№3499517[Quote]
The Baroque has often been contrasted with the Enlightenment and presented as a kind of proto-Romanticism because of its highly emotional and Catholic character, with its curving cathedrals, dramatic paintings, Scholastic philosophy, and tragic literature.
However, I do not think this is true at all. Whereas the Enlightenment falls into the idealism of believing that it can discover the truth of the world through empirical science, appealing to an idealized Greco-Roman past-that is, the usual neoclassicism-Comte and French positivism are perhaps the clearest examples of this idealism, which seeks to attribute impossible powers to human reason. Romanticism is even more subjective than the Enlightenment, believing that the world can be understood through a form of mystical self-transcendence. This can be seen in authors such as Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, as well as in an entirely essentialist worldview exemplified by thinkers like Hegel and Herder.
The Baroque, by contrast, is a highly moderate intellectual current. The Baroque spirit represents humanity's disenchantment after having idealized reality during the Renaissance, with all its mystical Neoplatonic grandeur. It abandons the aspiration to know the world in its entirety and accepts Aristotelian categories as a sufficient method for understanding a reality that ultimately surpasses us. Man becomes disillusioned and no longer seeks to transform himself into a heroic figure, as the Romantics did, but instead strives to live his life in the most pragmatic way possible.
Hence Cervantes' ridicule of idealists through the figure of Don Quixote, a man who-much like the Germans, French, and British centuries later-attempted to live as a heroic knight from a fairy tale when in reality he inhabited a secular, austere world governed by the marketplace, the palace, and the temple. A world in which there are no maidens or witches, but rather women who may be both loving mothers and disreputable prostitutes; feudal lords who fall far short of the Christian ideal of the just ruler; and peasants endowed with greater intellectual gifts than many men born into noble lineages.
Baltasar Gracian, in The Criticon, goes even further. He presents, on the one hand, the natural world created by God, and on the other, the human world-dirty and corrupt, yet nevertheless the world in which we are destined to live by virtue of our human condition. As Aristotle said, "Man is by nature a social animal, and he who lives outside society by choice is either a beast or a god." This statement is revealing, for it implicitly denies any possibility of living apart from reality itself, as many Romantics and idealists sought to do.
In sum, the Baroque represents humanity's disenchantment and its attempt to live a life grounded in reality, something fundamentally different from the idealism of both Romanticism and the Enlightenment.
From Don Quijote last words: Forgive me, my friend, for having given you occasion to seem as mad as I was, by leading you into the same error into which I fell: believing that there once were, and still are, knights-errant in the world. Let us go on slowly, for the birds that nested there in years gone by are no longer there today. I was mad, and now I am sane; I was Don Quixote of La Mancha, and now I am, as I have said, Alonso Quijano the Good.
№3499560[Quote]
Wow, very well said. I really need to read Don Quixote.
№3499591[Quote]
Digital books are barely readable compared to physical ones because of the format. Would be nice if somephono made an app that turns books into imageboard threads where each page is a reppey.
№3499659[Quote]
>>3499591>Digital books are barely readableYou tell me, I have been pressed to use them because I waste money buying physical books. I prefer the smell of a new book, the paper tact, the decoration, etc. Lecture is not just the text but the book as a whole.
№3499674[Quote]
>>3499560I would also recommend some of Cervantes' lesser-known works, which are just as subversive of the Greco-Roman model and likewise grounded in his realist, tragicomic and tragic type, yet still leave the door open to hope.
The first is The Works of Persiles and Sigismunda, Cervantes' masterpiece in his own estimation and his favorite among his works, a love novel belonging to the Byzantine romance genre.
The second is The Numantia (The Siege of Numantia), which deals with the Roman siege of Numantia. It is a transgressive work because it is one of the first literary works to remove God and fate from the equation, while centering not on nobles or heroes but on ordinary people; something highly unusual in the literature of the period.
№3499683[Quote]
>>3499591True, I might just use a printer to print out the pdf so its more readable.
№3499798[Quote]
>>3499761I think Segismundo's soliloquy is a kind of rambling as a way to cope with his condition as a prisoner; the man does not begin to think about transcendental matters until he is up against the wall, as a way of internalizing his situation.
The fact is that he was still a prisoner.
You know, the atheist start praying to God when the plane begins to fall, etc.