“Gentlemen! We find ourselves in a crucial epoch. We, so called ‘civilized’ men of intellect, are only now emerging from a primitive phase in which one mode of thought has been elevated to the highest degree due to its usefulness in practical matters. Surrendering to purposive intellectuality has helped the primitive man over many hurdles. Building…
From Insouciance in Deliberation (1899): To really deliberate, that is, to vividly imagine oneself persisting into one future, adjusting that mysterious stew of antecedent beliefs and evaluative biases (which may, of course, just be two Gestalten of the very same essence) in such a way that the resultant future “self” is one wants to assume is…
From “Hallowed Hollowness: On Machines and Modernity”: “The modern man of science wonders to himself, “If I were to arrange things thus-and-so, how would y then be?” But what the scientist fails to see is that this is just the manipulation of what is arbitrary [eigenmächtig], rearrangement of labels chosen for their aesthetic charm and not for…
The union (he would have hated that word, of course) between Adalbert and Maria was short-lived because Maria herself was short-lived: she intentionally overdosed on opiates imported from Bucharest, leaving open a copy of Die Leiden des jungen Werthers next to her bed. This has led scholars to wonder whether there was another woman in Meingast’s life…
I found an excerpt written by Alexandr (Shurik) Leonidovich Katz describing Meingast’s daily life in Graz: “Teaching obligations claimed two to three hours a day, in which was included the lecture on classical pedagogy that he held twice weekly at the university. His remaining work hours were reserved for reading, the setting down on paper of…
“Knowledge, for Reason, is but a passing stage. Once, through its effortful striving, it has reached knowledge of the world entire, Reason coagulates into a knowing that knows itself. Knowledge is the being of Reason, and having reached being, Reason can act no more. When nothing escapes its gaze, and every corner of the world…
Exciting news, all! I’ve located a manuscript of Meingast’s 1903 poem for children, “Entartete Entenarten.” It’s in a library in Lecce— hopefully I’ll be able to look at it this summer. I remember reading that Kolo Moser wanted to do illustrations to accompany the text. Does anyone know whether Moser actually painted anything?
He courted her in the cruelly hot summer of 1867 when he was stationed outside Linz. From a youthful diary entry: “She wanted to be expressive, yes, but her cheeks, surging with ever more pliant flesh as she lumberingly metamorphosed into what every lady of the Bildungsbürgertum must eventually become (immovable), made even wrath (she hated it when I forgot…
“One plus one will never be one. Only and forever two. But that does not diminish anything: a current only passes when there is a difference in charge.”
Meingast travelled to Amsterdam in 1885 to go to the Rijksmuseum, which had just moved into its new building (that “disorienting hodgepodge of Gothic and Renaissance elements”). No one is sure which canvas he was “watching.” A triptych/ three sitting or leaning before an aqua green, faintly mottled curtain/without creases/ a painterly imposition on reality, like the symmetry of…
“There are hordes of people today who would like us to believe that in their wisest moments they were doing their thinking with the help of some special faculty. Whether one calls it divine illumination or, in the modern fashion, merely intuition, it is a hindrance to real understanding. Nothing is to be gained by…