Introduz o livro mostrando os problemas advindos do desprezo à transcendência e o foco no empirismo, de forma dedutiva.

É cirúrgico em diversos aspectos de sua análise, como por exemplo, na igualdade, que ele já via em 1948 como um enorme catalisador da inveja e desprezo da liberdade, desde que os pobres ideais de "igualdade e fraternidade" da Revolução Francesa prosperaram.

Mostra a dicotomia entre governantes e governados, como no caso da democracia, que também há uma segregação e falta de representatividade.
Critica a especialização de forma parecida com Ortega y Gasset, na sua "barbárie da especialização", autor que ele mesmo cita no livro.

Enaltece as hierarquias e a ordem, como a existente na família. Toca em vários assuntos, como na música, e as consequências pro egoísmo no mundo, influenciados por Beethoven, em especial o ataque ao Jazz, que ele considera a perda da forma e da referência, uma música para acompanhar o empirismo.

Mostra como a modernamente louvada divisão entre religião e educação foi na verdade uma divisão entre metafísica e sabedoria. A imprensa cobriu grande parte desse espaço da religião, onde há uma zumbificação das pessoas, ampliada nos dias de hoje, sendo muito mais benéfico abandonar os jornais e se debruçar sobre os clássicos.

Novamente como Ortega y Gasset, reconhece o problema do homem moderno achar que a sociedade ou a ciência tem a obrigação de garantir sua sobrevivência. Lembra que conforto material não tem a ver com as façanhas de uma sociedade, citando que os gregos dormiam sobre um manto em um banco, assistiam peças de teatro ao ar livre sentado em uma pedra. Já hoje, há um culto ao conforto.

Critica a moralidade de Aristóteles e suas consequências na Igreja, enquanto enaltece a de Platão, em sua busca pela virtude. Faz a defesa do que ainda nos sobrou, a propriedade privada. Mostra a desvalorização da moeda, por culpa do estado, que a inflacionou e falsificou. Faz boas críticas à essa cultura amplificada hoje de tentar de igualar homem e mulher, embora na época ele não pudesse conceber que a biologia também pudesse ser alvo de inversão, com a ideologia de gênero existente hoje.

Rastreia a derrocada do homem moderno a partir do nominalismo de Guilherme de Ockham e dos ideais da Revolução Francesa.

Tempo estimado de leitura: 5 horas.

Truly a fantastic book, and deeply prophetic. Given the predictions Weaver makes about the future, including reflections on trends in the arts, the degeneracy of culture, decline of religion, rise of specialisms etc he has made some very keen insights. Clearly a very brilliant mind, and reminds me of the work of Schaeffer (Escape from Reason) and Taylor (A Secular Age).

This book however predates the work of those writers by several decades, and despite being deeply philosophical is much more grounded than the others. His discussion of the "last metaphysical right" of ownership of property provides a good ground to start from, and is clearly (still) a widely upheld notion and good basis for discussion, requiring little metaphysical baggage (he doesn't demand for example, a radical reconversion of the West). There is also a good discussion on language and symbolism.

It is a rather dense book, even if it is not long, and there are times particularly in some of the earlier chapters where perhaps he is too verbose. However I generally found most of the later chapters much more lucid, except parts of the final chapter on justice. There are several points where I felt that he was being too critical and empassioned, and many points where I thought a longer discussion would benefit his argument, but clearly a brilliant and articulate mind and lots of relevant material here to chew on despite the book's relative antiquity.

An amazing treatise. Weaver touches on several topics that I have been wondering about over the past few years, and he views each topic through a shrewd lens of traditional values and intellectual corruption. The overarching theme is that modernism has pushed us away from first principles, abstract ideas, acceptance of the existence of a metaphysical world that is not our own and a "complete" education which would allow us to think about the general, rather than focus on the specifics. The victory of the modernists (the "nominalists") has been complete, to a degree that a thing when owned by us is "good", while the same thing owned by another is "bad".

