Obtain On Heroes, Hero Worship And The Heroic In History Articulated By Thomas Carlyle Displayed In Mobi

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I hate the btish For the reader of today, the first three chapters seem to be the most insightful/interesting.
"A man lives by believing something, A sad case for him when all that he believes in is something he can button in his pocket.
"

Beautiful prose but I didn't think the thoughts as interesting, The first lecture on Odin was the most innovative to me, It managed to communicate ! something of the awe we should all feel towards the wonder that is language, written or spoken.


The rest of the lectures I found boring, either because of the subject matter itself Muhammad or because Carlyle assumed historical knowledge of which I had none Knox, Cromwell.


But it was at times a fascinating look inside a mind only a century or so old, yet so distant.
"The history of the world is but the biography of great men, "
Probably an only good thing in this god awful book,
I swear to god, point Carlye is trying to make is, great people do great things and that why they are remembered as heroes then he stretches that overpages with little cohesion or some conclusion.

There aretypes of heroes but explanations are so broad, messy and disconnected with the subject you forget what is the point Carlyle is trying to make or why you even bother reading this book.

Furthermore, he is emphasizing how heroes must be honest and sincere but then he sais well Cromwell wasn't, Napoleon as well, when I come to think about it prophet Mohammed and his Quran are full of lies, so you as a reader have no bloody idea what the f is he trying to say.

Awful, god awful.
Style of writing doesn't help either,
I can appreciate his admiration of the heroes and of the great men and how extraordinary feet needs to be remembered, but I didn't need to readpages of an incoherent mess.

PS That quote from the beginning is so

awesome, that even I don't like this book one bit, I don't necessarily hate Carlyle.

Carlyle reads like a good scotch: divine in small sips nauseating in large gulps, Not exactly a typical biography, The book offers sketches of select individuals of historical significance in order to justify a neohegelian reading of history basically an 'all the world's a stage' mentality and most of us are mere spear chuckers and cannon fodder for the Great Men who pop up from time to time as exemplars for the rest of us to follow.
Hegel had described Napoleon in this way, riding his white horse through town just as he was finishing writing one of his books.
He is seen as an incarnation of Geist, a particular finite expression of the spirit of the times, embodied in one man.

Carlyle was a great popularizer of German thought to the British people, and a contemporary of the American equivalent, Ralph Waldo Emerson.
توماس كارليل في هذا الكتاب يقدم نماذج إنسانية كات في نظرة نماذج لأبطال بعدهم الدنيا لم تعد كما كانت


الكتاب مقسم لستة فصول كالآتي:

البطل في صورة إله : متمثل في الشخصية الأسطورية "أدوين" وتأثيره في دول الشمال الاسكندنافي

البطل في صورة نبي: متمثل في شخص النبي الكريم محمد صلى الله عليه وسلم

البطل في صورة شاعر: دانتي وشكسبير

البطل في صورة قسيس: لوثر ونوكس

البطل في صورة كاتب: جونسنروسو و بارنر

البطل في صورة ملك: كرومويل ونابيليون بونابرت


استمتعت كثيرا بفصل "البطل في صورة قسيس" تحديدا شخصية مارتن لوثر.
قرأت الكتاب لشهرته وللإنصاف يتصف الكتاب بزخم المحتوى وجودة الترجمة وقيمته بنجمتين لأنه ليس من نوع الكتب المفضلة لدي وشعرت بالملل في أغلب الأجزاء
Excellent series of lectures given in May, Carlyle moves progressively through the forms the archetypal hero has taken in culture, as well as the responses these characters have received over time.
Extremely quotable amp articulate, almost everything he covers on the subject is not only relevant today but perhaps even more so.
Not much has changed it seems, with the corrosive influence of cynicism amp atheism of his day simply having flowered into the postmodernism of today.
The effect is the same, Reading this gave me renewed my appreciation of sincerity above all things, Carlyles ideas on how to look at and appreciate great men are as important amp valuable today as they were back when he gave his famous lectures.
Carlyle is, and always has been, a man without a country: An Scotsman at odds with the materialism of his nativeth Century Britain a idealist nonetheless too British to happily fit among his Prussian cobelievers.
He is a rabid antimodernist, but in the most modern way, Carlyle is a hero to a new generation of reactionaries, but the failings of his thoughtvery clearly on display in On Heroes and Hero Worshipshow the limits of this movement, and stand testament to the fact that admiration of the past is no remedy for the pains of the present and future.


