| Title | : | On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 140694419X |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9781406944198 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 142 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1841 |
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On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History Reviews
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Carlyle reads like a good scotch: divine in small sips; nauseating in large gulps.
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كتاب يناقش ترقي البشرية في تصورها عن الشخصيات المميزة "الأبطال".. وهو يتدرج منذ كانت البشرية تعتقد فيهم آلهة ثم أنبياء ثم محاربين ثم أدباء وهكذا..
هذا التدرج منطلق بالأصل من الفلسفة المادية الإلحادية التي لا تؤمن بنشأة الكون مخلوقا من إله، ولا بنبوات أرسلها هذا الإله لإصلاح حال البشر
غير أني أعطيت هذا التقييم المرتفع لعدة أسباب أهمها عمق الفكر ومتانة العرض والطرح والمحاججة عنها لدى توماس كارلايل.. ثم إن الفصل الذي عقده عن محمد (صلى الله عليه وسلم) كنموذج لمرحلة النبوات فصل عظيم وإن شابته بعض أخطاء
* الترجمة الأدبية التي كتبها محمد السباعي للنص الإنجليزي جعلت الكتاب وكأنه قطعة من الأدب العربي الأصيل، وهي لغة ارتفعت بشأن الكتاب كثيرا، ولعلها ذات نصيب قوي في انتشاره باللغة العربية -
On a writer's e-mail loop I once mentioned something about Thomas Carlyle. Another member then wrote that he liked Carlyle, and that a copy of Hero Worship stayed on his nightstand for occasional re-reading. So when I felt a hankering to return to some Carlyle reading, this was the book I chose. The version I read was an e-book for the Nook, by B&R Samizdat Express.
I'm glad I read it. I don't feel that I understood it as well as I wanted to, but I chalk that up to reading too often with distractions. It took me a while to find what Carlyle's definition of a great man was: a sincere man. He discusses that in clear language in chapter 2. Maybe it was in chapter 1 and I missed it. Yes, Carlyle's premise is that a Great Man, a hero, is a sincere man—a man who believes what he is doing is right. One who isn't a "quack", that is, a charlatan, a man who knows what he is doing is wrong but does it anyhow to cheat or abuse people, or even for his own entertainment.
The hero isn't like that. Carlyle seems less concerned with what the hero actually accomplishes than if he is sincere in his pursuits. For sure all the men he picked had accomplished much, so maybe significant accomplishments is a precursor to making the sincere/quack evaluation. So he counts Mohammed, the Moslem prophet, as a hero, because although Carlyle called his religion erroneous, at least he was sincere in his belief of it and in how he spread it. He called Napoleon a hero even though he obviously disagreed with his pursuits and outcomes.
In fact, Napoleon comes out worst of all the heroes in the lectures/book, while Oliver Cromwell comes out best. Both of these men are in the final chapter, the Hero as King. Carlyle had been researching Cromwell and planning to write about him for years, and would have that book to market less than five years after he prepared these lectures. So Cromwell was much on his mind. At that time Cromwell was consigned to the ash heap of English villains. Carlyle thought differently, and sought to rehabilitate him. Cromwell could do no wrong in Carlyle's eyes. It was his critics, against whom Carlyle stood pretty much alone (at that time) who were blind or biased.
The book is fairly easy to read. Although 170 years old the language is modern enough. A good reader should have no problem with it. It is an obvious must for anyone wanting to study Carlyle. It is useful for anyone wanting to investigate the "great man theory" of history. And, it is a good read for anyone who wants to know more about the men discussed in the book. This isn't biography, but it has biographical elements to it. You learn something of the lives of Dante, Shakespeare, Luther, Johnson, etc. The one hero I wish he had given more biographical information on was John Knox, his fellow Scott. Alas, I will have to look elsewhere for that.
