Frank M. Turner (1944–2010)

Finishing a stressful year with some food for the mind: a collection of lectures from a former Yale professor, Mr Frank M. Turner. I had seen this book several years ago, yet was a little reluctant to purchase it, fearing it would be too complex for me to understand. Hence having taken my time before diving into this work.

In "short" chapters/lectures - not essays, as someone else mentioned here on Goodreads - Mr Turner offers a pretty varied range of topics, as the table of contents shows. While each lecture can be read on its own, they do follow a sort of chronological order and some of are linked of cross-reference each other in terms of period, themes, philosophers, political figures, ...

At the end, Mr Turner explained why he chose to start with Rousseau and to end with Nietzsche: They were each others opposite's. Also worth noting: Much of Nietzsche's works were apparently edited by his sister, who had more extreme views on the world than him.

Table of contents:
1) Rousseau's Challenge to Modernity (Wikipedia)
2) Tocqueville and Liberty (Wikipedia)
3) J.S. Mill and the Nineteenth Century (Wikipedia)
4) The Turn to Subjectivity (Wikipedia)
5) Medievalism and the Invention of the Renaissance (Wikipedia, Wikipedia)
6) Nature Historicised
7) Darwin and Creation (Wikipedia, Wikipedia)
8) Marx and the Transcendent Working Class (Wikipedia)
9) The Cult of the Artist (this chapter contains a selection of relevant paintings, printed on glossy paper); this reminded me of a chapter in 'Fantasy et Féminismes': Héroïnes antiques et émancipation féminine dans la peinture victorienne: les origines d'un archétype de la fantasy - Yannick Le Pape; my review)
10) Nationalism (Wikipedia)
11) Race and Anti-Semitism (Wikipedia, Wikipedia)
12) Wagner (Wikipedia)
13) The Ideology of Separate Gender Spheres (Wikipedia)
14) Old Faiths and New (Wikipedia)
15) Nietzsche (Wikipedia)

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It was eye-opening and (not always) surprising to read how the 18th and 19th centuries have influenced and still influence many people to this day (psychologically, economically, politically, religiously, ...). Many of our ways of thinking, of living, of doing business, ... are perfectly inline with those of a few centuries ago, despite the changes of the last few decades. It's therefore important to know where we come from and how it's all evolving.

You don't slide through this collection of lectures like you do when reading a novel. This is due to the subjects of the lectures themselves, but also the exquisite style in which these were written.

I do admit that not every lecture was as accessible as the other, as I don't often read such a kind of work, but I could grasp the essence in those cases. Mr Turner managed to clearly explain each subject, with the subtle encouragement to the reader to continue his/her journey via the list of works at the end. Of course, for reasons of clarity, he also added a list of the various persons mentioned in the book, from literary critics over philosophers to historians and sociologists. A necessary list, as not everyone's importance was explained in the respective lectures.

'European Intellectual History from Rousseau to Nietzsche' is a more than recommended (selected) overview of, as written in the blurb, "modern European history from the Enlightenment to the dawn of the twentieth century and conveyed the turbulence of a rapidly changing era in European history through its ideas and leading figures".

It allows for a better understanding of other history books I've read so far and a nice bridge to those I've yet to read (if circumstances allow it):

* De verbeelding van het denken: Geschiedenis van de westerse en oosterse filosofie (Jan Bor, Errit Petersma)
* Geschiedenis der Westerse Filosofie : in samenhang met politieke en sociale omstandigheden van de oudste tijden tot heden (Eng.: A History of Western Philosophy) (Bertrand Russell)
* Greek and Roman Political Ideas: A Pelican Introduction (Melissa Lane) (my review)
* Duitsland, een natie en haar geschiedenis (Helmut Walser Smith)
* Europe: The Struggle for Supremacy, 1453 to the Present (Brendan Simms)
* 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (Yuval Noah Harari) (my review)… (mer)

Bits I found interesting in: The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain by Frank Turner (The best chapter is Victorian Humanistic Hellenism)

William Gladstone wrote Studies in Homer and the Homeric Age (3 Vols.1858). Between 1847 and his death in 1898 he produced seven volumes on Homer and a very large numbers of articles. For better or worse, his works on Homer constituted the single most extensive body of Victorian Homeric commentary.

Gilbert Murray: When the polis was crushed under the Macedonian invasion, the reasonably sane civic life and the worship of the Olympians collapsed. Thereupon ensued the rise of new religions founded on mysteries, mysticism, and a rejection of the notion of humankind as the forger of its own world. It is a rise of asceticism, of mysticism, in a sense of pessimism.

Murray: The Olympians had possessed the supreme religious virtue of having “issued no creeds that contradicted knowledge, no commands that made man sin against his own inner light.” The gods of Greece had not been fully rational creatures, but they had not stood as barriers against the achievement of rationality.

Lewis Farnell felt, that recognition of the dark and superstitious roots of Greek religion should not lead to the neglect of “the flowers and the fruit which derive their nutriment from those roots.”

Percy Gardner: The truth communicated through their sculpture and awakened in the observer was the prescriptive moral truth of the polis rather than the mere description of physical nature.

P.Gardner: The shared values and moral expectations of the polis provided both an ethical ideal that the artist might strive to express and a cultural restraint on the excessive individualism that might separate him and his activity from his audience.

Charlotte Young, novelist: The history of the Jews shows what God does for men; the history of Greece shows what man does left to himself.… (mer)