On Heroes appears after of Carlyles fantastic history of the French Revolution, and his bizarre, mocking, adulatory Sartor Resartus which serves as a germ for his heroworshiping philosophy.
The attributes which made his history great are here used to poor effect the attributes which made his novel fascinating yet unserious are here supercharged.
The effect is a work which does not make any sense, even by its authors own standards, It is an incoherent defense of the past which does not understand the past it is an encomium of heroes without understanding what makes a man heroic.
Where Carlyles argument cannot carry water, he relies on florid language and metaphor these elements, which lent extra locomotion to his French Revolution, are here used to prod a lump.


It isnt possible to understand Carlyle or his failures without understanding those of Hegel, whose philosophy of history has within it the rough blueprint of Carlyles hero worship.
It runs roughly like this: Through the dialectic process of history, the spirit of the age is constantly developing, strengthening or crumbling in the smithy of experience, its axioms rising or falling by the parallel development of its own contradictions.
The zeitgeist is not metaphorical excess, but the actual working of Gods spirit in the progress of generations it is Gods own will realizing itself through the ages.
The end result of this has been the propagation of freedom, arriving at its apotheosis with the German deformation of Church and State, seen in the unscrupulous but very “free” acts of Luther and Frederick II.
This is not mere English whiggery, a belief in progress because each year seems to better sate our material desires.
This is intellectual and spiritual whiggery every eras passage makes us more and more human, more and more godlike, more and more in concord with the Divine.


The German idealists made themselves more godlike than any thinkers ever have, The French and English believed they were discovering the hidden blueprints of material reality, but left metaphysics largely to a deistic God, inscrutable but for what their empiricism allowed.
The Prussians not only appropriated Promethean fire, but turned its character into a mechanism which charted the course of history in its simple progression.
Locke and Hume warred against the Church by plucking stones out of her walls and tossing them at her spires the Prussians erected a metachurch over all Christendom, all belief, all mankind, and declared themselves themselves the priests.
History, in this reading, is of course still progressing, and will never be at an end Young Hegelians notwithstanding but in a sense all attempts to search for higher Truth are in vain, for what is dictated by this years spirt may be eradicated by the next.
The measure of truth is man, and insofar that man changes with the ages, so do the progressing ages demand higher and higher truths.
Carlyles heroworship is one attempt to make Hegelianism concrete,

Of course, this is lofty stuff the heights of pure reason, But even the highest philosophic system has a humansized mechanism, “Freedom” was Hegels measure of historical progress, Carlyle adopts another measure of heroism: The essential trait, the first condition, of the hero is his sincerity.
Every time he repeats this phrase, I cant help thinking to myself Wildes aphorism: “All bad poems are sincere.
” And if there is one thread to be pulled which can show the weakness of Carlyles work, it is this: Neither many of his subjects nor himself is sincere!

Let us take Napoleon.
In his youth, the young Corsican reviled the French, and could very well have become a terrorist against the nation he once would lead.
As a general in Levant, he considered converting to Islam in order to expand his conquests to Alexandrian proportions, thereby making himself an enemy to Christendom.
The man rose to power a republican, the grand culmination of the Revolution, but gladly made himself emperor when the opportunity arose.
Even in his personal life, his brooding over Josephine could be set aside to marry an Austrian princess.
Few men in history have ever been as unscrupulous and opportunist as Bonaparte, Of all the slanderous titles placed upon the little corporal by Enlighmen, “sincerity” may be the most obtuse!

The same goes for Mahound who, as Salmund Rushdie reminds us, gladly walked back his commitment to allah when to was necessary to flatter the Arabs lesser gods.
The same with Shakespeare, who is perhaps the greatest cipher in human history, Henry V seems to promote a monarchist, while the author of Henry VI may well support the mob his histories speak to the greatness of Christianity, but Lear portrays a deeper void than any nihilist has achieved.
Shakespeare felt very deeply he cogitated diversely and with great dedication, But insincerity is better applied to him rather than the contrary,

Sincerity fails as a mechanism to climb the heights, but Carlyles larger structure is similarly unsound.
Many paths could get us to this point, but the central fact is this: Carlyle wants to reconnect with the greatness of the past without subjecting himself to the conditions which made the past, and his men within it, great.
Carlyle the reactionary hates the present, and with good reason but he attempts to love and honor the past without truly knowing what made it lovable or honorable.
This is the greatest contradiction of On Heroes: That the great men documented in this book would be revolted by the idea that they and their beliefs were merely a realization of greatness in history.


To actually be great requires we forget, at least for a time, the idea of greatness and simply be.
But how are we to go about this Mahound, Luther, and St, Peter all had ideas, each of them mutually exclusive from one another, Carlyle and his cohort seem to think the act of choosing is as relevant as the choice that any end is implicitly good so long as one pursues it properly.
In this way he is little different a liberal, who sees as much value in free speech as what is being said who sees as much value in free exercise without caring how or to whom this should be done.
This might be called the curse of the postEnlightenment Promethean: He knows so well the mechanics of a thing that he has wholly forgotten its function.


