Fragments
Karl Barth, ‘The problem of ethics today’:
‘What are we supposed to do?’ is the question that is asked here. This ‘what’ directs itself aggressively and corrosively; it hollows out the entire portfolio of that which we did yesterday and what we will do tomorrow; it lays everything on the scale.
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Hannah Arendt, ‘Introduction into Politics’:
The loss of standards, which does indeed define the modern world in its facticity and cannot be reversed by any sort of return to the good old days or by some arbitrary promulgation of new standards and values, is therefore a catastrophe in the moral world only if one assumes that people are actually incapable of judging things per se, that their faculty of judgment is inadequate for making original judgments, and that the most we can demand of it is the correct application of familiar rules derived from already established standards.
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Bertolt Brecht, ‘And in your country?’:
He who speaks untruths is borne in triumph through the crowds
Whereas he who speaks the truth
Needs a company of bodyguards
But will find none.
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Theodor Adorno, Problems of Moral Philosophy:
we may not know what absolute good is or the absolute norm, we may not even know what man is or the human or humanity – but what the inhuman is we know very well indeed. I would say that the place of moral philosophy today lies more in the concrete denunciation of the inhuman, than in vague and abstract attempts to situate man in his existence.
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Eugenio Montale, ‘Cuttlefish bones’:
Don't ask us for the word to frame
our shapeless spirit on all sides,
and proclaim it in letters of fire to shine
like a lone crocus in a dusty field.
Ah, the man who walks secure,
a friend to others and himself,
indifferent that high summer prints
his shadow on a peeling wall!
Don't ask us for the phrase that can open worlds,
just a few gnarled syllables, dry like a branch.
This, today, is all that we can tell you:
what we are not, what we do not want
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Paul Valéry, History and Politics:
Everything now conspires against the chances of creating what might be, or rather might have been, noblest and most beautiful. How can this be?