John C, I'm not familiar with Paul Johnson's "Intellectuals" but if the following comment about it in Amazon is half-way accurate, I'd say save your money:
"This is the kind of book that is either going to inspire or infuriate you, but it should provoke valuable discussion and thought in either case. Johnson's thesis is quite simple: the revolutionary thinkers whose ideas have shaped intellectual history over the past 250 years were, for the most part, lousy human beings. These were not not common or garden variety jerks but personalities whose flaws were so manifest that they must call into question the value of the theories they generated. "This is an interesting proposition. Does it matter that Peter Sellers, the world's greatest comedic actor, was a vile neurotic, that Marilyn Monroe was a goddess on screen but a drug-addled manipulator in everyday life, that Winston Churchill, who saved civilization during World War II, was also an alcoholic egomaniac? Probably not. But Johnson asks a deeper question: if a thinker cannot live out his own principles, can these ideas have any real merit? His book convinces us that there is a real connection between the rancid lives lived by intellectuals and the disasters their ideas produced. "For example, Jean-Jacques Rousseau is adored by educational theorists and his ideas are entrenched in the curricula of teachers' colleges, despite the fact that he serially abandoned every one of his children. Karl Marx was bourgeois to the core and seems to have exploited the only working-class woman he ever knew: paying her starvation wages, impregnating her and forcing her to abandon their child. Johnson lacerates the behaviour of these prominent figures but more importantly shows how their shabby personal values foreshadow the social harm their works engendered." Sounds to me like the politics of personal destruction so prevalent in today's culture. No matter that Jane Candidate will vote to curtail government spending, she owns 150 pairs of shoes. Recall the defense loudly proclaimed for Clinton in the Lewinsky affair: "It's a private matter." Never mind that he lied to cover it up. Besides, ad hominem attacks are logic fallacies. Johnson's book about creativity appears a better value. I agree with your praise of the Bagehot quote. "In the faculty of writing nonsense, stupidity is no match for genius." Priceless! Such my opinion for what it's worth. I'm flattered you asked. Thanks for that. And for making me aware of Johnson's books. Platt On 15 Oct 2010 at 16:19, John Carl wrote: Platt, What do you think? I've got only so much money and time, with so many books beckoning from Amazon's lusty arms, and 50 whole dollars to spend, I need help deciding. Are you familiar with Paul Johnson's *Intellectuals*? It sounds right up your alley - The New York times review called it "an intellectual making fun of intellectuals". Sounds like a hoot to me, too. But the one I'm really interested in, his second book of his trilogy (the third will be * Heroes*) called *Creators*. review snippets: Creators is a riveting collage of a book. Its ambitious scope is adumbrated by its subtitle: "From Chaucer and Dürer to Picasso and Disney." Shakespeare, Bach, Jane Austen, Turner, and T. S. Eliot are here; so are Wagner, Tiffany, Victor Hugo, and the dress designer Cristóbal Balenciaga. (The chapter on Balenciaga and Christian Dior is a special delight.) Along the way Johnson glances at figures as disparate as Imhotep, vizier or chief minister to a succession of Egyptian pharaohs circa 2600 B.C., and Thomas Telford, the great Scottish bridge-builder and engineer. Johnson has prepared the widest possible canvas upon which to paint his tableau. Creativity, he points out, is a fundamental God-given grace of human life, inherent in all of us, as much in the humorist whose creative gift issues in the transient if utterly absorbing phenomenon of laughter as in the architect, painter, musician, or writer, whose creativity issues in more lasting monuments. --------- It is worth noting that the expression of creativity, even creativity at a high level, does not require genius. Johnson devotes a chapter to Jane Austen (along with some other women novelists), and though he greatly admires Austen´s novels - what sane person does not? - he is probably right that she "was not a genius." This is not to diminish Austen´s achievement but rather to suggest that genius may not be the essential concomitant of superlative artistic, intellectual, or cultural achievement. There are after all plenty of geniuses about. Often, their productions are more curious than substantial. Think only of Hegel: a man, as Kierkegaard said, who built an intellectual palace but lived in the guard house. As the English essayist Walter Bagehot observed in another context, "In the faculty of writing nonsense, stupidity is no match for genius. --------- Hey! I like that. Somebody else used my Kierkegaard quote. Didn't know it was of Hegel, but that sure does make sense. I also like the bit about genius being more full of nonsense than stupidity, for obvious reasons. Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
