Charles Baudelaire

Charles Baudelaire ca. 1863

The son of Joseph-Francois Baudelaire and Caroline Archimbaut Dufays, Charles Baudelaire was born in Paris in 1821. Baudelaire's father, who was thirty years older than his mother, died when the poet was six. Baudelaire was very close with his mother (much of what is known of his later life comes from the letters he wrote her), but was deeply distressed when she married Major Jacques Aupick. In 1833, the family moved to Lyons where Baudelaire attended a military boarding school. Shortly before graduation, he was kicked out for refusing to give up a note passed to him by a classmate. Baudelaire spent the next two years in Paris' Latin Quarter pursuing a career as a writer and accumulating debt. It is also believed that he contracted syphilis around this time.

In 1857, Auguste Poulet-Malassis published the first edition of Les Fleurs du mal. Baudelaire was so concerned with the quality of the printing that he took a room near the press to help supervise the book's production. Six of the poems, which described lesbian love and vampires, were condemned as obscene by the Public Safety section of the Ministry of the Interior. The ban on these poems was not lifted in France until 1949. In 1861, Baudelaire added thirty-five new poems to the collection. Les Fleurs du mal afforded Baudelaire a degree of notoriety; writers such as Gustave Flaubert and Victor Hugo wrote in praise of the poems. Flaubert wrote to Baudelaire claiming, "You have found a way to inject new life into Romanticism. You are unlike anyone else [which is the most important quality]." Unlike earlier Romantics, Baudelaire looked to the urban life of Paris for inspiration. He argued that art must create beauty from even the most depraved or "non-poetic" situations.

Les Fleurs du mal 

The first edition of Les Fleurs du mal with author's notes.

"You know that I have always considered that literature and the arts pursue an aim independent of morality. Beauty of conception and style is enough for me. But this book, whose title (Fleurs du mal) says everything, is clad, as you will see, in a cold and sinister beauty. It was created with rage and patience. Besides, the proof of its positive worth is in all the ill that they speak of it. The book enrages people. Moreover, since I was terrified myself of the horror that I should inspire, I cut out a third from the proofs. They deny me everything, the spirit of invention and even the knowledge of the French language. I don't care a rap about all these imbeciles, and I know that this book, with its virtues and its faults, will make its way in the memory of the lettered public, beside the best poems of V. Hugo, Th. Gautier and even Byron."

Victor Hugo wrote to him: "Your fleurs du mal shine and dazzle like stars... I applaud your vigorous spirit with all my might".

The Painter of Modern Life

• Beauty

"Beauty is made up of an eternal, invariable element, whose quantity it is excessively difficult to determine, and of a relative, circumstantial element, which will be, if you like, whether severally of all at once, the age tis fashions, its morals, its emotions."

• Modernity 

"By modernity I mean the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent" (Baudelaire 1964, 13). Advancing technological innovation, affecting artistic technique and the means of manufacture, changed rapidly the possibilities of art and its status in a rapidly changing society. Photography challenged the place of the painter and painting. Architecture was transformed by the availability of steel for structures.

Philosophy 

• Love

"There is an invincible taste for prostitution in the heart of man, from which comes his horror of solitude. He wants to be 'two'. The man of genius wants to be 'one'... It is this horror of solitude, the need to lose oneself in the external flesh, that man nobly calls 'the need to love."

•  Marriage

"Unable to suppress love, the Church wanted at least to disinfect it, and it created marriage."

•  The artist

"The more a man cultivates the arts, the less randy he becomes... Only the brute is good at coupling, and copulation is the lyricism of the masses. To copulate is to enter into another–and the artist never emerges from himself."
"Style is character."

•  Pleasure

"Personally, I think that the unique and supreme delight lies in the certainty of doing 'evil'–and men and women know from birth that all pleasure lies in evil."

