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    Nostalgia for the Absolute
    Nostalgia for the Absolute
    Nostalgia for the Absolute
    Ebook83 pages53 minutes

    Nostalgia for the Absolute

    By George Steiner

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    About this ebook

    Writer and scholar George Steiner's Massey Lectures are just as cogent today as when he delivered them in 1974 -- perhaps even more so. He argues that Western culture's moral and emotional emptiness stems from the decay of formal religion. He examines the alternate mythologies (Marxism, etc.) and fads of irrationality (astrology, the occult). Steiner argues that this decay and the failure of the mythologies have created a nostalgia for the absolute that is growing and leading us to a massive clash between truth and human survival.

    Ultimately he suggests that we can only reduce the impact of this collision course if we continue, as disinterestedly as possible, to ask questions and seek answers in the face of our increasingly complex world.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHouse of Anansi Press
    Release dateMar 1, 1997
    ISBN9780887848698
    Nostalgia for the Absolute
    Author

    George Steiner

    George Steiner (París, 1929-Cambridge, 2020), fue uno de los más reconocidos estudiosos de la cultura europea y ejerció la docencia en las universidades de Stanford, Nueva York y Princeton, aunque su carrera académica se desarrolló principalmente en Ginebra e Inglaterra. En 2001 recibió el Premio Príncipe de Asturias de Comunicación y Humani­dades.

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    • 3/5
      In these lectures, Steiner argues that in the cultural vacuum left by the decay of religion, the religious urge, a "nostalgia for the absolute" continue to fuel our zest for what amount to modern mythologies (Freud, Marx, and--strangely--Levi-Strauss' structural anthropology) along with new age fads. Given the format, it's hard to fault him too much for some lax argumentation and sensationalist conclusions. Yet despite some interesting observations and rhetorically persuasive narratives about how all these things fit together, the thesis suffers from too many hasty generalizations and simplistic analogies.The analysis of Marx is rather superficial and makes no effort to distinguish between Marx and Marxism; the chapter on Freud involves some rather weak arguments concerning the role played by mythology in the genesis and support of Freud's ideas; and the chapter on Levi-Strauss is both bewildering for its inclusion at all, and also doesn't even remotely establish Steiner's claim that structural anthropology constitutes a total mythology (in the sense in which he proposes this thesis).

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    Nostalgia for the Absolute - George Steiner

    The Massey Lectures Series

    The Massey Lectures are co-sponsored by CBC Radio, House of Anansi Press, and Massey College in the University of Toronto. The series was created in honour of the Right Honourable Vincent Massey, former governor general of Canada, and was inaugurated in 1961 to provide a forum on radio where major contemporary thinkers could address important issues of our time.

    This book comprises the 1974 Massey Lectures, Nostalgia for the Absolute, broadcast in November 1974 as part of CBC Radio’s Ideas series. The producer of the series was Paul Buckley.

    George Steiner

    George Steiner is an internationally renowned writer and scholar. He was born in Paris and received his B.A. in 1948 from the University of Chicago. In 1950 he received his M.A. from Harvard University. From 1950 to 1952 he earned his Ph.D. where he was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University. He joined the staff of The Economist and later was a member of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton University.

    Steiner was the Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Geneva for twenty years, becoming Professor Emeritus upon his retirement in 1994. He has since taught comparative literature at Oxford and was the Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard from 2001-2002.

    His numerous nonfiction works include Tolstoy or Dostoevskiy, The Death of Tragedy, Aspects of Language and Translation, Language and Silence, Real Presences, and Grammars of Creation. Steiner is also the author of works of fiction and poetry, including The Portage to San Cristobel, and Proofs and Three Parables. George Steiner lives in Cambridge and is a regular contributor to The New Yorker, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Guardian.

    NOSTALGIA FOR THE ABSOLUTE

    NOSTALGIA FOR THE ABSOLUTE

    GEORGE STEINER

    Copyright © 1974 George Steiner

    All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

    First published in 1974 by CBC Enterprises

    Published in 1997 by House of Anansi Press Ltd.

