The freedom rampant in the West, which it wants to export, [contemporary Russian writer Alexander] Dugin sees, is only a freedom from some constraint or other. It has no positive value; it is not freedom for some purpose or goal. As Nietzsche said, “many lost what was best in them when they lost their chains,” meaning that without an aim or purpose, freedom is merely license—or, as existentialists like Jean-Paul Sartre saw, a burden.
“Where every man is a sharer in the direction of his ward-republic … and feels that he is participator in the government of affairs, not merely at an election one day in the year, but every day … he will let the heart be torn out of his body sooner than his power be wrested from him by a Caesar or Bonaparte.”---Thomas Jefferson
Unlike the class of the intellectuals, who offer their services either to the state as experts, specialists, and officials, or to society for diversion and instruction, the hommes de lettres always strove to keep aloof from both the state and society. Their material existence was based on income without work, and their intellectual attitude rested upon their resolute refusal to be integrated politically or socially. On the basis of this dual independence they could afford that attitude of superior disdain which gave rise to La Rochefoucauld’s contemptuous insights into human behavior, the worldly wisdom of Montaigne, the aphoristic trenchancy of Pascal’s thought, the boldness and open-mindedness of Montesquieu’s political reflections. It cannot be my task here to discuss the circumstances which eventually turned the hommes de lettres into revolutionaries in the eighteenth century nor the way in which their successors in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries split into the class of the “cultured” on the one hand and of the professional revolutionaries on the other.
“Newton could hold a problem in his mind for hours and days and weeks until it surrendered to him its secret. Then being a supreme mathematical technician he could dress it up, how you will, for purposes of exposition, but it was his intuition which was pre-eminently extraordinary….The proofs, for what they are worth, were, as I have said, dressed up afterwards—they were not the instrument of discovery.”--John Maynard Keynes
Then he asks me if I’ve ever heard of George Catlin. Indeed I had; lately, Catlin has had a bit of a resurgence among a certain breed of biohackers who look to evolution for answers to human health. Born in 1796, Catlin was a renowned explorer, painter and ethnographer who spent much of his life traveling among indigenous tribes of North and South America. He traveled with William Clark (of Lewis and Clark) on explorations of the Missouri River and had the opportunity to meet tribes and communities who had never encountered white men before. Toward the end of his career, Catlin began to wonder why it was that nearly all of the tribes he encountered had incredibly low instances of chronic diseases.
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