This book is well known as a kind of manifesto for the return to traditional values and is used by conservative politicians, but the book is *NOT* a political manifesto. It talks about liberal politicians and "rabid egalitarians", always accompanying these lines with the thinking and the justification behind these classifications. (Weaver argues that our current fear of classifying and grouping people, groups, and nations is another sign of modernism's victory in spreading the dogma of "equality") He summarizes the image of a modern man, from a press agency's point of view, when deciding how to advertise to him, in one amazing paragraph:

It means in the world picture of press agency, a job, domesticity, interest in some harmless diversion such as baseball and fishing, and a strong antipathy toward abstract ideas. This is the Philistine version of man in pursuit of happiness. Even Carlyle's doctrine of blessedness through work has overtones of strenuousness which are repugnant to the man of today. (p. 94)

Weaver's plan for restoration includes a return to first principles, humility, an acceptance of the things that nature and the past can teach us. It includes the abolition of the sensationalist media, and any kind of media that is bound to produce "comedy-variety shows", that are aimed at keeping the vacuous minded ignorant and in good will. It includes the studying of the past, and a complete education that educates us in both rhetoric and dialectic, teaching us how to think and how to live with the abstract.

This was an aspirational book written in 1948. 73 years later, most of what Weaver argued for didn't happen. That serves to make the picture clearer: The decision to not act was the current generation's. On a personal level, it can serve as a guidebook, as we continue to slip further into the wasteland dominated by the media, the popular media, and the broadening of the noise through platforms like Instagram.

I read this book on archive.org: [[https://archive.org/details/richard-m...]]

This is a bold work by an author whose thesis will be either completely accepted or absolutely denied by the reader. Weaver asserts an idea in the introduction and then pursues it with such thoroughgoing, damnable consistency, that the reader is left, naturally, in either philosophical shock or ideological rage.

Weaver asserts the main idea by bringing us to Shakespeare: "Like Macbeth, Western man has made an evil decision, which has become the efficient and final cause of other evil decisions. Have we forgotten our encounter with the witches on the heath? It occurred in the late fourteenth century, and what the witches said to the protagonist of this drama was that man could realize himself more fully if he would only abandon his belief in the existence of transcendentals. The powers of darkness were working subtly, as always, and they couched this proposition in the seemingly innocent form of an attack upon universals. The defeat of logical realism in the great medieval debate was the crucial event in the history of Western culture; from this flowed those acts which issue now in modern decadence" (3).

Logical Realism, a philosophical view represented by most medieval thinkers such as Anselm or Aquinas, asserted that things have a reality beyond themselves. These are the "forms" which ultimately exist in the Mind of God. In Realism, words are powerful symbols which connect man to idea, to image, to thing. For example, dating back to Plato, Realists would say that the concept of "man" is universal. It is insofar as someone resembles this universal that he can be named "man" himself.

Nominalism, on the other hand, is a philosophy which found its greatest proponent in William of Ockham and other late "Schoolmen" at the eve of the Reformation. Nominalists asserted that each individual thing exists as that particular thing only; the "forms" of the Realists are non-existent in themselves. Such forms are simply arbitrary names that humans assign to different things that can be observed or logically deduced. This means that there would be no objective reality of "man" outside of the man who might exist right in front of me, or any other man living or dead. The word "man" is therefore a sign and not a symbol.

A sign simply points, while a symbol pulls. That is to say, with a sign, something else is immediately signified. A red, 8-sided piece of metal with the word "stop" written upon it is an arbitrary fabrication (e.g., certainly the color and design are intentional in order that it be seen clearly, but ultimately there is nothing objective or universal about the stop sign so that men throughout history would instinctively know what it means). However, a symbol participates in the reality to which it corresponds; it doesn't just redirect us, but it draws us into its realities. An example of a symbol would be a cross. Pious people may kiss or touch a cross not because it is understood to be a talisman or fetish, but because it is a symbol, a reflection of the reality itself behind it. It draws a person into its reality.

Realists see symbols where Nominalists see only signs, or at least Nominalists understand a symbol to function not as a window, icon, or reflection, but as a pointer (a signifier).

Richard Weaver, who was a professor of English at the University of Chicago for almost his entire academic career, argues that the philosophical shift from Realism to Nominalism was the event of the last 1,000 years that has repercussions today that Ockham and his offspring (such as Luther) could never have imagined. By removing transcendentals or universals, truth has slipped away. And when truth slips away, meaning and beauty and purpose slip away as well.

The book is then essentially Weaver's record of the havoc Nominalism has caused up to his own day (1948). In this his book takes decidedly interesting turns, such as when he utterly condemns Jazz music for being the musical embodiment of the forces of sensuality, selfishness, and chaos which Nominalism unleashed.

