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Intellectualism, though by no means confined to doubters, is often the sole piety of the skeptic.
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p. 28

 

Richard Hofstadter

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Piety is not an end but a means to attain ... the highest degree of culture. This is why ... those who parade piety as a purpose and an aim mostly turn into hypocrites

 

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Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and those who followed them accurately foresaw this growing split between truth and reality in Western culture, and they endeavored to call Western man back from the delusion that reality can be comprehended in an abstracted, detached way. But though they protested vehemently against arid intellectualism, they were by no means simple activists. Nor were they antirational. Anti-intellectualism and other movements in our day which make thinking subordinate to acting must not at all be confused with existentialism. Either alternative-making man subject or object-results in loosing the living, existing person.

 

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Anti-intellectualism ... first got its strong grip on our ways of thinking because it was fostered by an evangelical religion that also purveyed many humane and democratic sentiments. It made its way into our politics because it became associated with our passion for equality. It has become formidable in our education partly because our educational beliefs are evangelically egalitarian. Hence, as far as possible, our anti-intellectualism must be excised from the benevolent impulses upon which it lives by constant and delicate acts of intellectual surgery which spare these impulses themselves.

 

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If the skeptic admits that truth exists, he allows the innocent illusion of believing they will some day possess it. As for me, he declares, I abide by appearances, I note what they are and adhere to them only to the degree that, as a living being, I cannot do otherwise. I act like other people, I perform the same deeds they do, but I identify myself with neither my words nor my actions, I bow to customs and laws, I pretend to share the convictions, i.e., the prejudices of my fellow citizens, while knowing that in the last analysis I am quite as unreal as they are...What then is a skeptic? - A ghost: a conformist ghost.

 

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One sole God;
One sole ruler,—his Law;
One sole interpreter of that law—Humanity.

 

Giuseppe Mazzini