• Politics

Along with Poe, Baudelaire named the arch-reactionary Joseph de Maistre as his maître à penser and adopted increasingly aristocratic views. In his journals, he wrote "There is no form of rational and assured government save an aristocracy. A monarchy or a republic, based upon democracy, are equally absurd and feeble. The immense nausea of advertisements. There are but three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the warrior and the poet. To know, to kill and to create. The rest of mankind may be taxed and drudged, they are born for the stable, that is to say, to practise what they call professions."

http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/607
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Baudelaire

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), English lyrical poet, critic, and philosopher, whose Lyrical Ballads,(1798) written with William Wordsworth, started the English Romantic movement.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born in Ottery St Mary, Devonshire, as the youngest son of the vicar of Ottery St Mary. After his father's death Coleridge was sent away to Christ's Hospital School in London. He also studied at Jesus College. In Cambridge Coleridge met the radical, future poet laureate Robert Southey. He moved with Southey to Bristol to establish a community, but the plan failed. In 1795 he married the sister of Southey's fiancée Sara Fricker, whom he did not really love.

In 1795 Coleridge befriended William Wordsworth, who greatly influenced Coleridge's verse. Coleridge, whose early work was celebratory and conventional, began writing in a more natural style. In his "conversation poems," such as "The Eolian Harp" and "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison," Coleridge used his intimate friends and their experiences as subjects. The following year, Coleridge published his first volume of poetry, Poems on Various Subjects, and began the first of ten issues of a liberal political publication entitled The Watchman. From 1797 to 1798 he lived near Wordsworth and his sister, Dorothy, in Somersetshire. In 1798 the two men collaborated on a joint volume of poetry entitled Lyrical Ballads. The collection is considered the first great work of the Romantic school of poetry and contains Coleridge's famous poem, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner."

That autumn the two poets traveled to the Continent together. Coleridge spent most of the trip in Germany, studying the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, Jakob Boehme, and G.E. Lessing. While there he mastered the German language and began translating. When he returned to England in 1800, he settled with family and friends at Keswick. Over the next two decades Coleridge lectured on literature and philosophy, wrote about religious and political theory, spent two years on the island of Malta as a secretary to the governor in an effort to overcome his poor health and his opium addiction, and lived off of financial donations and grants. Still addicted to opium, he moved in with the physician James Gillman in 1816. In 1817, he publishedBiographia Literaria, which contained his finest literary criticism. He continued to publish poetry and prose, notably Sibylline Leaves (1817),Aids to Reflection (1825), and Church and State (1830). He died in London on July 25, 1834.


http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/292

Samuel Johnson

http://justus.anglican.org/resources/bio/20.html
Next only to William Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson is perhaps the most quoted of English writers. The latter part of the eighteenth century is often (in English-speaking countries, of course) called, simply, the Age of Johnson.

The essays in the Rambler, although many of them are explicitly moralistic, are almost never explicitly Christian, or even religious. Yet there is no doubt that Johnson intended them to serve a Christian purpose. Before writing them, he offered the following prayer:

Almighty God... without whose grace all wisdom is folly, grant, I beseech Thee, that in this my undertaking thy Holy Spirit may not be withheld from me, but that I may promote thy glory, and the Salvation both of myself and others.

Why, then, did he not write openly about Christ in the Rambler, or for that matter in the Vanity? For the Vanity, a short answer is that he wrote his poem as an "imitation" of the Tenth Satire of Juvenal, and that he is constrained thereby to follow the form of that Satire. More generally, we may say that he considers his work to be, not the preaching of the Gospel, but the preparing of men for hearing the Gospel preached by another. A man who has been persuaded that without Divine Help he cannot be virtuous, and that without virtue he cannot be truly happy, is ready to hear the offer of Divine Help when it is preached. The Law, says the Apostle Paul, is a pedagogue to bring us to Christ. Johnson thought of himself in these writings as such a pedagogue.
Why did he choose the role of pedagogue rather than evangelist? One reason is an overwhelming dread of having others examine his character and actions to see whether he practiced what he preached. He knew that a minister of the Gospel who preaches, "Blessed are the poor," and lives like a millionaire, or one who preaches chastity and is discovered in adultery, brings the Faith into contempt, and he was dreadfully afraid of bringing the Faith into contempt. He was innocent of adultery and of living luxuriously, but he could not write moral advice without being reminded of his own shortcomings. What some critics have called "one of the finest short discussions in English of idleness and procrastination" (Rambler, Number 134) was written by Johnson in great haste while the printer's boy waited to snatch up the copy and speed it to the press. He would therefore write Christian sermons, but only if he could do so anonymously.
Johnson wrote a series of sermons for his friend John Taylor. One of them deals with trust in God. Trust in God is en essential part of the Christian life. But suppose that a man does not feel trust. Ought he to try to deceive himself into thinking that he does feel it? Ought he to try to manufacture feelings of trust by sheer will-power? Johnson's answer is that he ought to behave as if he did trust God, and that means obeying God. He who obeys will find sooner or later that he does trust.