Why four stars, not five? I'm not quite sure. The book disappointed me a little, perhaps because of Carlyle's fawning over Cromwell and Mohammed. Perhaps because his premises were not, to my mind, clearly stated at the beginning. Perhaps it's because I don't fully subscribe to the "great man theory" of world history. Perhaps it was a few formatting errors in the e-book. All of these have combined to cause me to take a star away. But again I say the book does not disappoint. -
Carlyle is, and always has been, a man without a country: An Scotsman at odds with the materialism of his native 19th Century Britain; a idealist nonetheless too British to happily fit among his Prussian cobelievers. He is a rabid anti-modernist, but in the most modern way. Carlyle is a hero to a new generation of reactionaries, but the failings of his thought—very clearly on display in On Heroes and Hero Worship—show the limits of this movement, and stand testament to the fact that admiration of the past is no remedy for the pains of the present and future.
On Heroes appears after of Carlyle’s fantastic history of the French Revolution, and his bizarre, mocking, adulatory Sartor Resartus which serves as a germ for his hero-worshiping philosophy. The attributes which made his history great are here used to poor effect; the attributes which made his novel fascinating yet unserious are here supercharged. The effect is a work which does not make any sense, even by its author’s own standards. It is an incoherent defense of the past which does not understand the past; it is an encomium of heroes without understanding what makes a man heroic. Where Carlyle’s argument cannot carry water, he relies on florid language and metaphor; these elements, which lent extra locomotion to his French Revolution, are here used to prod a lump.
It isn’t possible to understand Carlyle or his failures without understanding those of Hegel, whose philosophy of history has within it the rough blueprint of Carlyle’s hero worship. It runs roughly like this: Through the dialectic process of history, the spirit of the age is constantly developing, strengthening or crumbling in the smithy of experience, its axioms rising or falling by the parallel development of its own contradictions. The zeitgeist is not metaphorical excess, but the actual working of God’s spirit in the progress of generations; it is God’s own will realizing itself through the ages. The end result of this has been the propagation of freedom, arriving at its apotheosis with the German deformation of Church and State, seen in the unscrupulous but very “free” acts of Luther and Frederick II. This is not mere English whiggery, a belief in progress because each year seems to better sate our material desires. This is intellectual and spiritual whiggery; every era’s passage makes us more and more human, more and more godlike, more and more in concord with the Divine.
The German idealists made themselves more godlike than any thinkers ever have. The French and English believed they were discovering the hidden blueprints of material reality, but left metaphysics largely to a deistic God, inscrutable but for what their empiricism allowed. The Prussians not only appropriated Promethean fire, but turned its character into a mechanism which charted the course of history in its simple progression. Locke and Hume warred against the Church by plucking stones out of her walls and tossing them at her spires; the Prussians erected a meta-church over all Christendom, all belief, all mankind, and declared themselves themselves the priests. History, in this reading, is of course still progressing, and will never be at an end (Young Hegelians notwithstanding); but in a sense all attempts to search for higher Truth are in vain, for what is dictated by this year’s spirt may be eradicated by the next. The measure of truth is man, and insofar that man changes with the ages, so do the progressing ages demand higher and higher truths. Carlyle’s hero-worship is one attempt to make Hegelianism concrete.
Of course, this is lofty stuff; the heights of pure reason. But even the highest philosophic system has a human-sized mechanism. “Freedom” was Hegel’s measure of historical progress. Carlyle adopts another measure of heroism: The essential trait, the first condition, of the hero is his sincerity. Every time he repeats this phrase, I can’t help thinking to myself Wilde’s aphorism: “All bad poems are sincere.” And if there is one thread to be pulled which can show the weakness of Carlyle’s work, it is this: Neither many of his subjects nor himself is sincere!
Let us take Napoleon. In his youth, the young Corsican reviled the French, and could very well have become a terrorist against the nation he once would lead. As a general in Levant, he considered converting to Islam in order to expand his conquests to Alexandrian proportions, thereby making himself an enemy to Christendom. The man rose to power a republican, the grand culmination of the Revolution, but gladly made himself emperor when the opportunity arose. Even in his personal life, his brooding over Josephine could be set aside to marry an Austrian princess. Few men in history have ever been as unscrupulous and opportunist as Bonaparte. Of all the slanderous titles placed upon the little corporal by Enlighmen, “sincerity” may be the most obtuse!
