{"id":3592,"date":"2019-09-22T11:54:50","date_gmt":"2019-09-22T11:54:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2019\/09\/22\/roger-kimball-on-elias-canetti-on-death\/"},"modified":"2019-09-22T11:54:50","modified_gmt":"2019-09-22T11:54:50","slug":"roger-kimball-on-elias-canetti-on-death","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2019\/09\/22\/roger-kimball-on-elias-canetti-on-death\/","title":{"rendered":"Roger Kimball on Elias Canetti on Death"},"content":{"rendered":"
An excerpt from Roger Kimball, <\/span>Becoming Elias Canetti<\/a>:<\/span><\/div>\n
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. . . . Canetti\u2019s response to the fact of death\u2014\u201cthe only fact,\u201d as he sometimes puts it\u2014is a tragic stance of rebellion against an ineluctable fate. The overriding question for every individual, he writes in The Torch in My Ear<\/em>, is \u201cwhether he should put up with the fact that a death is imminent for him.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Canetti has never worked out his thoughts on death in any systematic fashion. His basic message would seem to be the unexceptionable admonition not to go gentle into that good night. Yet he also uses the rejection of death as the starting point for other, often more questionable, sorts of statements. At one point, for example, his insistence that the individual take a stand against death leads him to the pious declaration that \u201cI care about the life of every human being and not just that of my neighbor.\u201d And in one of his essays, he goes beyond the posture of stoically resisting death to tell us that \u201cSo long as death exists, no beauty is beautiful, no goodness is good.\u201d We must of course be grateful that Canetti cares about the lives of all of us, even if the word \u201ccares\u201d is rendered practically empty in this context. But as for the relation between death and beauty and death and goodness\u2014well, here I think we must question Canetti\u2019s dictum. For it seems at least equally plausible that beauty and goodness can emerge as compelling forces in our lives only against the background of mortality; in this sense, death, as Wallace Stevens put it, is the mother of beauty. Things matter to us precisely because neither we nor they last forever. Now, I do not doubt that Canetti\u2019s meditations on death betray a core of genuine pathos. But in the end I\u2019m afraid that they amount to little more than a collection of sentimental exhortations; their chief function would seem to be to perpetuate the atmosphere of intellectual melodrama within which Canetti prefers to operate. Indeed, they would hardly be worth scrutiny, except that Canetti insists on placing them at the very center of his thought.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Canetti quoted: \u201cSo long as death exists, no beauty is beautiful, no goodness is good.\u201d<\/span> Canetti<\/span> paraphrased:  To those who live free of illusions, nothing ultimately matters if neither we nor they last forever. Kimball quoted:<\/span><\/span>  "Things matter to us precisely because neither we nor they last forever."<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An excerpt from Roger Kimball, Becoming Elias Canetti: . . . . Canetti\u2019s response to the fact of death\u2014\u201cthe only fact,\u201d as he sometimes puts it\u2014is a tragic stance of rebellion against an ineluctable fate. The overriding question for every individual, he writes in The Torch in My Ear, is \u201cwhether he should put up … Continue reading “Roger Kimball on Elias Canetti on Death”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[463,184,40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3592","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-canetti-elias","category-death-and-immortality","category-literary-matters"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3592","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3592"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3592\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3592"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3592"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3592"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}