropriate events. But the thought is always prior to the fact; all the facts of history pre-exist in the mind as laws. Each law in turn is made by circumstances predominant, and the limits of nature give power to but one at a time. A man is the whole encyclopaedia of facts. The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn, and Egypt, Greece, Rome, Gaul, Britain, America, lie folded already in the first man. Epoch after epoch, camp, kingdom, empire, republic, democracy, are merely the application of his manifold spirit to the manifold world.
Of the works of this mind history is the record. Its genius is illustrated by the entire series of days. Man is explicable by nothing less than all his history. Without hurry, without rest, the human spirit goes forth from the beginning to embody every faculty, every thought, every emotion, which belongs to it in appropriate events. But the thought is always prior to the fact; all the facts of history pre-exist in the mind as laws. Each law in turn is made by circumstances predominant, and the limits of nature give power to but one at a time. A man is the whole encyclopaedia of facts. The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn, and Egypt, Greece, Rome, Gaul, Britain, America, lie folded already in the first man. Epoch after epoch, camp, kingdom, empire, republic, democracy, are merely the application of his manifold spirit to the manifold world.