Civilization: A Personal View

Civilization: A Personal View
Kenneth Clark
New York and Evanston: Harper & Row Publishers, 1969.

This was a TV series. Could not make law and philosophy visually interesting, so those topics are not covered as fully as others. An 18th-century all-inclusive title for this TV series called Civilization might be: "Speculations on the Nature of Civilization as Illustrated by the Changing Phases of Civilized Life in Western Europe from the Dark Ages to the Present Day."

What is civilization? "...at certain epochs man has felt conscious of something about himself--body and spirit--which was outside the day-to-day struggle for existence and the night-to-night struggle with fear...." Fragile and can be destroyed. Enemies of civilization: fears. Requires confidence, vigor, energy; a sense of permanence; based on success in war; never ceases to develop and change; intellectual energy; freedom of mind; sense of beauty; craving for immortality; tolerance of human diversity; obsessed by light; male and female principles in balance; intensity of life is also intensity of helpfulness; creative power, enlargement of human faculties--the opposite of slavery; order better than chaos; creation better than destruction; courtesy; ritual to avoid hurting other people's feelings in order to inflate our own egos; seeing that we are part of a great whole and all living things are our brothers and sisters. Lack of confidence kills civilization.

Highlights of Western civilization: Year 1100: outpouring of energy; intensification of existence. Could only understand absolute beauty, God, through the effects of beautiful things on the senses. Chivalry--utter subjection to the will of an almost unapproachable woman--to the Romans and Vikings, would have seemed absurd. St. Francis, et al. (Gandhi, Thoreau): free the spirit by shedding material goods.

Renaissance: instance of how burst of civilization depends on confidence; fame became the ideal, replacing chivalry; full use of human faculties more important than money; a man can do all things if he will; most profound thought in the Renaissance expressed in visual imagery; lasted 20 years; intelligence and heroic will.

Printing: 5th-century Greece. 12th-century Chartres and early 18th-century Florence got on very well without it, but they were not less civilized than we are.

HG Wells: communities of obedience and communities of will.

No thought without words. Shakespeare: complete absence of dogma. Authority replaced by experience; observation and experiment. Great figures--Dante; Michelangelo; Shakespeare; Newton; Goethe--summations of their times. Social conditions do not produce great works of art.

What is too subtle to be said, too deeply felt, too revealing, too mysterious can only be expressed in music.

Science separated from poetry.