The same goes for Mahound who, as Salmund Rushdie reminds us, gladly walked back his commitment to al-lah when to was necessary to flatter the Arabs’ lesser gods. The same with Shakespeare, who is perhaps the greatest cipher in human history. Henry V seems to promote a monarchist, while the author of Henry VI may well support the mob; his histories speak to the greatness of Christianity, but Lear portrays a deeper void than any nihilist has achieved. Shakespeare felt very deeply; he cogitated diversely and with great dedication. But insincerity is better applied to him rather than the contrary.
Sincerity fails as a mechanism to climb the heights, but Carlyle’s larger structure is similarly unsound. Many paths could get us to this point, but the central fact is this: Carlyle wants to reconnect with the greatness of the past without subjecting himself to the conditions which made the past, and his men within it, great. Carlyle the reactionary hates the present, and with good reason; but he attempts to love and honor the past without truly knowing what made it lovable or honorable. This is the greatest contradiction of On Heroes: That the great men documented in this book would be revolted by the idea that they and their beliefs were merely a realization of greatness in history.
To actually be great requires we forget, at least for a time, the idea of greatness and simply be. But how are we to go about this? Mahound, Luther, and St. Peter all had ideas, each of them mutually exclusive from one another. Carlyle and his cohort seem to think the act of choosing is as relevant as the choice; that any end is implicitly good so long as one pursues it properly. In this way he is little different a liberal, who sees as much value in free speech as what is being said; who sees as much value in free exercise without caring how or to whom this should be done. This might be called the curse of the post-Enlightenment Promethean: He knows so well the mechanics of a thing that he has wholly forgotten its function.
The only important divide in philosophy is between those who believe in a Truth unchangeable, and those who do not. Yet Carlyle expounds on “the new Truth, the deeper revealing of the Secret of the Universe.” This could well be any liberal party platform. Reactionaries of this sort may believe in hierarchy, aristocracy, the greatness of man. But real men and divinity can only be combined in deceit and mockery; the emperor Claudius might be the highest realization of this. We can believe these spurious gods to be either mythic, in which case they are not men, or frauds, in which place they are not gods. Only one man has long succeeding in convincing others he could be both.
Yet with what contempt does Carlyle treat this man! Perhaps it is piety that keeps Christ out of Carlyle's hall of heroes, but why are there no saints in these halls? Francis of Assissi, as one man, completes Carlyle’s definition of the heroic, and blows up his paradigm for understanding it. For this was a man who actually was sincere; who wrote great poetry, but which pales in comparison to the art that was his life; who reinvigorated the spirit of his age, but did so in a way that advanced the ancient cause of orthodoxy, and created nothing new. He was great before God, before man, and before the ages. Saints like Francis fit within history because they are all men and women of their times; but they are promoting the advancement of the Eternal, and are not fooled by the fact that men’s changing perceptions of the Truth mean that the Truth is changing, or can change at all.
Why is the Catholic Church, to Carlyle, obsolete? Certainly it is moribund politically and morally in the present day. But why should we not try to resurrect its greatness? What about the spirit of our dismal age rules out this possibility? If the claims made by the Church were true in 33 AD, they were just as true to Dante on Good Friday 1300, and are just as true to us now. But if the Church is a fraud, then it was and always has been a fraud.
For all his attempts at reverence, Carlyle treats all his subjects as very-sincere conmen, whose value is expressed in how many people they’ve duped. For all this inflated language, Carlyle’s true vision of history is little more nuanced than Herbert Spencer’s and other sub-Nietzschean hacks who look to strength as the only measure of truth. It has little more spiritual complexity than the epicurean, for fundamentally what Carlyle sees as being right for the age is what is pleasing to the men of that age. Says he: “Divine right, take it on the grand scale, is found to mean divine might, withal!” But why should rightness not be what is most disagreeable to men, especially the men of an evil age? Carlyle wrote this book largely because he was dissatisfied with modern man’s failure to elect great men. Are those masses the measure, or the great men who rule them? What is the measure? He wants the Kon-ning, or Able-man; but able in what?