There are really so many brilliant cultural interpretations in this book. Another example would be his analysis of the lost virtue of "piety." Piety, in a culture, leads men to not think too highly of themselves and their accomplishments. It leads them to look to their forebears for that ancient wisdom which never changes. Nominalism has led to the modern predicament where it is now a virtue to ignore and then curse the past, trusting in oneself and one's own mind for direction in the present. Weaver wrote this in 1948, and yet it sounds like he's just listened to our politicians speaking today.

Even if, as I mentioned at the beginning of my review, the reader doesn't accept Weaver's thesis for a moment, the arguments will at least cause the most thoughtful to reflect upon one's own beliefs and try to see from where they arise. As a person born in 1989, well into the decadence that Weaver sensed so presciently, I have never for a moment considered my intellectual positions or aesthetic tastes to be assailable. They arose in myself, and, am I not my own person, free to choose, to believe, to think? Now I see that much of what I chose, believed, and thought in my life did not arise from freedom, but from slavery. It was slavery I was unaware of, a slavery that was unstated. It was intellectual and metaphysical slavery to the ideas of modern philosophers who were swept along by the tide of "progress" and modernity's demonic technocratic hopes and dreams. Weaver's book has opened my own eyes and helped me to look around. What I see is a Western culture 71 years further down the road to suicide than what Weaver saw.

Really good book.

Kind of a 1.5 for me, although tbh I read this more as a historian than for the philosophical engagement. The short summary of this book is the Ron Swanson gif of him saying "I hate everything." This might be the grumpiest and most uptight book I have ever read, but I did find it valuable for my current research on conservative narratives of decline and decadence. And there were times when I thought Weaver was at least asking good, unorthodox questions even if I didn't agree with his answers.

Weaver argues that the essential problem with the world of his day (1940s) and the modern world in general is that since William of Occam in the 14th century Western thought has been based on the idea that meanings are mutable and that man is the measure of all things. Weaver, by my reckoning, is a sort of Platonist who believes that words/ideas have essential forms that human beings have to discover and learn. Our abandonment of this principle leads us to value the present over the past, self-expression over structure and responsibility, the pursuit of science as a conqueror of nature, an obsession with comfort and entertainment, the upending of gender roles, and a view of gov't as a benign father rather than a necessary evil (or tutor in morality). Weaver is very unclear on what he actually wants to change; this is a diagnosis of malaise based on the idea that the abandonment of essential forms has had consequences down to the present day.

To be fair, he was writing in the aftermath of the most horrible conflict in human history when everyone was trying to grapple with totalitarianism, atomic weaponry, genocide, etc. Of course, he is incredibly grumpy about everything from jazz music (goes on a racist rant about its lack of form) to women serving in the military (he goes on a sexist rant that really pissed me off) to women wearing pants to how Beethoven's music is just too wild and expressionist (uh, ok...). I found a lot of his complaining to be absurd, and as usual with conservative intellectuals, he prioritizes incredibly abstract ideas over concrete human experience. For example, he rails against Americans for their fixation on job stability and a comfortable place to live. Yeah, easy for you to say buddy. How about you consider that maybe these "obsessions" are a product of the horrors of the Depression? This kind of contempt for ordinary people, especially those who aren't white men, fills the book

However, you can get a lot from this book as a scholar of conservatism. Weaver is obsessed with decline; he sees an America that most historians would say was at the height of its power as crashing imminently into decadence and disorder. Had he lived into the 60s he would have said "ha! Told ya so." He believes that human beings find the most meaning in life (he doesn't seem to care about happiness) in an ordered, hierarchal world, one that he believes must be ordered by fixed, essential ideas. Everyone must know their place, every place must be valued and meaningful, all must participate in sacralizing the social and political order. If this sounds like a rejection of everything since the Renaissance, that's because it is. And yet many modern human beings keep reaching back for essences, orders, and hierarchies, so for liberals like me to simply ignore Weaver's claims would be hubristic. He's also deeply uncomfortable with modern warfare and atomic power, which he believes has lost any element of chivalry (more of his selective renderings of the past). On a more serious level, he argues that the bureaucratization and mechanization of warfare has enabled atrocities; here he is on more interesting ground, showing how these processes erode human agency and responsibility and make mass killing possible. This is strikingly similar to many analyses of the perpetrators of the Holocaust. Say what you will about Weaver, he isn't a chauvinistic nationalist.

