Forgotten Thinkers: Jacques Barzun

Visit my new website: www.wescecil.com Lecture delivered at Peninsula College exploring the life and thought of the prolific critic and historian Jacques Barzun. Lecture by Wesley Cecil PhD.
Download the lecture handout at www.wescecil.com/jacques-barzun
For more information visit www.wescecil.com

[@robertwilkscomposer3726]

Barzun's "From Dawn to Decadence" is the best non-fiction book I've ever read. The product of a lifetime of research, broad in perspective, and above all, extremely well-written. Probably not intended as a myth-buster, but he does bust a few, depending on the myths the reader entertains. At 800 pages, one might expect it to be rambling and wordy, but actually it's extremely concise. Every word carefully chosen, every sentence and every paragraph meticulously crafted for flow of understanding. I found it a joy to read.

[@swetiyeti7991]

Hopeful pessimist has been a term I have used for myself for quite a while. It is heartening to know someone far more cultured than me proposed this view. I know I’m late to this video but thank you for putting this out!

[@xxcrysad3000xx]

it's enapsulated by the phrase "hope for the best yet expect [or plan for] the worst."

[@cheri238]

Thank you, Professor Wes Cecil. This was a great lecture on Jacque Barzan. I have listened to this lecture a few times, and "Dawn to Decadence" is an excellent book. What would he think today in 2023? Our elite universities were bought out years ago by greed. Yes, women have come a long way . Must we always be second-class citizens? Yes, we are only human, and women still can follow the herd in decision-making and be misled in the games for power. Therefore, again their are men and women who rise and think outside the box are making contribution to changes in all departments of education in various fields. Democracy within a system of capitalism, by corporations of greed and powerful politicians, has led the dawn to be awakened today. With the deepest appreciation for all your lectures. Every 500 years, empires fall. We all can make a betterment for our societies, but it begins inside of you, with the understanding what the intellect is used for. What is intelligence, and what is thought, with in addition how and why the Western brain got it wrong. Thank you.

[@maximkmrr3879]

An amazing man! It’s such a shame that so few people have heard of him and his work.

[@jimcrabbe3373]

I was suspicious of this lecture from the first moment the speaker pronounced the name Jacques incorrectly. I am no expert on Barzun, but I have read half-dozen or so of Barzun's books. This speaker's presentation of Barzun's ideas seemed somewhat off the mark. It also contained factual errors about Barzun's life like saying he moved to Austin, TX when he moved to San Antonio. I would read Barzun's books for yourself or look elsewhere for an explication of Barzun's ideas.

[@HanktheWonderDog]

As always, I learn much from Mr. Cecil and often follow up in more research on these great and sometimes vastly under-rated thinkers and philosophers. I find these fine lectures to be like a light switch turned on in the dark, thank you.

[@robertgarvey4069]

I absolutely love what you said about the Artist's Statement (around 32:00). I always felt bad for art students when I'd walk through my university's art building and read their half-literate attempts at explaining their work. Why do we torture artists by expecting them to MEAN things?

[@robertgarvey4069]

Also love that you mentioned the social "sciences'" replication crisis.

[@kryptonickraze]

Great series so far Wes. Hoping to hear one on Bergson in upcoming weeks.

[@helenemasour9256]

Phenomenal lecture.

[@alija83]

At 59:10, final note of Barzun is powerful. Thanks Cecil for this amazing lecture.

[@madmax8405]

Now, THIS is a forgotten thinker! Literally NEVER heard about.

[@inventsable]

Really love your lectures Cecil. You're the ideal educator being so motivated, enthusiastic, and knowledgeable! Hope you see how much the online community appreciates it

[@Jy3pr6]

The hallmark of the mind control of our times is when authorities speak about things that are not obviously good or bad as if they are. There are many examples of that in this lecture

[@alan2here]

An artist explaining his work being missing the point is an interesting insight.

[@johmayo7042]

Thanks for this. The segment on Barzun re racism in the 30s made me wonder if this was a sort of opposition to Girauldoux. In any case, highly informative, highly entertaining. Thank you!

[@Meihuar2006]

I enjoyed this lecture! "The Great Works" carry baggage for their complete omission (at least at one time) of any work that wasn't in some manner descended from European culture... I mean, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata have shaped cultures from Laos to Indonesia, and Journey to the West continues to influence Chinese mainland and diaspora culture, but these works are omitted from such lists, often with condescending certainty. But, as you discuss in this lecture, the notion of "great works" is doomed to subjectivity. (Though we all know, in the recesses of our soul, some books truly are "more equal than others"... we just won't ever arrive at a criteria for greatness that we can all agree on.... >:-/ ). Maybe the true problem is one of perception--"a list of great books" is just a list of works I recommend you familiarize yourself with... whereas we culturally want to interpret "a list of great works" as an immutable, perfect statement from Heaven.

