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Dewey Crowe

Confused, Memes, and Aesthetic: the very midst of this vain agitation there arose domes, statues, bas-reliefs,
paintings and palaces which have remained intact through the centuries and which
still enchant the men of today. One can imagine an intellectual Florentine being
skeptical about the great uncertain movements which are stirring up his country
and which will die out as did the seethings of the centuries which have gone by:
as he sees it, the important thing is merely to understand the temporary events and
through them to cultivate that beauty which perishes not. Many Frenchmen also
sought relief in this thought in 1940 and the years which followed. "Let's try to
take the point of view of history," they said upon learning that the Germans had
entered Paris. And during the whole occupation certain intellectuals sought to
keep "aloof from the fray" and to consider impartially contingent facts which did
not concern them.
But we note at once that such an attitude appears in moments of discouragement
and confusion; in fact, it is a position of withdrawal, a way of fleeing the truth of
the present. As concerns the past, this eclecticism is legitimate; we are no longer
in a live situation in regard to Athens, Sparta, or Alexandria, and the very idea of
a choice has no meaning. But the present is not a potential past, it is the moment
of choice and action; we can not avoid living it through a project; and there is no
project which is purely contemplative since one always projects himself toward
something, toward the future; to put oneself "outside" is still a way of living the
inescapable fact that one is inside: those French intellectuals who, in the name of
history, poetry, or art, sought to rise above the drama of the age, were willy-nilly
its actors more or less explicitly, they were playing the occupier's game. Likewise,
the Italian aesthete, occupied in caressing the marbles and bronzes of Florence, is
playing a political role in the life of his country by his very inertia. One can not
justify all that is by asserting that everything may equally be the object of
contemplation, since man never contemplates: he does.
Simone de Beauvoir, on intellectuals who attempt to withdraw from the events of the world into their "purely contemplative" work:

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found @ 1919 likes ON 2016-11-19 00:09:12 BY conservativememes

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