Irving Babbitt Quotes

A man needs to look, not down, but up to standards set so much above his ordinary self as to make him feel that he is himself “spiritually” the underdog. Anyone who thus looks up has some chance of becoming worthy to be looked up to in turn.

Equality as it is currently pursued is incompatible with true liberty; for liberty involves an inner working with reference to standards, the right subordination, in other words, of man's ordinary will to a higher will. There is an inevitable clash, in short, between equality and humility.

The principle of competition is, as Hesiod pointed out long ago, built in the very roots of the world; there is something in the nature of things that calls for a real victory and real defeat. —IRVING BABBITT

Humanists had always emphasized the hedonistic aspect of cultural life. Manetti had written of the enjoyment that came from thinking and reasoning. Cicero had argued for giving Roman citizenship to the poet Archias because of the pleasure as well as moral improvement he gave Romans. All three of our humanists in this chapter were in agreement that pursuing culture and developing one’s humanity to the utmost were deeply satisfying things to do. For Arnold, it brought life a taste of honey. In Mill’s case, personal experience of “the imaginations of poetry” and the study of “the ways of mankind” had given him back his ability to feel anything at all. Humboldt was the most blissed-out of the three, writing in a letter: “An important new book, a new theory, a new language appears to me as something that I have torn out of death’s darkness, makes me feel inexpressibly joyous.” Inexpressible joy! To appreciate the difference between this sensibility and some of the narrow notions of culture that have held sway among duller pedagogues, it suffices to look at an ideology that briefly flourished in some American universities in the early twentieth century, known as “the New Humanism.” That name for it came later, but the ideology was mostly the invention of Irving Babbitt, another Harvard scholar, though of a very different mentality from that of its president Charles Eliot. Babbitt argued for moral training based entirely on a monocultural canon: mainly the literature of the ancient Greeks,