[@alfredsams9059]

You have humour and judge writers for today

[@Kaydiasez]

at 30:00 Good God, YES! I struggled with my professors endlessly over this. So glad I'm not the only person put off by the anti-intellectual word jumble that is the artist statement.

[@chrissearer1896]

Oh Momma!!! :/ ......YES!

[@aMulliganStew]

53:58 - 54:08 Exactly what I imaged the marble walls and stairways of the New York Public Library to be saying to me the first time I visited Manhattan.

[@scottwhittaker4959]

Perhaps Barzun is "forgotten" because he was so prolific and wide-ranging; like God, nowhere and everywhere. Missing from Cecil's lecture is the fact that Barzun viewed the intellect as "energetic," at the very heart of life, not an escape from it; in short: "cool." What subject that interested Barzun is not still discussed today? Race? Art? Music? Education? Science? Darwin? Marx? Baseball? Cecil acts as if Barzun was arguing for the perpetuation of the horse-drawn carriage. And look how casually Cecil dismisses Barzun because he was a foreigner. Are we not a nation of immigrants? Is it not the outsider who sees the American scene more clearly than we who are born into it?

[@dm-gq5uj]

Barzun may be out of fashion now, but I daresay his works will eventually be appreciated and will last longer than any number of politically correct theorists who are chic today. Read Barzun and you find wisdom and deep thought I went on to read William James and Samuel Butler because Barzun made me want to read them. Read a trashy poseur like Foucault and before long your eyes gaze over. I strongly disagree with much of what Paglia writes, but at least she is fun and interesting to read. Most academics write cliched sludge and make their students hate history and literature.

[@jorgelander4752]

Any chance you can cover Alain Locke in this series ?

[@Wylkus42]

Whoa now calling out being able to study comic books. Not to say any of them approach Great Books tier, but a few writers have made comics that certainly belong in the Very Good Books tradition. Alan Moore in particular comes to mind with From Hell, V for Vendetta, his run on Swamp Thing, and Watchmen. Do not judge them by their movie translations, they are exceptional writing. Though I will concede that a great many of the comics touted as great works by those college classes, Maus and Persepolis leap to mind, while pretty good simply do not stand up to comparison with real literature.

[@augustineriley5582]

Wylkus - certainly Alan Moore, agreed!

[@robertmonie2129]

Interesting, thoughtful presentation, but didn't Barzun move to San Antonio, rather than Austin, Texas after his long career based in New York City and Columbia University?

[@jasminejeanine2239]

THANKS!!! Wes for introducing me to Barzun as how he thinks is exactly how I think about things but has FAR more experience over the most changing millenium ever seen. Of course I struggle with the same thing something my bf said just this morning that it's VERY easy to misunderstand me bc I don't respond the way he expects. For example: I DON'T care (his example today) about things and furthermore don't care that he struggles with it. Thus he could easily take this as NOT giving a damn about him, however as he's learned it's not that I don't give a damn I just that I don't struggle with his mental hangups and I'm NOT going to feed into his dsyfunction. Thus if he asks me during a argument "if I care about his feelings right now", if I'm angry then my answer will be a truthful NOOO!!! Not right now. Thus his conclusions is that my method requires him to become more emotionally healthy since when he did he realized that I was RIGHT!! Since my lack of caring IS caring about him since my exact reason that I do these things is bc I care more about HIM then pacifying him. Thus I routinely challenge his pov, tell him stuff he doesn't like nor agree with, at least yet lol as in the last 7 yrs he's seen me be proven right again and again much to his shock as when say shocking things he assumes I'm talking out my ass. But when he wanted to know the future he and his son are lining up to ask me thus I'm the resident seer; which I rather not be since I believe in getting ppl to think FOR THEMSELVES. My focus is on breaking down all my indoctrination of which I got significately more in some areas and less in others since I homeschooled myself, had no TV/radio and was told I could read any non fiction books I wanted thus I didn't get a single view perspective like from school thus making me a horror to teach later as I didn't even know there was a box and knew stuff in tons of different arenas and how they're interconnected thus I don't even see math as different from philosophy as they were both developed during the same time AND in the same place under those very belief systems put forth by the philosophers as BOTH are taking abstracts and turning them into something useful. Thus I don't see how things are different but how things are the same. For example: religion.... If you look at all religions you find that the core beliefs are the SAME. Thus Hinduism and Christianity share more in common. BUT if like most you camp out on their polytheism you miss that they actually believe that EVERYTHING is reduced ONE, thus each god is a different manifestation of the same thing just put in a way that speaks to YOU best.

