The need for a body of common knowledge and common reference does not disappear when a society is pluralistic. On the contrary, it grows more necessary, so that people of different origins and occupation may quickly find familiar ground and as we say, speak a common language. It not only saves time and embarrassment, but it also ensures a kind of mutual confidence and goodwill. One is not addressing an alien, as blank as a stone wall, but a responsive creature whose mind is filled with the same images, memories, and vocabulary as oneself. Otherwise, with the unstoppable march of specialization, the individual mind is doomed to solitude and the individual heart to drying up.
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"Of What Use the Classics Today?," Begin Here: The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and Learning (1991)Jacques Barzun
» Jacques Barzun - all quotes »
If mind is common to us, then also the reason, whereby we are reasoning beings, is common.' If this be so, then also the reason which enjoins what is to be done or left undone is common. If this be so, law also is common; if this be so, we are citizens; if this be so, we are partakers in one constitution; if this be so, the Universe is a kind of Commonwealth.
Marcus Aurelius
But this I thought was the meaning of life, that the individual shook off the habit of accepting the favors of difference, should that be tempting, steeled himself against its humiliation, should that weigh down on him, in order to find the universal, what is common to all human beings, to concern oneself only with that. Oh! How beautiful to lose oneself in this way. But then I thought again that in the having of this concern the meaning of life was to be concerned for oneself as if the particular individual were all there was. Oh! How beautiful thus to find oneself in the universal! If the universal is the rule then the individual is the paradigm [corrected from demand]; if the universal is the demand then the universal is the fulfillment; if the universal is everything, if the universal says everything, then the particular individual believes that the everything is said about him-him alone. So if the place and context here did not require signature, none would be needed, for again it is infinitely inconsequential who has said it (as though the favored one said it, the one who was wronged being in no position to say it, since after all they all have it in them to do it).
Soren Aabye Kierkegaard
The Adlerians, in the name of “individual psychology,” take the side of society against the individual. ... Adler’s later thought succumbs to the worst of his earlier banalization. It is conventional, practical, and moralistic. “Our science ... is based on common sense.” Common sense, the half-truths of a deceitful society, is honored as the honest truths of a frank world.
Alfred Adler
Sin, however common to all, does not gather men together into a common concept, into an association or partnership (no more than out in the graveyard the multitude of the dead form a society), but splits people up into individuals and fastens hold of every individual as a sinner.
Soren Aabye Kierkegaard
I know from experience that to one who thinks much and feels deeply, it often seems that he has only to put down his thoughts and feelings in order to produce something altogether out of the common; yet as soon as he sets to work he falls into a certain mannerism of style and common phraseology; his thoughts do not come spontaneously, and one might almost say that it is not the mind that directs the pen, but the pen leads the mind into common, empty artificiality.
Henryk Sienkiewicz
Barzun, Jacques
Bascom, John
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