Richard Weaver

Professor of English and Rhetoric, author, thinker, Platonist.

[Richard Weaver @IdeasHC]

When a man chooses to follow something that is arbitrary as far as the uses of the world go, he’s performing a feat of abstraction; he’s recognizing the noumenal, and it’s this, and not that self-flattery which takes the form of a study of his own achievements, that dignifies him

[Richard Weaver @IdeasHC]

It is not what people can read; it is what they do read, and what they can be made, by any imaginable means, to learn from what they read, that determines the issue of this noble experiment.

[Richard Weaver @IdeasHC]

What the defenders of present civilization usually mean when they say that modern man is better educated than his forebears is that he is literate in larger numbers.

[Richard Weaver @IdeasHC]

The literacy can be demonstrated; yet we are compelled, after a hundred years of experience, to echo Nietzsche’s bitter observation: “Everyone being allowed to learn to read, ruineth in the long run not only writing but also thinking.”

[Richard Weaver @IdeasHC]

The defeat of logical realism in the great medieval debate was the crucial event in the history of Western culture; from this flowed those acts which issue now in modern decadence.

[China’s Dream of Western Confucian Journal 西儒中國夢札記 @XiRuZhaJi]

Modern Crisis: From Nominalism to Civilisational Decline

“Adaequatio realis mentis et vitae… which continues to evolve”—Garrigou-Lagrange

The triumph of nominalism over Thomistic realism in the late Middle Ages, by denying real universals and reducing them to mere names…

1/6

[Richard Weaver @IdeasHC]

For four centuries every man has been not only his own priest but his own professor of ethics, and the consequence is an anarchy which threatens even that minimum consensus of value necessary to the political state.

[Richard Weaver @IdeasHC]

There is ground for declaring that modern man has become a moral idiot. So few are those who care to examine their lives, or to accept the rebuke which comes of admitting that our present state may be a fallen state.

[China’s Dream of Western Confucian Journal 西儒中國夢札記 @XiRuZhaJi]

Modern Crisis: From Nominalism to Civilisational Decline

“Adaequatio realis mentis et vitae… which continues to evolve”—Garrigou-Lagrange

The triumph of nominalism over Thomistic realism in the late Middle Ages, by denying real universals and reducing them to mere names…

1/6

[China’s Dream of Western Confucian Journal 西儒中國夢札記 @XiRuZhaJi]

…and the broader secular consumerism that treats persons and cultures as malleable projects. As Richard Weaver observed, “The denial of universals carries with it the denial of everything transcending experience,” producing not progress but fragmentation, relativism, and…

5/6

[Scott Godwin @fitfoodgoodlife]

@The__Comedian__ @JayDyer Read Richard Weaver

[Richard Weaver @IdeasHC]

A creature designed to look before and after [man] finds that to do the latter has gone out of fashion and that to do the former is becoming impossible.

[Richard Weaver @IdeasHC]

The denial of universals carries with it the denial of everything transcending experience. The denial of everything transcending experience means inevitably—though ways are found to hedge on this—the denial of truth.

[Richard Weaver @IdeasHC]

The practical result of nominalist philosophy is to banish the reality which is perceived by the intellect and to posit as reality that which is perceived by the senses.

[Richard Weaver @IdeasHC]

With this change in the affirmation of what is real, the whole orientation of culture takes a turn, and we are on the road to modern empiricism.

[Richard Weaver @IdeasHC]

The task of the creators of culture is to furnish the molds and the frames to resist that “sinking in upon the moral being” which comes of accepting raw experience. Without the transcendental truth of mythology and metaphysics, that task is impossible.

[Richard Weaver @IdeasHC]

He is recognizing the noumenal, and it is this, and not that self-flattery which takes the form of a study of his own achievements, that dignifies him.

[Richard Weaver @IdeasHC]

When a man chooses to follow something which is arbitrary as far as the uses of the world go, he is performing a feat of abstraction.

[Richard Weaver @IdeasHC]

There can be no doubt that the enormous exertions made by the Middle Ages to preserve a common world view signified a greater awareness of realities than our leaders exhibit today.

[Richard Weaver @IdeasHC]

Not without cause has the devil been called the prince of lawyers, and not by accident are Shakespeare’s villains good reasoners. If the disposition is wrong, reason increases maleficence; if it is right, reason orders and furthers the good.

[Richard Weaver @IdeasHC]

Every man participating in a culture has three levels of conscious reflection: his specific ideas about things, his general beliefs or convictions, and his metaphysical dream of the world.

[Richard Weaver @IdeasHC]

How frequently it is brought to our attention that nothing good can be done if the will is wrong! Reason alone fails to justify itself.