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The University Bookman on John Lukacs: Essays and reviews from fifty years (The University Bookman Collections) QUOTES

The University Bookman on John Lukacs: Essays and reviews from fifty years (The University Bookman Collections) QUOTES

1 " history is not social science but an unavoidable form of thought.” While the name of Augustine does not appear in the chapter from which these quotations come, the Augustinian spirit nevertheless haunts it. History is memory and memory is history. To cultivate the historical sense is to nourish memory as the highest of all disciplines, as a calling; it is to participate in the past and so also to influence (but never, of course, to predispose) the future. One can see why Barfield appeals to Lukacs. As the being called Meggid says to the initially bewildered Mr. Burgeon in Barfield’s Unancestral Voice, “Interior is anterior.” Barfield, too, is an Augustinian who sees that mentalité sans memoir leaves only animal existence—something tyrannized by the immediacy of the environment—while in rich recall an individual’s conscious being graduates into its own redoubled richness. "

― John Lukacs , The University Bookman on John Lukacs: Essays and reviews from fifty years (The University Bookman Collections)

2 " The lesson that Lukacs takes from his own lifelong study of history is that the human chronicle does not unfold in the shape of a deterministic reflex but that consciousness invariably alters that on which it is brought to bear. "

― John Lukacs , The University Bookman on John Lukacs: Essays and reviews from fifty years (The University Bookman Collections)

3 " Barfield, too, is an Augustinian who sees that mentalité sans memoir leaves only animal existence—something tyrannized by the immediacy of the environment—while in rich recall an individual’s conscious being graduates into its own redoubled richness. “Human understanding is a matter of quality,” Lukacs writes, and it thus “differs from the scientific purpose of certainty and accuracy. "

― John Lukacs , The University Bookman on John Lukacs: Essays and reviews from fifty years (The University Bookman Collections)

4 " Concerning the special “quality” of historical thinking, as Lukacs convincingly asserts, it “is neither objective nor subjective but personal and participant.” In this way it abrogates the dogmatic bifurcation into subject and object proclaimed by the long dominant Cartesian epistemology and helps repair what has been, in a real sense, a delusion. "

― John Lukacs , The University Bookman on John Lukacs: Essays and reviews from fifty years (The University Bookman Collections)

5 " in the study of history: because the main material of history is words, and because words are always imbued by some small ambiguity, objectifying historians declared that history was nothing but ambiguity, words without recoverable referents. As Lukacs says, this claim rendered history inaccessible, like the Kantian Ding an Sich, and denied the participatory element in historical investigation. Such a view offends against basic human experience, which is suffused by memory. Common sense is right when it reminds the dogmatist that words do indeed refer to events and things, and that these events and things were bound up with human struggles and aspirations the effects of which not only reach down to the present but constitute it. History must be “participatory. "

― John Lukacs , The University Bookman on John Lukacs: Essays and reviews from fifty years (The University Bookman Collections)

6 " The historian must enter into the dialectic of the actual and the potential contained in every critical moment of the past. Memory is the real psyche or life force and nothing is genuinely more alive than the historian’s disciplined rejoining of the past; apprehended in the right way, history becomes palpable. "

― John Lukacs , The University Bookman on John Lukacs: Essays and reviews from fifty years (The University Bookman Collections)