The Sickness of Consciousnessin the Western Philosophical Tradition

The Decadenceof Western Civilization

The Romans of the DecadenceThomas Couture, 1847

The Collapse of Civilization

The Last Days of BabylonGeorges Rochegrosse, 1891

The Sickness of Civilization

The PlagueArnold Böcklin, 1898

“I am a child of my time, that is, a decadent:

the difference is that I understand this, that I revolt

against it.” --Friedrich Nietzsche (1888)

“The tragedy of all culture [is that]

the higher and more noble it is,

the less right it has to exist,

for it is a superfluous and harmful hotbed

in which life rots and weakens.” --František V. Krejčí (1896)

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground

The Reader of DostoevskyEmil Filla, 1907

The Sickness of Consciousness

“Too much consciousness is a sickness…

any consciousness at all is a sickness.”

--Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground (1864)

“[E]very line in Notes from the

Underground is important…

no thinking person can afford not to

consider carefully all of the ideas expressed

in it.” --Vasily Rozanov (1891)

“Civilization has done for mankind what life

has done for the Underground Man:

provided it with an excess of

consciousness,

a sick consciousness which has come to

find pleasure in its moral fall.” --Robert Louis Jackson (1958)

“Pure reflection [...]

is a sickness [and] an evil.” --Friedrich Joseph Schelling (1792)

“Consciousness of life…

is mere pain and sorrow

over this existence.”--G. W. F. Hegel (1807)

“[Suffering] is heightened

in proportion to

the clearness of [one’s] consciousness.”--Arthur Schopenhauer (1818)

“It is the rising level of consciousness,

or the degree to which it rises,

that is the continual intensification of

despair:

the more consciousness,

the more intense the despair.”--Søren Kierkegaard (1849)

“[O]ur souls have become corrupted in

proportion as our sciences and arts have

advanced toward perfection.”--Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1750)

“All progress has been in appearance

steps toward

the perfection of the individual,

but in fact toward

the decay of the species.”--Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1754)

“[I]n following the history of civil society,

we shall be telling also that of

human sickness.”--Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1754)

“Our feeling for nature

is like the sick person’s

feeling for health.”--Friedrich Schiller (1796)

“[A]s soon as we experience

the misery of culture

we long to be back where we began.”--Friedrich Schiller (1796)

“I have never been able to understand the idea

that only one-tenth of the people

should be given higher education,

while the remaining nine-tenths should serve merely

as material and means to that end...

I do not wish to think...

otherwise than with the faith

that all the ninety millions of us Russians...

will some day be educated, humanized, and happy.”--Fyodor Dostoevsky (1876)