"The entity one-who-can-make-shoes is substituted for the concrete reality of so-and-so, married to such-and-such a person and father of such-and-such a child.""Note that in the ages when it was respected wisdom was regarded as the prerogative of old age: and if respect for age has almost vanished in our day, this is undoubtably connected with the devaluation suffered by wisdom itself."
"We know that if wisdom became complacent, it would immediately get stiff in the joints and in the end fall into decay. It does seem in the last analysis that for the seeker, wisdom is in a sense indistinguishable from the pursuit of it."
"It is easier to define this freedom negatively than to bring out its positive attributes. The sage is in the first place one who has silenced his passions, or at least tamed, domesticated them; he is also independent of public opinion and prejudice and is able in all circumstances to resist the collective impulse. Perhaps we should also say that his independence gives him peace, and, if the word still has meaning, happiness, so long as this is not confused with pleasure. Even the hedonists have had to establish a hierarchy of pleasure and thus in a sense to go beyond it. But it is difficult to conceive the sage without a kind of harmonious equilibrium which he cannot but feel as happiness."
"What is certain is that the notion of wisdom implies what might be called aristocratic values, this word being taken in an altogether general sense and in no way related to the idea of aristocracy of a class. What I mean is that there can be no wisdom without a recognition of a certain hierarchy of modes of living, without the prevalence of an idea of a better life, even if this is not referred to a religious or metaphysical absolute."
"There undoubtedly still exist democracies of a type which, at least provisionally, is compatible with the idea of the primacy of quality... But wherever egalitarianism prevails, rooted as it always is in envy and resentment, the sense of quality tends to vanish."
"What is very curious, incidentally, is that, for certain psycho-analytical reasons, the intellectual toadies to the people in exactly the measure in which his own thinking has become disembodied and floats about in a sort of indeterminable medium; I mention psycho-analysis because the intellectual suffers from an inferiority complex which is itself inseparable from a great pretentiousness: we are here in the field of ambivalence. But the people, flattered, indoctrinated, subjected to all kinds of propaganda, is doomed to lose the good sense which was its appanage. The role of bad films cannot here be overlooked. Those who, by reason of their very poverty and of what was deeply real in their work and in their tastes, were genuinely and constantly in touch with what might be called the soil of existence, are today perverted by something that is certainly not culture but is rather its most harmful counterfeit.
That popular wisdom to which philosophers worthy of the name have always paid tribute cannot really be separated from common sense; and the disappearance of common sense is a phenomenon of immeasurable gravity and one which must inevitably bring about a radical change in the climate of the mind. It is comparable to some great meteorlogical transformation such as now and then takes place, and mental meteorology is the name I would propose for this change which is too deep and too general to be readily discerned..."
"With the disappearance of common sense it is likely that wisdom is also doomed to vanish, or at best to become the prerogative of the very few... What I should like to stress now is that at bottom common sense is not so very different from wisdom. It is a kind of deposit left by wisdom: instead of drifting about it settles in the average human being, but only for so long as certain sociological conditions are maintained. The nature of these conditions is shown by the word 'common' itself. There is and can be no common sense where there is no common life or common notions, that is to say where there no longer exist any organic groups such as the family, the village, and so on. Yet the collectivization we are witnessing in every field is happening at the cost or even in contempt of these organic groups. This may seem astonishing at first sight, but it is very obvious if we think about it. For we are confronted everywhere with enormous agglomerations which are increasingly mechanized, so that the individuals are linked in much the same way as the parts of a machine. This seems to me one of the most terrible effects of the predominance of the State. It could be said that the moment common sense goes out of institutions and civic relationships it is also driven from the human mind. There are countless examples of this: I am thinking especially of the burdening of teaching and school life by examination programmes which are often drawn up in defiance of common sense, so that the means of selection are made increasingly artificial and take less and less account of those human qualities which ought surely be considered before all others. Another and very different instance is the fact that small enterprises, that is to say those which are on a really human scale, are systemattically penalized in favor of enormous and dehumanized concerns. Still another is the danger to such professions as medicine when they are run by functionaries."
"The spirit of abstraction is gradually taking hold of human beings and alienating them increasingly from the sense of life and living realities, while at the same time it makes of them a field which is dangerously favorable to the growth of totalitarian ideologies."
"It seems that it is not enough to say that tolerance is not practised: most people nowadays have not an idea of what it means."
"We can indeed say with complete assurance that if the notion of commitment has any meaning it must be in relation to an absolute which has first to be recognized. As soon as what is stressed is not an absolute to be recognized but a creative act--an act claimed to be creative--by which human freedom gives birth to its own values, anarchy takes the place of reason. And as anarchy is untenable, a roundabout road--and something very like a crooked way out--will be looked for. This is where the notion of history is brought in, and of a historical sense to be used as a criterion and to replace the traditional values which are to be discredited once and for all.
