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Can you identify a writer from a passage of their philosophical prose?

  • 27-03-2020 7:52pm
    #1
    Registered Users Posts: 5,301 ✭✭✭


    Who do you think wrote this?

    Poll posted. Without googling, see if you can identify the author from the ideas expressed and/or the style of their writing. It's a verbatim transcript, if any words or clauses are omitted (very few) I've put in the customary few dots.

    "..[the] sordid necessity of living for others .. in the present condition of things, presses so hardly upon almost everybody. In fact, scarcely anyone at all escapes.

    Now and then, in the course of the century, a great man of science, like Darwin; a great poet like Keats; .. a supreme artist like Flaubert, has been able to isolate himself, to keep himself out of reach of the clamorous claims of others, to stand 'under the shelter of the wall', as Plato puts it, and so to realize the perfection of what was in him, to his own incomparable gain, and to the incomparable and lasting gain of the whole world. These, however are exceptions.

    The majority of people spoil their lives by an unhealthy and exaggerated altruism - are forced, indeed, so to spoil them. They find themselves surrounded by hideous poverty, by hideous ugliness, by hideous starvation. It is inevitable that they should be strongly moved by all this. The emotions of man are stirred more quickly than man's intelligence; .. it is much more easy to have sympathy with suffering than it is to have sympathy with thought.

    Accordingly, with admirable, though misdirected intentions, they very seriously and very sentimentally set themselves to the task of remedying the evils they see. But their remedies to not cure the disease; they merely prolong it. Indeed, their remedies are part of the disease. "

    Who is the author?

    "It is more easy to have sympathy with suffering than with thought" Who wrote this? 4 votes

    Friedrich Hayek
    100% 4 votes
    Karl Marx
    0% 0 votes
    George Orwell
    0% 0 votes
    Ayn Rand
    0% 0 votes
    GB Shaw
    0% 0 votes
    Oscar Wilde
    0% 0 votes


Comments

  • Registered Users Posts: 5,301 ✭✭✭Snickers Man


    Poll expires in 30 days. Answer posted then.


  • Moderators, Category Moderators, Science, Health & Environment Moderators, Society & Culture Moderators Posts: 47,212 CMod ✭✭✭✭Black Swan


    Answered


  • Registered Users Posts: 1,894 ✭✭✭cdgalwegian


    Interesting thread SM. Answered.


  • Registered Users Posts: 5,301 ✭✭✭Snickers Man


    Wow. Forgot about this. It was in fact Oscar Wilde It's the opening few paragraphs from The Soul of Man under Socialism, which is not, in my view one of his best pieces although there are some great quotes in it.

    I thought it sounded very like one might expect Ayn Rand to sound, which is very disturbing IMHO.

    After all, I can't imagine, even as a devoutly straight male, someone I would more like to spend a night on the piss with than Oscar Wilde. Whereas Ayn Rand comes across as such a miserable old trout that I'd rather sandpaper my testicles than spend any time with her.

    Still, as neither is any longer with us........


  • Moderators, Category Moderators, Science, Health & Environment Moderators, Society & Culture Moderators Posts: 47,212 CMod ✭✭✭✭Black Swan


    The philosophical differences between Oscar Wilde and Ayn Rand were vast, indeed. Wilde was earnest to this day, while Rand's irrelevance today makes me shrug.


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  • Registered Users Posts: 1,894 ✭✭✭cdgalwegian


    Black Swan wrote: »
    The philosophical differences between Oscar Wilde and Ayn Rand were vast, indeed. Wilde was earnest to this day, while Rand's irrelevance today makes me shrug.
    Full marx for that, the thread being a capital idea.


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