[@a.n.c.australia]

Forgotten Thinker: Dominic Stanca. Let us solve the problems around us, as quickly as we can :))

[@a.randomjack6661]

Feb. 2022 Synchronicity at work again. Video title in my feed while I'm 35:53 in the lecture "DNA Mutation and Evolution Are Not As Random As We Thought"

[@bondapovon]

There have been lots of free will sided thinkers featured recently. Any chance of the other side of the coin in the future such as Althusser, Cioran, or Gray?

[@wescecil3920]

+Hector Hung I had not conceived of the thinkers as "Free will" and "Not Free will". I don't tend to sort thinkers this way, but it is an interesting conception. I would posit that Mencius is not a proponent of free will.

[@bondapovon]

thanks for getting back to me. Thats a fair enough point. I would love to see a lecture on Cioran or Gray some day if you ever have time which was why I asked. Anyway, love your lectures as always-and thanks for posting them.

[@xyhmo]

The moment you realize this is not about the Norwegian legendary black metal band Burzum.

[@VictorLepanto]

I don't think so. Dawn To Decadence was WIDELY read & think it will still be read 1,000yrs from now. Just as Boethius is still read today.

[@okra7648]

I hope so! I plan on reading him after listening to this. But widely read? doubt it, though I'm sure he's popular in a few circles. I personally never heard of the guy until this lecture and I consider myself fairly informed on history and philosophy.

[@erniereyes1994]

KZbin commentators who get most of what they know from the internet: "Barzun had a bad understanding of... "

[@cloudage2956]

30:18 How to understand criticism

[@WWTvsUFT]

15:55 race is not a strictly western problem. ever read anything about asia?

[@jasminejeanine2239]

There is NOTHING better for societies then having ppl from different cultures speaking about ours as they weren't indoctrinated by the same culture thus don't develop the same blind spots. Hence I believe the ONLY way to solve difficult questions is to get different fields to work TOGETHER since each is totally blind to the big picture and thus they see problems from a very narrow perspective. For example my dad's friend (a engineer like him) was talking to his medical researcher friend who was stumped on the best way to deliver medication at a steady rate. He immediately thought what about a patch. Thus then turned into the fentanyl pain patch. Lol

[@alfredsams9059]

Nice to have you to stop hagiography

[@Pandaemoni]

Barzun had a really bad understanding of evolutionary theory. Organisms make choices? Yes. (Neurobiologists may disagree, but evolutionary biologists generally would not.) Choices affect survival? Yes. Therefore survival isn't random? YES! Survival isn't random. No one said it was. Mutation is random and there is some randomness in the conglomeration of traits that make up an organism, but those traits and mutations-once set-are what is supposed to influence your odds of survival. (Ignoring random accidents, meteor strikes and the like.) No wonder his work in no way influenced anyone. I would also add that the speaker is potentially wrong to say that birth control is crazy evolutionarily speaking. Evolution is not always a numbers game. If it were, then bacteria win. What matters is passing genes into the future. Ignoring how the change in child mortality changes the playing field, it COULD be that parents who choose when and how many children to have will have superior-smarter, stronger, better, more well adjusted-kids. They will be able to select higher quality mates and produce higher quality grandkids. In each generation these better positioned offspring may have a 99% chance of passing their genes to the next generation, whereas a couple which refuses to use any birth control (and that would include abstaining from sex to avoid pregnancy), would have let's say 12 children, be impoverished from the cost of that, those kids would have received less direct attention, so their mortality and morbidity rates, education, health might all suffer relative to the offspring of parents who are controlling future births. They may have trouble finding mates, the odds of their having offspring might be concomitantly reduced and therefore controlling birth rates could be the better strategy. That is pure conjecture, but it is not a complicated leap, and shows that birth control might not, under the right circumstances, be evolutionarily "crazy."

[@blazmaverick]

+Pandaemoni Thank you for posting this. That rambling about evolution was painful to listen to.

[@seranatus]

Under the "right circumstances" everything is random. You're argument is hinged on this.