"This constant and devout practice is both the effect, and Cause, of confidence in God. Trust in God is to be obtained only by repentance, obedience, and supplication, not by nourishing in our hearts a confused idea of the goodness of God, or a firm persuasion that we are in a state of grace."

A problem for Johnson was that, although he had no trouble seeing that his attitude toward God ought to be one of trust and dependency, his constant struggle since infancy with his physical disabilities had instilled in him a strong habit of self-reliance and rejection of help from others. Habit and theory were thus at constant war.
He also found it difficult to participate in public worship, especially when it involved sermons, since he often knew more about the sermon subject than the preacher, and had to resist the impulse to contradict him. Public prayer was less of a difficulty, and private prayer still less. The followin is taken from his diary. (It should perhaps be explained that "scruples" is sometimes used to refer to a state of mind in which one feels incapacitating guilt over matters that it is not in one's power to alter. Being free of scruples in this sense does not mean being a scoundrel.)

O Lord, who wouldst that all men should be saved, and who Knowest that without thy grace we can do nothing acceptable to thee, have mercy upon me. Enable me to break the chain of my sins, to reject sensuality in word and thought, and to overcome and suppress vain scruples; and to use such diligence in lawful employment as may enable me to support myself and do good to others. O Lord, forgive me the time lost in idleness; pardon the sins which I have committed, and grant that I may redeem the time misspent, and be reconciled to thee by true repentance, that I may live and die in peace, and be received to everlasting happiness. Take not from me, O Lord, thy Holy Spirit, but let me have support and comfort for Jesus Christ's sake. Amen.

Meanwhile, he wrote Essays for the Rambler about human motives, about self-deception, the "treachery of the human heart," the ways in which we evade the knowledge of what we ought to do, and about some specific duties that we need to be reminded of.

Some short extracts from the essays are:

• We are more pained by ignorance than delighted by instruction.
• The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.
• Men more frequently require to be reminded than informed.
• The safe and general antidote against sorrow is employment.
• Merit rather enforces respect than attracts fondness.
• Many need no other provocation to enmity than that they find themselves excelled.
• The vanity of being known to be entrusted with a secret is generally one of the chief motives to disclose it.
• Among other pleasing errors of young minds is the opinion of their own importance. He that has not yet remarked, how little attention his contemporaries can spare from themselves, conceives all eyes turned upon himself, and imagines everyone that approaches him to be an enemy or a follower, an admirer or a spy.
• The cure for the greatest part of human miseries is not radical, but palliative.
• Whatever is proposed, it is much easier to find reasons for rejecting than embracing.
• Ease, a neutral state between pain and pleasure...if it is not rising into pleasure will be falling towards pain.
• Almost every man has some real or imaginary connection with a celebrated character.
• Discord generally operates in little things; it is inflamed...by contrariety of taste oftener than principles.
• So willing is every man to flatter himself, that the difference between approving laws, and obeying them, is frequently forgotten; he that acknowledges the obligations of morality and pleases his vanity with enforcing them to others, concludes himself zealous in the cause of virtue.
• We have less reason to be surprised or offended when we find others differ from us in opinion, because we very often differ from ourselves.
• All censure of a man's self is oblique praise. It is in order to show how much he can spare. It has all the invidiousness of self-praise, and all the reproach of falsehood.
• Such is our desire of abstraction from ourselves, that very few are satisfied with the quantity of stupefaction which the needs of the body force upon the mind. Alexander himself added intemperance to sleep, and solaced with the fumes of wine the sovereignty of the world. And almost every man has some art, by which he steals his thought away from his present state.
• I would injure no man, and should provoke no resentment. I would relieve every distress, and should enjoy the benedictions of gratitude. I would choose my friends among the wise and my wife among the virtuous, and therefore should be in no danger from treachery or unkindness. My children should by my care be learned and pious, and would repay to my age what their childhood had received.

