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Like <i>Hamlet,</i> Goethe's <i>Faust</i> offers a wide panorama of scenes from the vulgar to the sublime, with passages of wondrous poetry that can … - Daniel J. Boorstin
" "Like Hamlet, Goethe's Faust offers a wide panorama of scenes from the vulgar to the sublime, with passages of wondrous poetry that can be sensed even through the veil of translation. And it also preserves the iridescence of its modern theme. From it Oswald Spengler christened our Western culture 'Faustian,' and others too have found it an unexcelled metaphor for the infinitely aspiring always dissatisfied modern self.
Goethe himself was wary of simple explanations. When his friends accused him of incompetence in metaphysics, he replied. 'I, being an artist, regard this as of little moment. Indeed, I prefer that the principle from which and through which I work should be hidden from me.
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About Daniel J. Boorstin
Daniel J. Boorstin (1 October 1914 – 28 February 2004) was an American historian, professor, attorney, and author. He served as the director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in 1969-1973 and was the Librarian of Congress from 1975 to 1987. His book trilogy, The Americans: The Colonial Experience, The National Experience, and The Democratic Experience received the Bancroft Prize, the Pulitzer Prize, and the Francis Parkman Prize. In 1989, the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters was bestowed upon him.
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Also Known As
Native Name:
Daniel Joseph Boorstin
Alternative Names:
Daniel Boorstin
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Additional quotes by Daniel J. Boorstin
Progress, for Comte, unlike Condorcet, is not indefinite, but continuous. And there is no room for surprise or the whims of personal liberty. It was no wonder, then, that the doctrines of Enlightenment and social science, touted to liberate man from the tyranny of the priesthood, would soon establish their own tyranny. Comte and his successors could not imagine that their gospel of progress might prove as ephemeral as the fictions of theologians or the abstractions of metaphysicians.
MY hero is Man the Discoverer. The world we now view from the literate West — the vistas of time, the land and the seas, the heavenly bodies and our own bodies, the plants and animals, history and human societies past and present — had to be opened for us by countless Columbuses. In the deep recesses of the past, they remain anonymous. As we come closer to the present they emerge into the light of history, a cast of characters as varied as human nature. Discoveries become episodes of biography, unpredictable as the new worlds the discoverers opened to us. The obstacles to discovery — the illusions of knowledge — are also part of our story. Only against the forgotten backdrop of the received common sense and myths of their
Our attitude toward our own culture has recently been characterized by two qualities, braggadocio and petulance. Braggadocio —- empty boasting of American power, American virtue, American know-how —- has dominated our foreign relations now for some decades. ... Here at home —- within the family, so to speak —- our attitude to our culture expresses a superficially different spirit, the spirit of petulance. Never before, perhaps, has a culture been so fragmented into groups, each full of its own virtue, each annoyed and irritated at the others.
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