The Philosopher
Johan Huizinga
The face
The background
- Nationality:
- Dutch
- Period:
- 20th century
The synopsis
Johan Huizinga (7 December 1872 – 1 February 1945) was a Dutch historian and one of the founders of modern cultural history. He was born in Groningen, Netherlands, and died in De Steeg, Netherlands. Huizinga's academic career included professorships at Groningen University and Leiden University. He had an aesthetic approach to history, where art and spectacle played an important part. His most famous work is *The Autumn of the Middle Ages* (1919). Other significant works include *Erasmus* (1924) and *Homo Ludens* (1938), in which he explored the idea that play is a primary element in human culture. Alarmed by the rise of National Socialism, Huizinga wrote cultural criticism, drawing parallels with contemporary critics like Ortega y Gasset and Oswald Spengler. He argued that technical and mechanical organization had replaced spontaneous and organic order. Huizinga was briefly detained by the Nazis in 1942 and passed away shortly before the end of Nazi rule.
The works
The Autumn of the Middle Ages
Erasmus
Homo Ludens
Dutch Civilisation in the Seventeenth Century
The quotes
If we are to preserve culture we must continue to create it.
An aristocratic culture does not advertise its emotions. In its forms of expression it is sober and reserved. Its general attitude is stoic.
Whether the aim is in heaven or on earth, wisdom or wealth, the essential condition of its pursuit and attainment is always security and order.
History can predict nothing except that great changes in human relationships will never come about in the form in which they have been anticipated.
Do you know anything that in all its innocence is more humiliating than the funny pages of a Sunday newspaper in America?
It is the goal of the American university to be the brains of the republic.
Systematic philosophical and practical anti-intellectualism such as we are witnessing appears to be something truly novel in the history of human culture.
The repudiation of the primacy of understanding means the repudiation of the norms of judgment as well, and hence the abandonment of all ethical standards.
Culture means control over nature.
Every age yearns for a more beautiful world. The deeper the desperation and the depression about the confusing present, the more intense that yearning.
You only live a short time... and you are dead a long time.
These are strange times. Reason, which once combatted faith and seemed to have conquered it, now has to look to faith to save it from dissolution.
The second fundamental feature of culture is that all culture has an element of striving.
From whichever angle one looks at it, the application of racial theories remains a striking proof of the lowered demands of public opinion upon the purity of critical judgment.
The susceptibility of the average modern to pictorial suggestion enables advertising to exploit his lessened power of judgment.
Physical nature lies at our feet shackled with a hundred chains. What of the control of human nature? Do not point to the triumphs of psychiatry, social services or the war against crime. Domination of human nature can only mean the domination of every man by himself.
Revolution as an ideal concept always preserves the essential content of the original thought: sudden and lasting betterment.
Life is made too easy. Mankind's moral fibre is giving way under the softening influence of luxury.
We can't put up a protectionist dam on our own against the neo-liberal world market either. However, we can try, together with our European partners, to maintain the social character of Europe as much as possible.
In Europe art has to a large degree taken the place of religion. In America it seems rather to be science.
A superstition which pretends to be scientific creates a much greater confusion of thought than one which contents itself with simple popular practices.
Culture must have its ultimate aim in the metaphysical or it will cease to be culture.
History creates comprehensibility primarily by arranging facts meaningfully and only in a very limited sense by establishing strict causal connections.
It is impossible to strive for the heroic life. The title of hero is bestowed by the survivors upon the fallen, who themselves know nothing of heroism.
History is the interpretation of the significance that the past has for us.