Dante "The Letter to Can Grande"

Dante's Letter to Can Grande della Scala About Allegory

Note from William Fredlund: In the following letter Dante explains his ideas about allegory to his friend and host in Verona, Can Grande della Scala.

The meaning of this work is not simple. . . for we obtain one meaning from the letter of it and another from that which the letter signifies; and the first is called the literal, but the other allegorical or mystical. And to make this matter of treatment clearer, it may be studied in the verse: "When Israel came out of Egypt and the House of Jacob from among a strange people, Judah was his sanctuary and Israel his dominion." For if we regard the letter alone, what is set before us is the exodus of the Children of Israel from Egypt in the days of Moses; if the allegory, our redemption wrought by Christ; if the moral sense, we are shown the conversion of the soul from the grief and wretchedness of sin to the state of grace; if the anagogical, we are shown the departure of the holy soul from the thralldom of this corruption to the liberty of eternal glory. And although these mystical meanings are called by various names, they may all be called in general allegorical, since they differ from the literal and historical. The subject of the whole work, then, taken merely in the literal sense is "the state of the soul after death straightforwardly affirmed," for the development of the whole work hinges on and about that. But if, indeed, the work is taken allegorically, its subject is: "Man, as by good or ill deserts, in the exercise of his free choice, he becomes liable to rewarding or punishing Justice."

Dante shows us that we can interpret the passage first as simple literal or in this case historical fact: the Jews came out of Egypt. Or in other allegorical ways and he lists three ways which can be applied to a reading of the Divine Comedy.


By: http://www.westernciv.com/greatminds/dante/danteallegory.shtml

Moses Maimonides

Moses Maimonides, original name Moses Ben Maimon, also called Rambam, Arabic name Abū ʿImran Mūsā ibn Maymūn ibn ʿUbayd Allāh   (born March 30, 1135, Córdoba [Spain]—died Dec. 13, 1204, Egypt), Jewish philosopher, jurist, and physician, the foremost intellectual figure of medieval Judaism. His first major work, begun at age 23 and completed 10 years later, was a commentary on the Mishna, the collected Jewish oral laws. A monumental code of Jewish law followed in Hebrew, The Guide for the Perplexed in Arabic, and numerous other works, many of major importance. His contributions in religion, philosophy, and medicine have influenced Jewish and non-Jewish scholars alike.

Works                      

The writings of Maimonides were numerous and varied. His earliest work, composed in Arabic at the age of 16, was the Millot ha-Higgayon (“Treatise on Logical Terminology”), a study of various technical terms that were employed in logic and metaphysics. Another of his early works, also in Arabic, was the “Essay on the Calendar” (Hebrew title: Maʾamar haʿibur).

The first of Maimonides’ major works, begun at the age of 23, was his commentary on the Mishna, Kitāb al-Sirāj, also written in Arabic. The Mishna is a compendium of decisions in Jewish law that dates from earliest times to the 3rd century. Maimonides’ commentary clarified individual words and phrases, frequently citing relevant information in archaeology, theology, or science. Possibly the work’s most striking future is a series of introductory essays dealing with general philosophic issues touched on in the Mishna. One of these essays summarizes the teachings of Judaism in a creed of Thirteen Articles of Faith.