    This edition published in 2004 by

    House of Anansi Press Inc.

    110 Spadina Avenue, Suite 801

    Toronto, ON, M5V 2K4

    Tel. 416-363-4343 • Fax 416-363-1017

    www.anansi.ca

    Distributed in Canada by

    HarperCollins Canada Ltd.

    1995 Markham Road

    Scarborough, ON, MIB 5M8

    Toll free tel. 1-800-387-0117

    Distributed in the United States by

    Publishers Group West

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    Toll free tel. 1-800-788-3123

    CBC and Massey College logos used with permission

    House of Anansi Press is committed to protecting our natural environment. As part of our efforts, this book is printed on Rolland Enviro paper: it contains 100% post-consumer recycled fibres, is acid-free, and is processed chlorine-free.

    11 10 09 08 07 3 4 5 6 7

    LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION DATA

    Steiner, George, 1929–

    Nostalgia for the Absolute

    (CBC Massey lectures series)

    Text of radio lectures broadcast in fall 1974.

    ISBN-13: 978-0-88784-594-9

    ISBN-I0: 0-88784-594-0

    1. Christianity—20th century. 2. Civilization—Modern—1950—

    3. Marx, Karl, 1818-1883. 4. Freud, Sigmund, 1836-1939. 5. Levi-Strauss Claude.

    I. Title. II. Series

    BR125.S73 1997                 270.8'2                 C97-93o636-1

    Library of Congress Control Number: 2007927971

    Cover design: Bill Douglas at The Bang

    We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

    Printed and bound in Canada

    NOSTALGIA FOR THE ABSOLUTE

    CONTENTS

    The Secular Messiahs

    Voyages into the Interior

    The Lost Garden

    The Little Green Men

    Does the Truth Have a Future?

    THE SECULAR MESSIAHS I

    The conjecture which I want to put forward in these Massey Lectures is a very simple one.

    Historians and sociologists agree, and after all we should sometimes believe them too, that there has been a marked decline in the role played by formal religious systems, by the churches, in Western society.

    The origins and causes of this decline can be variously dated and argued, and, of course, they have been. Some would locate them in the rise of scientific rationalism during the Renaissance. Others would assign them to the scepticism, to the explicit secularism, of the Enlightenment with its ironies about superstition and all churches. Still others would maintain that it was Darwinism and modern technology during the industrial revolution which made systematic beliefs, systematic theology, and the ancient centrality of the churches so obsolete. But the phenomenon itself is agreed upon. Gradually, for these very complicated and diverse reasons, the Christian faiths (may I emphasize this plural) which had organized so much of the Western view of man’s identity and of our function in the world, whose practices and symbolism had so deeply pervaded our daily lives from the end of the Roman and Hellenistic world onward, lost their hold over sensibility and over daily existence. To a greater or lesser degree, the religious core of the individual and of the community degenerated into social convention. They became a kind of courtesy, an occasional or perfunctory set of reflexes. For the very great majority of thinking men and women—even where church attendance continued—the life-springs of theology, of a transcendent and systematic doctrinal conviction, had dried up.

    This desiccation, this drying-up, affecting as it did the very centre of Western moral and intellectual being, left an immense emptiness. Where there is a vacuum, new energies and surrogates arise. Unless I read the evidence wrongly, the political and philosophic history of the West during the past 150 years can be understood as a series of attempts—mor or less conscious, more or less systematic, more or less violent—to fill the central emptiness left by the erosion of theology. This vacancy, this darkness in the middle, was one of the death of God (remember that Nietzsche’s ironic, tragic tonality in using that famous phrase is so often misunderstood). But I think we could put it more accurately: the decay of a comprehensive Christian doctrine had left in disorder, or had left blank, essential perceptions of social justice, of the

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