Civilization
“Plato to NATO” Author: David Gress
Chapter 2
1. “The ancestors of the Greek arrived in what was to become Greece long before classical civilization began. In the later second millennium BC, they produced a Bronze Age culture, literate and artistic centered on ten places, of which Mycenae enjoyed social, artistic and military ties both friendly and hostile” (Pg 13)
This quote is all about history. David Gress explains about the contemporary cultures on how Anatolia proceeded to Greece with the kind of life they lead.
2. “The stories of the poem are stories of the Trojan War, evidently known to all in dark and classical Greece and imagined by Greeks to have taken place in the remote past, many generations before their own time, whatever that time happened to be.” (Pg 14)
The quote reflects on the history of the Trojan War of the Greeks. It introduces the cause of the war said to be because of abduction the most beautiful woman in the world, Helen from her husband, Menelaus brother to the high king of the Greeks.
3. “The romantic individualism of Goethe, Fichte, and especially Holderlin stimulated an extraordinary intense, almost religious philhellenism.” (Pg 15)
This quote reflects on love as a power to save humanity by the Greeks, while lamenting the distance separating antiquity from modern man.
4. “Holderlin’s gentle tolerance extended to the radical revolutionaries in France, who modeled their empire not so much on the Greeks as on the Romans.” (Pg 16)
This quote history based explains how evidently it was to a second break of antiquity of the French cult of Rome.
5. “the birth of tragedy believes in art against the background of another belief: that is not possible to live with truth, and that the will of truth is already a symptom of decadence” (Pg 27)
This is art related and explains how fundamental the substantive discussion the modern crisis is of the culture is.
Chapter 3
1. “History is for human knowledge. Knowing yourself means knowing what you can do and since nobody knows what he can do until he tries, the only clue to what man can do is what man has done. The value of history, then, is that it teaches us what man has done and thus what man is” (pg 42)
This quote depicts the association amidst the prevailing art and the science. Within the book, he depicts distinctively that history contains the existing has the procession disposition of the fundamental elements that normally is self-explanatory. David Gress discloses that the whole thing that is associated with nature and normally explained in the form of movement and body that represent the science and the work of art.
2. “The revolutionary can only regard his revolution as a progress in so far as he is also an historian, genuinely re-enacting in his own historical thought the life he nevertheless rejects” (pg 46)
The existing work of Art normally put forward that knowledge is of requisite for evaluating the advancement. It clarifies the prevailing instantaneous thought of response as it tackles the old predicaments of the history time. This therefore ascertains that art is fundamental within the human self-knowledge.
3. “The retention in the mind, at one phase, of what was achieved in the preceding phase” (Pg 48)
Within the prevailing work of David, the association amidst the art and the science is of distinct spelling. Art is normally definable as the thought that pertains to the past events which is closely tied to the objectives of the study in the comprehension of the old thought.
4. “My first answer to the question ‘What is history?’ is that it is a continuous process of interaction between the historian and his facts, an unending dialogue between the present and the past.” (Pg 47)
The study of history connection that pertains to the historical progression is normally reliant on the science of nature. Moreover, this history does not explain the period accompanied by the location of the history, which is related to the science within the procession that trudges alongside the prevailing evidence of parade in the determination of the existing vision angle of art in the elaboration of the past.
5. “Scientists, social scientists, and historians are all engaged in different branches of the same study: the study of man and his environment, of the effects of man on his environment and of his environment on man. The object of the study is the same: to increase man’s understanding of, and mastery over, his environment. Historian and physical scientist are united in the fundamental purpose of seeking to explain, and in the fundamental procedure of question and answer. The historian, like any other scientist, is an animal who incessantly asks the question ‘Why?” (Pg 50)
Within the book, the prevailing art accompanied by the science is a verity of the precedent for each man and the surrounding as pertaining noteworthy impacts that normally pertains to the surroundings on humankind.
Chapter 4
1. “Thus natural science is not a way of knowing the real world; its value lies not in its truth but in its utility; by scientific thought we do not know nature, we dismember it in order to master it.”
Art normally tries to elaborate the prevailing nature of the universe based on the existing past methods of study. Conversely, science with value normally analyses the historical reality concerning the world.
2. “The study of history comprehends everything that men have said, thought, done or suffered. That much is commonplace, but also not quite true; some reservations have to be made. In the first place, not all the past is recoverable. Historical study is not the study of the past but the study of present traces of the past.” (Pg 57)
The prevailing teaching of the history demands sources that are plainly provided by the art. Science explains the substances of the underlying study itself thereby possessing broad range of the prevailing sources within practice.
3. “What kind of things does history find out? I answer, res gestae: actions of human beings that have been done in the past. History is the science of res gestae…” (Pg 58)
David first statement in the book, “the idea of history”, explains the history in terms of nature and value. This is art related and is not clear and resolute compared to science analysis. In terms of the object and method that analytically explains the connection of the nature and man subsequently art proves it.
4. “No question that rises in this primary series, the series constituting my real life, ever requires the answer in honor I won them, in honor I will die with them’. This secondary life is prevented from overflowing into a primary life by being what I call in capsulated” (Pg 76)
Here, Collingwood tries to explain the distinct nature of science as primary series and art as secondary series. Science constitutes the elements of life while art does not flow into science due to its in capsulate nature.
5. “History cannot be scientifically written unless the historian can re-enact in his own mind the experience of the people whose actions he is narrating” (Pg 97)
History being seen as nature represents art as a spectacle of virtue. David critically reveals the distinction of art from science in that art has to re-enact in order to be understood hence revealing the peculiar nature no science.
