Of course there is trouble from the start.
For even at this first gathering one could receive the impression that every great mind feels extremely insecure as soon as it leaves the refuge of its treetop aerie and has to make itself understood on common ground.Diotima had tried to be gentle with the poets especially: "she made a point of assuring the poets in particular that all life, even the world of business, rested on an inner poetry if one 'regarded it magnanimously.'" That was a mistake.
. . . it turned out that most of those singled out . . . had come on the assumption that they were expected to launch the Parallel Campaign with some brief words of advice -- somewhere between five and forty-five minutes' worth -- which, if heeded, would hat guarantee its success, even if subsequent speakers squandered time with pointless and misguided suggestions.Diotima senses the problems and is discouraged; as the narrator says, "she felt the wind of the grave over the fields of the spirit." But she remembers Arnheim's pessimism "into which she was drifting, which made it ultimately an almost sensuously pensive and flattering pleasure."
Musing on his prophetic words, she wondered: "Isn't it, deep down, the pessimism people of action are always bound to feel when they come in contact with those who traffic in words?"In Chapter 72, the narrator provides an essay that begins as a "few necessary words about . . . the smile of the scholars who had accepted Diotima's invitation and were listening to the famous artists." In these men, the narrator informs us, "a propensity for Evil crackled like a fire under a cauldron."
To explain this, the narrator says, we must "ask ourselves how science has arrived at its present state . . . considering how entirely we are in its power." He traces it back to "the matter-of-factness that inspired" Galileo Galilei "raged and spread like an infection through Europe." It has to do with Galileo's excessive pleasure in "facts."
And in truth, before intellectuals discovered their pleasure in "facts," facts were the sole preserve of soldiers, hunters, and traders --- people by nature full of violence and cunning. The struggle for existence makes no allowance for sentimental considerations; it knows only the desire to kill one's opponent in the quickest, most factual ways; here everyone is a positivist.This is a bad thing. Why? The narrator goes on to explain:
In other words, we find just those ancient vices of soldiers, hunters, and traders, here merely translated into intellectual terms and interpreted as virtues. This raises them above the pursuit of personal and relatively vulgar advantage, but even in this transformation the element of primal evil is not lost; it is seemingly indestructible and everlasting, at least as everlasting as everything humanly sublime, since it consists of nothing less and nothing else than the urge to trip up that sublimity and watch it fall on its face.There is a certain pettiness in the "factual" outlook as practiced by scientists:
Certainly they demonstrate the love of truth. But surrounding this clear, shining love is a predilection for disillusionment, compulsiveness, ruthlessness, cold intimidation, and dry rebuke, a spiteful predilection, or at least an involuntary emanation of some kind. . . . This approach to shaping life is of course in no way nurturing or appeasing. It would regard everything worthy of life not with simple veneration but rather as a line of demarcation being constantly redrawn in the battle for inner truth. . . . It just so happens that the second thought, at the very least, of every person today confronted by an overwhelming phenomenon, even if it should be its beauty that so overwhelms him, is "You can't fool me! I'll cut you down to size!"That is the unconscious evil expressed in the slightly condescending smile of the intellectuals who are to draw up the guidelines for the great Parallel Campaign.
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