The only important divide in philosophy is between those who believe in a Truth unchangeable, and those who do not.
Yet Carlyle expounds on “the new Truth, the deeper revealing of the Secret of the Universe, ” This could well be any liberal party platform, Reactionaries of this sort may believe in hierarchy, aristocracy, the greatness of man, But real men and divinity can only be combined in deceit and mockery the emperor Claudius might be the highest realization of this.
We can believe these spurious gods to be either mythic, in which case they are not men, or frauds, in which place they are not gods.
Only one man has long succeeding in convincing others he could be both,

Yet with what contempt does Carlyle treat this man! Perhaps it is piety that keeps Christ out of Carlyle's hall of heroes, but why are there no saints in these halls Francis of Assissi, as one man, completes Carlyles definition of the heroic, and blows up his paradigm for understanding it.
For this was a man who actually was sincere who wrote great poetry, but which pales in comparison to the art that was his life who reinvigorated the spirit of his age, but did so in a way that advanced the ancient cause of orthodoxy, and created nothing new.
He was great before God, before man, and before the ages, Saints like Francis fit within history because they are all men and women of their times but they are promoting the advancement of the Eternal, and are not fooled by the fact that mens changing perceptions of the Truth mean that the Truth is changing, or can change at all.


Why is the Catholic Church, to Carlyle, obsolete Certainly it is moribund politically and morally in the present day.
But why should we not try to resurrect its greatness What about the spirit of our dismal age rules out this possibility If the claims made by the Church were true inAD, they were just as true to Dante on Good Friday, and are just as true to us now.
But if the Church is a fraud, then it was and always has been a fraud,

For all his attempts at reverence, Carlyle treats all his subjects as verysincere conmen, whose value is expressed in how many people theyve duped.
For all this inflated language, Carlyles true vision of history is little more nuanced than Herbert Spencers and other subNietzschean hacks who look to strength as the only measure of truth.
It has little more spiritual complexity than the epicurean, for fundamentally what Carlyle sees as being right for the age is what is pleasing to the men of that age.
Says he: “Divine right, take it on the grand scale, is found to mean divine might, withal!” But why should rightness not be what is most disagreeable to men, especially the men of an evil age Carlyle wrote this book largely because he was dissatisfied with modern mans failure to elect great men.
Are those masses the measure, or the great men who rule them What is the measure He wants the Konning, or Ableman but able in what

This reduces to the fact that the thinking man must occupy either the real Church, or the metachurch of modern intellectualism.
The first claims to have the rules of human life on earth the latter claims to know the very rules of these rules, but lapses in following any particular creed or regiment itself.
And why should it not The Truth is ever changing, And because there are vague principles but no code, no disciples or flock can ever form apart from the small brahmin caste that can endure the blather of Kant and Hegel.
The masses become worse and worse their leaders, their wouldbe great men, follow suit, Men are no longer sincere Carlyle complains, Sincere to what Modernity has made men, like their poetry, too sincere sincere to their lusts, their wants, their facebook pages, their whims.
The problem is that their souls are ugly, because they have nothing beautiful or true to emulate, Goethe was wrong the Good must precede the Beautiful, In fact, the Good must at times appear ugly, for beauty and ugliness are things of this world but it is mans one purpose on earth to make this Good beautiful again.


There is nothing good in the past that does not partake of eternal Goodness there is no honor in the past aside from Honor.
The artificiality of Carlyles construct condemns the entire modern project, but does so in the most pathetic manner.
The liberal or radical can put his faith in history and receive some optimism, but the reactionary must watch the former ages beauty die, or be rebuilt in a hollow imitation.
This is the sad state of the reactionary, always looking backwards but, in confining himself to the material world, unable to understand or recreate what made the past truly great.
But the past is only good so far that it can teach us about what is immortal and that immortal strain, when applied to present conditions, may very well look nothing like what we have seen.
This is the tradeoff of not being able to find our consolations in Claudius and Odin, but in cruel Truth itself.


Carlyle is admirable as historian, a field in which brute facts constrain his poetic fancy, As a philosopher, he is poetic where he should be literal, and his own fervor takes him places his methodology should not allow.
Given this, it is not strange that Carlyle was a stranger in his own time and in ours.
As author and thinker, he offers many great pleasures, but no method for imitators or reason for disciples.
The cause of reaction is always enticing, but no inherently wiser than optimism for the future the romance of both past and future is equally vain.
Our potentialities and virtues live with us in the present,

And while a Christian can look back at the past with great yearning, at the future with dread, and the present age with tears, he must keep in mind this fact: The spirit of the ages is always the same the problem is always himself.
.