Arthur Melzer

Quotes From

“Rousseau and the Modern Cult of Sincerity” (1995)

• What piety is for St. Augustine, what contemplation is for Plato, sincerity is for Rousseau. It is the unique means through which we draw closer to Being and make ourselves most real.#

Philosophy Between the Lines (2014)

• If modern scholars thought more like wily peasants, they would be less resistant to the essential truth that there is always more freedom in the world than the compliant surface of things would lead one to suppose. Thus, the true history of human reason is of necessity a secret history: when the practice of philosophic secrecy is once seen, then the faculty of human reason no longer appears quite as servile and culture-bound as it inevitably does to us.#
• If the world is originally well ordered, then God is needed to explain that order. And if it is incurably disordered, then God is needed to save us from that disorder. Only if life is originally bad but fixable through human effort is it the case that God is neither a necessary hypothesis nor a fundamental need.#
• In traditional society, it was common to ask, “can an atheist be an honest man?”; in modern society, the question has become “can a believer be a tolerant man?” Just as the former society demands unity and strength of belief, so the latter tends to demand pluralism and skepticism.#
• Reason is set in motion by the awareness of arbitrariness out contingency. It is driven to wonder at and to question everything accidental and ungrounded—driven to seek the cause, the explanation, the underlying necessity…. But custom if precisely the power to bestow on the contingent the appearance of necessity. It makes us feel that what is and has been must be, that it simply cannot be otherwise. #
• What it means, on the deepest level, for a society to be “traditional” is not merely that its subjects happen to follow old habits and customs, but that, on some level, they understand themselves to be fallen from the originary fullness of the world, from the divine era; that they live in remembrance and repentance, in hunger for the past.#
• Classical philosophy was defined against nonphilosophic life and the realm of commonsense “opinion” out of which it emerged. Modern philosophy, by contrast, is defined against an existing false philosophy, against scholasticism, and so has a far more academic and historically contingent character.#