He completed the commentary on the Mishna at the age of 33, after which he began his magnum opus, the code of Jewish law, on which he also laboured for 10 years. Bearing the name of Mishne Torah (“The Torah Reviewed”) and written in a lucid Hebrew style, the code offers a brilliant systematization of all Jewish law and doctrine. He wrote two other works in Jewish law of lesser scope: the Sefer ha-mitzwot (Book of Precepts), a digest of law for the less sophisticated reader, written in Arabic; and the Hilkhot ha-Yerushalmi (“Laws of Jerusalem”), a digest of the laws in the Palestinian Talmud, written in Hebrew.

His next major work, which he began in 1176 and on which he laboured for 15 years, was his classic in religious philosophy, the Dalālat al-ḥāʾirīn(The Guide for the Perplexed), later known under its Hebrew title as the Moreh nevukhim. A plea for what he called a more rational philosophy of Judaism, it constituted a major contribution to the accommodation between science, philosophy, and religion. It was written in Arabic and sent as a private communication to his favourite disciple, Joseph ibn Aknin. The work was translated into Hebrew in Maimonides’ lifetime and later into Latin and most European languages. It has exerted a marked influence on the history of religious thought.

Maimonides also wrote a number of minor works, occasional essays dealing with current problems that faced the Jewish community, and he maintained an extensive correspondence with scholars, students, and community leaders. Among his minor works those considered to be most important are Iggert Teman (Epistle to Yemen), Iggeret ha-shemad or Maʾamar Qiddush ha-Shem (“Letter on Apostasy”), and Iggeret le-qahal Marsilia (“Letter on Astrology,” or, literally, “Letter to the Community of Marseille”). He also wrote a number of works dealing with medicine, including a popular miscellany of health rules, which he dedicated to the sultan, al-Afḍal. A mid-20th-century historian, Waldemar Schweisheimer, has said of Maimonides’ medical writings: “Maimonides’ medical teachings are not antiquated at all. His writings, in fact, are in some respects astonishingly modern in tone and contents.”

Significance                       

Maimonides’ advanced views aroused opposition during his lifetime and after his death. In 1233 one zealot, Rabbi Solomon of Montpellier, in southern France, instigated the church authorities to burn The Guide for the Perplexed as a dangerously heretical book. But the controversy abated after some time, and Maimonides came to be recognized as a pillar of the traditional faith—his creed became part of the orthodox liturgy—as well as the greatest of the Jewish philosophers.

Maimonides’ epoch-making influence on Judaism extended also to the larger world. His philosophic work, translated into Latin, influenced the great medieval Scholastic writers, and even later thinkers, such as Benedict de Spinoza and G.W. Leibniz, found in his work a source for some of their ideas. His medical writings constitute a significant chapter in the history of medical science.

Primary Contributor: Rabbi Ben Zion Bokser

Horace--Ars Poetica

        Horace is a conservative, traditional literary critic. His Ars Poetica, which takes the form of advice given to a young man named Piso on the writing of poetry, breaks no new ground in relation to the ideas of Plato and Aristotle. His advice centers on sticking to traditional forms (Greek forms of the 5th/4th centuries BCE):

1) It is better to follow a traditional story than to invent a new one.

2) The attention of the audience is best kept by character traits fitted to the age (a youth should not be given the traits appropriate to age, and a mature man should not be given the traits appropriate to youth). This is straight out of Aristotle.

3) Lurid scenes--such as Medea slaying her boys, or Atreus cooking human flesh--should not be performed but rather saved for narration.

4) A play should be no longer or shorter than five acts.

5) The chorus--a device of the Greek drama--should side with that which is good and right.

6) Gods and heroes should not be presented in satyr plays as fallen to the common talk of "some dingy tavern." A modified Plato anyone?

7) Good writing reflects good thinking. This is currently considered heresy by the Comp-Rhet powers-that-be in academia. He's right. They're wrong.

