🌈 Stylo the evil Werunicorn 🦄"In History, stagnant waters, whether they be stagnant waters of custom or those of despotism, harbour no life; life is dependent on the ripples created by a few eccentric individuals. In homage to that life and vitality, the community has to brave certain perils and must countenance a measure of heresy. One must live dangerously if one wants to live at all."
Alexandre ChristoyannopoulosToday is 4th-year🎂 of 3rd volume of Essays on #Anarchism & #Religion co-edited with Matthew Adams:https://www.stockholmuniversitypress.se/site/books/e/10.16993/bbb/ including essays on #AbrahamHeyn, #HerbertRead, #LeoTolstoy, #DanielGuérin, #MartinBuber, #mysticism & #spiritualanarchism. Includes 1/ essay from me on #Tolstoy’s #politicalthought, 2/ co-authored intro discussing ‘#religiousness’ of political #ideologies such as #anarchism
Stockholm University Press
Stockholm University Press is an open access publisher of peer-reviewed academic journals and books. We aim to make journals and books affordable, and to enable the widest possible dissemination so that researchers around the world can find and access the information they need without barriers.In partnership with our authors and series editors, we publish in the humanities, social sciences and the natural sciences. Our main focal points are rigorous peer review, open access and global dissemination.
King MobHerbert Read on the achievements of education:
"“Docility, apathy, insensibility — these are the achievements of education in our time, and they are achieved by the suppression of individuality, sensitivity, creativity. Social conformity or convention demands a general frustration of personal instincts, the surrender to herd instincts, which then carry the individual in the ebb and flow of their aggressive attitudes. For when the individual has been deprived of his creative functions, he is ready to take part in collective destruction. And then, if he can’t have the real thing, which is war, he will indulge in fantasies of cruelty and murder, mass produced for one and all.”
#HerbertRead #education #individuality #socialconformity #creativity #apathy #war
I've been reading a great deal of Herbert Read, most recently his Politics of the Unpolitical.
One of the things I'm struck by at the moment is how Read challenges what he calls the "general desire for leadership" which we're told is the attribute that people need to develop. (I spent far too much of my time as a teacher dealing with the quotidian horror of schools' obsession with "leadership" so something about which I'm acutely sensitive.)
Read sees leadership as an aspect of the Will to Power and associated with ideas of discipline, command and obedience. He points out that when the everyday call for "better leadership" (or "efficiency" ) is made, it's actually a call for increasingly authoritarian measures and requirements of compliance. Read talks of the "evil of assertiveness" which "poisons minds with pride and ambition". He llinks leadership with bullying and tyranny.
Read calls it a "cult of leadership" and links its outcome with fascism.
Instead, Read argues that leadership is frequently confused with individual initiative ("fundamentally the impulse to originate, to construct, and, in relation to other individuals, the desire to distinguish oneself") which is something that should be seen as positive.
Read offers collective responsibility as the corrective of "leadership":
"Collective responsibility is the alternative to leadership, and the counterpart of equality. If each individual in the social body is a responsible member of that body there is no need for external control. The body acts as an organic whole, and acts spontaneously."
Read does, however, accept that "leaders" are needed by society - a somewhat Romantic notion:
"the [wo]man of imagination, the poet and philosopher above all, but equally the [wo]man who can present ideas in the visual images of painting and sculpture or through the still more effective medium of drama —the idea that it is this individual whom society should accept as its only leader."
Imagine if our leaders were really drawn from the best poets, philiosophers, artists and writers!
#HerbertRead #leadership #leaders #CollectiveResponsibility #hierarchy
Chris Bond#271 Herbert Read - A Concise History of Modern Painting. Thames and Hudson, London, 1969, 1st edition, revised and enlarged, reprint. #HerbertRead #Art #ModernArt #ArtHistory #ThamesAndHudson #BookOfTheDay
Eder"En la Historia, las aguas estancadas, sean las de la costumbre o las del despotismo, no toleran la vida; La vida depende de la agitación que realizan unos pocos individuos excéntricos.