[@blazmaverick]

I wouldn't worry about birth control being "crazy" in evolutionary terms. Not only is there merit to the argument you offered, but there's also the fact that birth control DIDN'T evolve, at least not in the relevant sense. It's not a direct product of biological evolution, but a contingent byproduct of minds that evolved for understanding their environments and improving their social standing and quality of life through cultural and technological innovation. In that context, birth control makes perfect sense.

[@michaelmcarthur8364]

hello god

[@CreativeVery]

+il baron "You're"?

[@GRYL180]

Where does influence come from? Influence is to a great degree shared power. Few intellectuals have achieved influence without tapping the support of powerful people. The greats of the renaissance and the enlightenment all had their patrons. We err when we believe great works are only influential because of their inherent power. In this regard, Barzun was a victim of his challenge to the creeping orthodoxy of his time. Nothing more or less explains his lack of influence.

[@antoniolima1068]

is lack of influence comes from the fact that he lived in a velvet bublle, never had skin in the fight, only projections, like a person talking about hunger that never did experience hunger a day in is life, he indulge himself in academia security, playing silly games only intelectuals play.

[@GRYL180]

@@antoniolima1068 Well, it looks like we are dealing here with differences in interpretation and perhaps taste. For me, it is obvious that Barzun was railing against the rising tide of liberalism and specifically, against the corruption of language. I dare say he could only have take on his fight from academe; for that has always been the great theatre of war in the battle of big ideas. And if you want to talk about intellectual silliness and velvet bubbles holding back an intellectual, you'd first have to explain the huge popularity of Michel Foucault. Can it get anymore abstract and silly than him?

[@goproengineers]

This lecture seems superficial.

[@brandonmacey964]

And yet.. the sense of race becomes ever more apparent.

[@tremblence]

Mostly because of leftists and their racist hatred of white people Its pathetic and disgusting.

[@8kumquat8]

Wonderful. But embarrassing that he pronounces the s at the end of Jacques.

[@robertgarvey4069]

Mg West I've noticed that people who read a lot frequently don't know how to pronounce words and names that they use, because they've read them maybe hundreds or thousands of times more than they have spoken or heard it. But as, I believe, William Strunk Jr said, "If you don't know how to pronounce a word, say it loud!"

[@jimcrabbe3373]

Yes, and I wouldn't say he characterized Barzun's ideas correctly either. Look elsewhere.

[@jclimacus081]

Read Barzun yourself. There are several misrepresentations and minor factual errors here. Aside from that the presenter is right that Barzun has had (lamentably) no influence. But just because an idea or thinker for that matter is discarded, forgotten or ignored in no way means that it has been defeated or debunked.

[@LeoRWong]

Berlioz

[@viggosmiles9496]

I bought his book and finished chap. 5. I realize that I am a decadent in our degenerate civilization. I love the West but cannot believe in Christianity and I can't resort to heterosexuality. Sometimes the most difficult thing to realize is the obvious.

[@TheWhitehiker]

Wes overly negativizes great works--he bows too much to ID poli.

[@ianman6]

Barzun, and it appears Mr. Cecil, misunderstand evolution deeply. If Mr. Cecil correctly summarizes Barzun’s vies on the subject, then it’s not clear that Barzun read Darwin, or any evolutionary biology literature, very closely. He seems to have been hung up on the idea of randomness as an abstract concept and ran with a critique of it that did not apply to evolution at all. Choice and randomness are not a problem for Darwinist evolutionary models, why he thought they were is unclear. Nor does he appear to understand science itself, if he thinks that rewriting a scientific text over time as hypotheses or evidence are challenged and updated is a sign of bad science. Not doing so is in fact bad science.

[@BlindEyeJones]

Cecil is too much of a liberal or his audience is with the remarks about civic pride: Trump is saying the exact thing that Cecil says he never hears from his students. Barzun's ideas remind me of many of the things that Allan Bloom said in his book "The Closing of the American Mind."

[@S2Cents]

+Walter Peretiatko Yeah, the smug liberal type. They're looking and sounding less and less "on the right side of history" to use a favorite cliche of the old 60s "New Left" and their hideous spawn, SJWs.

[@BNardolilli]

what "grab them by the pussy?"

[@delightfulBeverage]

This lecture is a fine example of why many people hate academia. Instead of simply conveying the facts about what Barzun's ideas were, we're treated to endless editorializing by Dr. Mushyhead who insists on gifting his students with his own "fourth rate" ideas are about race, evolution, democracy, etc. The university-- exactly as I remember it.