Although I disagree profoundly with Weaver about the surface level and deeper philosophical issues in this book, I would still say this is worth reading if you are a scholar of modern conservatism or if you have never read any conservative critiques of modernity. It isn't systematic in its order, but it raises some issues that are worth wrestling with while also providing a clear picture of anti-modernist conservative thought.

Weaver responds to what he saw as the cultural decline of the West resulting from the dissolution of transcendental truth or higher values. He argues that relativism and the leveling of hierarchy in society has led to rampant egotism and the breakdown of community. People no longer know where they belong in the whole. Without metanarratives, people turn to lowest-common-denominator consumerism. The media machine ("The Great Stereopticon") feeds the cynicism by continually serving up distortion and conflict. In a world without metaphysical truth or higher meaning, society can only bicker over facts without reference to a discernible greater good.

Weaver published Ideas Have Consequences in 1948. But his prescient observations have aged extremely well. His critique of media and mindless consumerism, in particular, could have been written to great accuracy today.

He really reminds me of GK Chesterton. A clear mind willing to see right through the BS narrative of his time on WWII and the Civil War despite being an American from the North. It's rather refreshing to hear ideas expressed that I too hold, coming from someone writing right after WWII. If I hadn't read the book on Lincoln and the terrible things done to the South during and after the Civil War, only a week ago, I wouldn't have understood why he characterized the South in such a romantic way. I also only recently finally attained a clear and satisfactory understanding of why the World Wars occurred and how terribly the allies acted in general during that war, not to mention how much we sacrificed and gave to Stalin, whose personality and regime were clearly more evil than Hitler and the Nazis. For example, the US via Supreme Allied commander Eisenhower + side-kick Marshall delayed their forces and held back Patton, Montgomery and others at the cost of many live simply so that Stalin could take Berlin.

The US could have taken it first and Berlin would have been saved from the Nanjing-like experience. Instead we delayed, purposely taking the harder path when we could have gone for Germanies soft underbelly, which resulted in the death and maiming of hundreds of thousands instead of just finishing Germany quickly and let Stalin pound sand. Especially considering we had nukes then and Russia didn't. ---As for Nanjing, well, I haven't done my full research there and only have read the 'official' narratives - official narratives which I have learned should NOT be trusted at face value. So I simply just don't know or have the right to opine whether Nanjing was the horror show the Chinese paint it as or not. History is written by the victors.--- Anyway, my point is that having just gotten the World Wars understood in a way that has allowed me to put a general picture together out of all the puzzle pieces I have - the message of the author was particularly poignant. Only a couple months ago his words would not have resonated with me or been as intelligible.

Anyway, I really like the way Richard Weaver thought and feel the same nostalgia towards a past filled with more meaning than our materialistic, shallow and increasingly dumbed down culture (the average American and Britton are 16 points lower in IQ than their counterparts in Victorian England). Calling our better technology, increased material wealth (which is decreasing again for ~99% of the population), atom bombs and freedom to indulge in vice -at the cost of moral character- "progress" is quite absurd. I like how he illustrated that Marxism is completely obsessed with materialism to the point of idolatry. Socialism/Communism not only denies the very soul of the world as it were, but raises material interests to their primary concern! With force and all kinds of dehumanizing tactics to be sure that their people will have as much material crap as their enemies.

Oh and I'd also say Richard Weaver was prophetic for his day, he predicted that we'd be headed right into the mess we are in now with authoritarianism, corruption, materialism, specialization of academics at the cost of understanding the bigger picture, further moral degeneracy, people so materialistic that fear of disease and death has become something we'll do anything to avoid (including shutting down, isolating from people and curtailing liberties), war being a permanent endeavor of liberal democracies and so forth. He knew the Allies were just as bad and that no good would come of the future with such unworthy rulers who only care about enriching their own position, etc.

I'll elaborate later, he had so many good points I will have to make note of when I'm less tired.

"There is ground for declaring that modern man has become a moral idiot.”

"We approach a condition in which we shall be amoral without the capacity to perceive it and degraded without the means to measure our descent.”

Prophetic.

Weaver argues that our divorcing universals and particulars paved the way for a brutal secularism. It also cheapened man's existence.

This book was a tour de force, a genealogy of ethics. Weaver argues that today's man has been alienated from nature, from language, and from hope in general.

Apparently, this is the source for a lot of the "Reformed theology is Ockhamist" narrative (esp. pp. 2–3 in my copy). See here and here.

Nevertheless, it's in Doug Wilson's top ten (maybe top four).