En homenaje a esa vida, a esa vitalidad, la comunidad debe aceptar ciertos riesgos, debe admitir una porción de herejía.
Debe vivir peligrosamente si es que quiere vivir."
-Herbert Read
#Anarquismo #Anarquismo #Libertad #Felicidad #Eudaimonia #Plenitud #ApoyoMutuo #AyudaMutua #HerbertRead #Filosofia
En homenaje a esa vida, a esa vitalidad, la comunidad debe aceptar ciertos riesgos, debe admitir una porción de herejía.
Debe vivir peligrosamente si es que quiere vivir."
-Herbert Read
#Anarquismo #Anarquismo #Libertad #Felicidad #Eudaimonia #Plenitud #ApoyoMutuo #AyudaMutua #HerbertRead #Filosofia
Today is 3rd-year🎂 of 3rd volume of Essays on #Anarchism & #Religion co-edited with Matthew Adams: https://lnkd.in/eD77Vauu including essays on #AbrahamHeyn, #HerbertRead, #LeoTolstoy, #DanielGuérin, #MartinBuber, #mysticism & #spiritualanarchism.
Includes 1/ essay from me on #Tolstoy’s #politicalthought, 2/ co-authored intro discussing ‘#religiousness’ of political #ideologies such as #anarchism
Stockholm University Press
Stockholm University Press is an open access publisher of peer-reviewed academic journals and books. We aim to make journals and books affordable, and to enable the widest possible dissemination so that researchers around the world can find and access the information they need without barriers.In partnership with our authors and series editors, we publish in the humanities, social sciences and the natural sciences. Our main focal points are rigorous peer review, open access and global dissemination.
"En la Historia, las aguas estancadas, sean las de la costumbre o las del despotismo, no toleran la vida; La vida depende de la agitación que realizan unos pocos individuos excéntricos.
En homenaje a esa vida, a esa vitalidad, la comunidad debe aceptar ciertos riesgos, debe admitir una porción de herejía.
Debe vivir peligrosamente si es que quiere vivir."
-Herbert Read
#Anarquismo
#Anarquia
#HerbertRead
#VivirIntensamente
#Pasion
#Rebeldia
#Vitalidad
#Filosofia
En homenaje a esa vida, a esa vitalidad, la comunidad debe aceptar ciertos riesgos, debe admitir una porción de herejía.
Debe vivir peligrosamente si es que quiere vivir."
-Herbert Read
#Anarquismo
#Anarquia
#HerbertRead
#VivirIntensamente
#Pasion
#Rebeldia
#Vitalidad
#Filosofia
David Pierce@dunadigital
I'm not sure, but you may have in mind how, once an artist makes a new
discovery, he or she and others may just go on milking it.
This is how I understand words of #RGCollingwood in *Speculum Mentis*
(1924) that #HerbertRead quotes in *A Concise History of Modern
Painting* (1968):
> To the historian accustomed to studying the growth of scientific or
> philosophical knowledge, the history of art presents a painful and
> disquieting spectacle, for it seems normally to proceed not forwards
> but backwards. In science and philosophy successive workers in the
> same field produce, if they work ordinarily well, an advance; and a
> retrograde movement always implies some breach of continuity. But in
> art, a school once established normally deteriorates as it goes on. It
> achieves perfection in its kind with a startling burst of energy, a
> gesture too quick for the historian's eye to follow. He can never
> explain such a movement or tell us how exactly it happened. But once
> it is achieved, there is the melancholy certainty of a decline.
Odin HalvorsonWho here is a fan of Herbert Read's work and writing? For someone who was so influential in his fields, not that many people know of him, and most that do know only of his work in the field of art aesthetics (rather than his work in philosophical anarchism).
#WritingCommunity #HerbertRead #Anarchism #Aesthetic #Philosophy #Art #Politics #History @medium #Medium
