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Quote by Hans Urs von Balthasar

“The man who follows Christ in full, who denies himself and and dies to himself and to the world, can never, ever be a “bourgeois.”

Quote by Hans Urs von Balthasar

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Hans Urs von Balthasar

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“Knighthood became an anachronism not because its weapons, but because its ‘idealism’ and irrationalism had become out of date. The knight did not understand the motive forces behind the new economy, the new society and the new state; he still persisted in regarding the middle class with its money and ‘narrow-minded’ commercial outlook as an anomaly. The men of the middle class knew much better where they stood with the knights. It amused them to join in the masquerade of the knightly tournaments and the ‘courts of love’, but they treated all such activities as mere sport; in their business activities they remained hard-headed and free from illusions in a world which was the very opposite of chivalrous.”

Middle ClassKnightsBourgeoisZeitgeist
Book:The Social History of Art, Volume 1: From Prehistoric Times to the Middle Ages
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“Richardson' moralizing novels contain the germ of the most immoral art that has ever existed, namely the incitement to indulge in those wish-fantasies in which decency is only a means to an end, and the inducement to occupy oneself to mere illusions instead of striving for the solution of the real problems of life. They also, for that reason, denote one of the most important dividing lines in the history of modern literature; previously the works of an author were either really moral or immoral, but since his time the books which want to appear moral in most cases merely moralize. In the struggle against the upper classes the bourgeois loses his innocence, and as he has to emphasize his virtue all too often, he becomes a hypocrite.”

ArtFictionHypocriteBourgeoisWish FulfillmentPre RomanticismMoralizeReading Public
Book:The Social History of Art Volume 3: Rococo, Classicism and Romanticism
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“Finally, to say that "the most favourable condition for wage. labour is the fastest possible growth of productive capital," is the same as to say: the quicker the working class multiplies and augments the power inimical to it—the wealth of another which lords it over that class—the more favourable will be the conditions under which it will be permitted to toil anew at the multiplication of bourgeois wealth, at the enlargement of the power of capital, content thus to forge for itself the golden chains by which the bourgeoisie drags it in its train.”

CapitalismProfitBourgeoisProletariat
Book:Wage-Labour and Capital & Value, Price and Profit
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“All along the river, the people I spoke to were hard-working and deeply attached to the mental security blanket of having a decent house, clean car and steady job. They were relatively wealthy, but at the same time quite ambivalent about wealth, and disdainful of anything which smacked of excessive consumption. Family was important, but having expensive jewellery or a fancy haircut usually were not. People considered it essential to be productive and efficient, but would also think it an outrage to be expected to reply to a work email on the weekend. From Rotterdam to Ludwigshafen, they counted pennies and returned empty bottles, avoided running up debts, and were careful to save for rainy days. Food was enjoyed but unimportant, and a 'salad' was anything covered with mayonnaise, preferably fried first.”

CultureMentalityBourgeoisEuropeansRhineRhenish Culture
Book:The Rhine: Following Europe's Greatest River from Amsterdam to the Alps
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“When I was a boy -- a bourgeois boy -- that term was applied to my social class by the class above it. Bourgeois meant "not aristocratic, therefore vulgar." When I was in my twenties this changed. My class was now vilified by the class below it; bourgeois began to mean "not proletarian, therefore parasitic, reactionary." Thus it has always been a reproach to assign a man to that class which has provided the world with nearly all its divines, poets, philosophers, scientists, musicians, painters, doctors, architects, and administrators.”

Middle ClassBourgeois
Author:C. S. Lewis
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“An experience is an encounter of mind with world, neither of these ever simple or wholly perspicuous. Often commonplace on the surface, experience shows itself, especially when we trace its roots to the remote domains of the unconscious, uncooperative, evasive, taciturn; the creature of ambiguous impulsions and unresolved conflicts, it often sows confusion and compels drastic misreadings. Far more than simply providing occasions for the stereotyped exercise of thoughts and action, experiences participate in creating the object of interest and passion; it gives form to the inchoate wishes and defends against besetting anxieties.”

PsychologyBourgeoisExperiences
Book:Education of the Senses: The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud
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“The human mind hungers for reality; except for the largely encapsulated id, which is the depository of the raw drives and of deeply repressed material, the other institutions of the mind, the ego and the superego, draw continuously and liberally on the culture in which they subsist, develop, succeed, and fail. While the mind presents the world with its needs, the world gives the mind its grammar, wishes their vocabulary, anxieties their object.”

CultureExperienceBourgeoisPsyche Structure
Book:The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume 3: The Cultivation of Hatred
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“The need to live by secure, sharply etched classifications is buried deep in the human mind and one of its earliest demands; simplicity allays anxieties by defeating discriminations. Real situations are rarely clear-cut, real feelings often nests of ambivalence. This is something the adult learns to recognize and to tolerate, if he is fortunate; it is a strenuous insight from which he will regress at the first opportunity. That is why the liberal temper, which taught men to live with uncertainties and ambiguities, the most triumphant achievement of nineteenth-century culture, was so vulnerable to the assaults of cruder views of the world, to bigotry, chauvinism, and other coarse and simplistic classifications. "Every society," wrote Friedrich Nietzsche in one of his most brilliant aphorisms, "has the tendency to degrade and, as it were, to starve out, its adversaries—at least in its perception." The criminal, he thought, was one victim of such a regressive process; so was the Jew. And "among artists, the 'philistine and bourgeois' becomes a caricature." And artists, the avant-gardes, Nietzsche might have added, only set the tone for the wider culture. Class consciousness, which emerged fitfully and then more and more fully and aggressively towards the end of the eighteenth and in the early nineteenth century, enshrined such a caricature: a mixture and social reality and unconscious needs.”

SimplicityUncertaintyBigotryBourgeoisSimplificationSocial RealityUnconscious Needs
Book:Education of the Senses: The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud
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