Richard Weaver - Language is sermonic

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One of the first major steps in the direction of modern skepticism came through the victory of Occam over Aquinas in a controversy about language. The statement that modi essendi were replaced by modi significandi et intelligendi, or that ontological referents were abandoned in favor of pragmatic significations, describes broadly the change in philosophy which continues to our time. From Occam to Bacon, from Bacon to Hobbes, and from Hobbes to contemporary semanticists, the progression is clear: ideas become psychological figments, words become useful signs.

Richard Weaver
All of us have had the experience of finding a particularly felicitous phrase in poetry and of feeling: This is what the world really means; he has hit it closer than anyone has ever hit it before.

Richard Weaver
Many of us who read the literature of social science as laymen are conscious of being admitted at a door which bears the watchword scientific objectivity and of emerging at another door which looks out upon a variety of projects for changing, renovating, or revolutionizing society. In consequence, we feel the need of a more explicit account of how the student of society passes from facts to values or statements of policy.

Richard Weaver
We cannot be too energetic in reminding our nihilists and positivists that this is a world of action and history.

Richard Weaver
Drill in exact translation is an excellent way of disposing the mind against that looseness and exaggeration with which the sensationalists have corrupted our world. If schools of journalism knew their business, they would graduate no one who could not render the Greek poets.

Richard Weaver
In dialectic the student … will get training in thinking, whereas the best that he gets now is a vague admonition to think for himself.

Richard Weaver
Man … feels lost without the direction-finder provide by progress.

Richard Weaver
It is not that things give meaning to words; it is that meaning makes things things. It does not make things in their subsistence; but it does make things in their discreteness for the understanding.

Richard Weaver
There is a sentimental poetry, and it will have to be exposed (not censored. certainly; for to omit criticism of it would deprive us of our fairest chance to combat the sentimental rhetoric of the student's environment).

Richard Weaver
Now, with the general decay of religious faith, it is the scientists who must speak ex cathedra, whether they wish to or not.

Richard Weaver
If we share to a large extent in the mutuality of spirit which makes meaning possible, we are receptive to true meanings; if we do not, we may accept wrong or perverted ones. And since there is no way of getting outside the human imagination to decide otherwise what a word should mean, we are compelled to realize that the most imaginative users of language are those who are going to have the greatest influence upon vocabulary in the long run.

Richard Weaver
To one completely committed to this realm of becoming, as are the empiricists, the claim to apprehend verities is a sign of psychopathology. Probably we have here but a highly sophisticated expression of the doctrine that ideals are hallucination and that the only normal, sane person is the healthy extrovert, making instant, instinctive adjustments to the stimuli of the material world.

Richard Weaver
The young come to us creatures of imagination and strong affection; they want to feel, but they don't know how—that is to say, they do not know the right objects and the right measures. And it is entirely certain that if we leave them to the sort of education obtainable today for extra-scholastic sources, the great majority will be schooled in the two vices of sentimentality and brutality. Now great poetry, rightly interpreted, is the surest antidote to both of these. In contrast with journalists and others, the great poets relate the events of history to a pure or noble metaphysical dream, which our students will have all their lives as a protecting arch over their system of values.

Richard Weaver
Until the world perceives that good cannot be applied to a thing because it is our own, and bad because it is another's, there is no prospect of realizing community.

Richard Weaver
Poetry offers the fairest hope of restoring our lost unity of mind.

Richard Weaver
The discipline of poetry may be expected first to teach the evocative power of words, to introduce the student, if we may so put it, to the mighty power of symbolism, and then to show him that there are ways of feeling about things which are not provincial either in space or time.

Richard Weaver