But here again is an innovation which is not compatible which has always been understood as wisdom. If indeed wisdom implies maturity it inevitably presupposes an attitude of respect for the past. By this I do not mean a blind conservatism or a superstitious feeling for tradition. To respect the past does not in any way prevent us from recognizing--and in a most painful way--the mistakes of which our predecessors were guilty and of which we may perhaps in some manner have shared the guilt. But I think this recognition, and it should be as lucid as possible, should not preclude what I would like to call an intellectual piety, for, without this, all feeling for nuances, and as a result for equity, is completely lost. Yet today, still, no doubt, under the influences of comitted thought, whole periods of history and 'classes' of men, seen in the distorting mirror of abstraction, are judged in the msot summary, overall and iniquitous way; while the very same people who are so censorious about the past, show themselves(in the same spirit of abstraction) remarkably indulgent to the abuses growing and multiplying in our own time, which they regard as the womb of history. It is not enough to say that this way of thinknig is unreasonable, it should be stressed that it is contrary to all wisdom. For if on the one side we have, after all, the immense patrimony of history--busy as we seem to be dismantling it--we are only dealing on the other with unformed and indeterminate possibilities."
"...we are witnessing an enormous dislocation of something that can now be hardly seen or heard, but which has been wisdom. Of that wisdom there is nothing left but 'scattered limbs'. What I mean is this: obviously, the technical processes which have been so prodigiously developed and specialised during the past half century have as their aim the rational ordering of all the resources at the disposal of mankind; a whole body of recipes is growing up in the as to the detailed manner of this ordering. Yet if we ask ourselves what is the connection between this body--so vast that it has in it the material of countless manuals--and what used to be known as wisdom, we will see that it is only its residue, its left-over, its dregs. You could put it like this: the huge multiplication of means put at man's disposal, and of recipies for their use, takes place at the cost of the ends which they are supposed to serve, or, if you like, at the cost of the values which man is called upon both to serve and to safeguard. It is as if man, overburdened by the weight of technics, knows less and less where he stands in regard to what matters to him and what doesn't, to what is precious and what is worthless."
"There was a sensorium commune (the Latin words are stronger and more characteristic than the French or English) and this sensorium commune provided a sort of meeting ground for the sacred and the profane. What is new is that it is this very metting ground which has collapsed, leaving the world more broken than it has ever been, perhaps, in any known epoch.
This shows itself in every field, even in that of philosophy proper. Anyone who has attended international philosophical congresses is aware that, even putting aside Marxism and its derivatives, there exist in the modern world two distinct types of philosophy without any living ocmmunication between them: there is on the one hand logico-mathematical neo-positivism which predominates in the Anglo-Saxon countries and in parts of Scandinavia, and, on the other, there are the doctrines of metaphysical inspiration, whether existentialist or not, current in Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and in the countries of South America."
"As time went on, the evolution of moral philosophy in Christendom tended to gloss over this paradox and to attenuate its scandalousness; though it is also true that time and again there arose great religious souls who reopened the breach which others had sought to close and denounced the misdirection given, consciously or unconsciously, by the teachers of the preceding epoch."
"All this is indeed strongly felt by Christian consciences nowadayas... The danger is thtat hey might fall into a different mistake which is perhaps even more grave. What tends to take the place of this individualistic utilitarianism is a historicism which tries, though vainly, to obtain the blessing of the Church.
From my own standpoint in the present study it follows that this contamination by history is a mortal danger to Christian wisdom. We have already had a glimpse of the reason for this: a conception which takes as its terms of reference an imaginary future, a future imagined in the abstract, is contrary to the very notion of wisdom."
"There is clearly a danger that as a reaction to the historicist frenzy there may arise a frenzy of integralism, a return to the most rigid and antiquated thinking in theology. Nothing could be further from wisdom worthy of the name."
"Enough has been said to show the infinitely tragic spiritual situation of the modern world. What is particularly grave, if we reflect on it, is that wisdom or common sense, untenanted and as it were set adrift, may be taken in tow by a singularly adroit propaganda which is quite capable, in a transitional period, of using them to its own advantage, since these dispositions lose their consistency the moment they are no longer related to a stable order, to truth. And we have seen that order, stability and truth are mortally compromised as soon as it is the will to power that predominates and turns the world into a factory. From then on, by what is only seemingly a paradox, the practical and the metaphysical problems merge into one. I mean that it will not be enough to exhume this or that general principle once elucidated by a secular thinker or a doctor of the Church; such a principle will be valuable towards reconstruction only if it becomes incarnate, and this kind of incarnation, as I have said, can only take place at the humblest and most intimate level of human life: the level of which a few men of good will meet to work at a common task."