8) A poet's aim may be amusement, instruction, or both; however, the best work will combine both aims in an advantageous proportion.

9) Instruction should be brief: "Every word that is unnecessary only pours over the side of the brimming mind."

10) Fictions need to keep as near as possible to real life. This reflects the Aristotelian emphasis on the necessity of probability in the incidents of plot. Science Fiction is out for Horace.

11) The best poet "has mingled profit with pleasure by delighting the reader at once and instructing him." This idea is still with us, and likely always will be.

12) The poet (in this case Piso) should submit his new verses to a trusted critic, not a flatterer, and never publish verses hastily. Once they are out there, there is no taking them back. Essentially this boils down to a sensible admonition to not leave your poetic ass hanging out in the breeze of the town square. Good idea.

13) The hasty, unskilled, "rapt" poet is the "terror of all sensible people: they fly at his approach." This section is hilarious: a bad poet will be left in the hole into which he has fallen, and people run from him in fear lest he read them some of his doggerel. "Run for your lives! It's POETBOY!!!!!!!"

http://www.brysons.net/academic/horace.html

Aristotle's Critical Response

As the student of Plato, Aristotle disagrees with much else what Plato said, but that art was essentially an Mimesis. However, he mentioned that good art was neither dangerous nor useless, but rather natural and beneficial.

3 Rejection: Plato's dualism, Plato's Rationalism, and Mimesis=Mirroring(Imagination) Nature--Unlike mirroring, these are acts of intellect.

Plato's View at Art

Art is Essentially Mimesis
1. art was useless:
a. it serves no useful purpose in society.
b. as a "imitation of nature" it added no knowledge. (no intellectual value)
*the same value could be added by simply by holding up a mirror to the world which would be far less costly.
c. according his metaphysics, art is an imitation of  an imitation, thus barely real at all.

Art was potentially dangerous for several reasons:

2. Art was essentially deceptive.
a.  the whole aim of art was to deceive. Success was achieved when the spectator mistook an imitation for reality.
b. Furthermore, artists were unconcerned with facts/ truth. It made no difference to artists nor to the success of their works whether the images or stories they depict were real or their messages true or good.

3. Art was mainly concerned with sensual pleasure.
a. Art seems directed entirely towards pleasing the senses and ignoring the mind, intellect, or concepts.
* Platonic Mind/Body Dualism---- our bodies are the least valuable, least permanent, least "real" aspects    of our personalities.
* Plato's Rationalism---- our senses are incapable of providing us with genuine knowledge since they only gather impressions from an ever changing physical world but not immaterial/ invisible forces which guide, direct and sustain the physical world.
Thus our senses and, consequently, art are "metaphysically" misguided since it is directed towards illusion and not "reality." Further, Art serves to perpetuate and sustain this misdirection, keeping us ignorant of truth, justice, goodness and "real" beauty.
b. Art was mainly concerned with sensual pleasure.
* "Allegory of the Cave"
c. Art is psychologically de-stabilizing.
* "Poetry feeds and waters the passions instead of drying them up; she lets them rule, although they ought to be controlled, if mankind are ever to increase in happiness and virtue".
d. Art leads to immorality.
1) Art was unconcerned with morality, sometimes even teaching immoral lessons.  Morality, it would seem, has nothing to do with a work's success as art.
2) Plato worries that such art would encourage immorality in the citizens of this state.
e. Art was politically dangerous, a threat to the common good.

https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:cqbBVE2yzw8J:www2.fiu.edu/~hauptli/TheMimeticTheoryofArt.ppt+plato's+views+on+art&hl=en&gl=us&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESiHZN74fm5BUNSowlk0ZUjFUvtgUpgYzxKdZUph3_gchNKruOTGnkU--QALpoMUHPy-q6Vk4eBXTD9DRd_asXdUdNzQUwYU7FZbYV-C-ewBbP5bPMMo1-QwdkTeKkgh20a2l4p7&sig=AHIEtbR1PmUyTJjRt0Pj-inWImbIuq2nXw