This reduces to the fact that the thinking man must occupy either the real Church, or the meta-church of modern intellectualism. The first claims to have the rules of human life on earth; the latter claims to know the very rules of these rules, but lapses in following any particular creed or regiment itself. And why should it not? The Truth is ever changing. And because there are vague principles but no code, no disciples or flock can ever form (apart from the small brahmin caste that can endure the blather of Kant and Hegel). The masses become worse and worse; their leaders, their would-be great men, follow suit. Men are no longer sincere Carlyle complains. Sincere to what? Modernity has made men, like their poetry, too sincere; sincere to their lusts, their wants, their facebook pages, their whims. The problem is that their souls are ugly, because they have nothing beautiful or true to emulate. Goethe was wrong; the Good must precede the Beautiful. In fact, the Good must at times appear ugly, for beauty and ugliness are things of this world; but it is man’s one purpose on earth to make this Good beautiful again.
There is nothing good in the past that does not partake of eternal Goodness; there is no honor in the past aside from Honor. The artificiality of Carlyle’s construct condemns the entire modern project, but does so in the most pathetic manner. The liberal or radical can put his faith in history and receive some optimism, but the reactionary must watch the former age’s beauty die, or be rebuilt in a hollow imitation. This is the sad state of the reactionary, always looking backwards but, in confining himself to the material world, unable to understand or recreate what made the past truly great. But the past is only good so far that it can teach us about what is immortal; and that immortal strain, when applied to present conditions, may very well look nothing like what we have seen. This is the tradeoff of not being able to find our consolations in Claudius and Odin, but in cruel Truth itself.
Carlyle is admirable as historian, a field in which brute facts constrain his poetic fancy. As a philosopher, he is poetic where he should be literal, and his own fervor takes him places his methodology should not allow. Given this, it is not strange that Carlyle was a stranger in his own time and in ours. As author and thinker, he offers many great pleasures, but no method for imitators or reason for disciples. The cause of reaction is always enticing, but no inherently wiser than optimism for the future; the romance of both past and future is equally vain. Our potentialities and virtues live with us in the present.
And while a Christian can look back at the past with great yearning, at the future with dread, and the present age with tears, he must keep in mind this fact: The spirit of the ages is always the same; the problem is always himself. -
The 18th Century, with its calamitous French Revolution and the unquenchable advance of Industrialisation, plunged the world into a haze of scepticism, as people started doubting the values and beliefs of their predecessors and embraced the artificial, offered the ideal backdrop to Thomas Carlyle's search for valor, as he saw through the all-pervading illusion and went on to deliver the six lectures collected in “On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History" in 1840, 50 years after the Bastille crumbled under the fury of the mob.
Stepping on the debris of the tumultuous past, Carlyle sought the catalyst of the events and ideals fallen into the realm of the legendary, and defined History as “the Biography of Great Men", the earthly and the celestial joined through the pursuit of authenticity, awareness of a higher purpose than mere hedonism, all heroic figures united under the mark of earnestness, loyalty to their cause and obedience to Natural Law. Each of his lectures is consecrated to archetypes of the Heroic Ideal: Divinity, Prophet, Poet, Priest, Man of Letters, and ultimately, King: “the summary of all the various figures of Heroism", reminiscing of Plato's Philosopher King; he does not shy away from exploring the underlying aspects of Paganism, Christianity, Islam nor Atheism, also depicting controversial figures, displaying the very traits he revered.
Given the two centuries that have passed since the lectures saw the light of day, one might expect them to be somewhat dull, as the Victorian Era is noted for its rigidity, yet his speech is imbued with a burning passion I have rarely encountered elsewhere, his ideas are highly empowering and can inspire anyone who feels lost in the present age to find clarity through the fog of modern commodities and chronic indoctrination, conquer their own minds and bodies, lead by example and strive for excellence. -
I Just wish the Carlyle hypothesis that in the next 100 of years Man will be smart enough not to acknowledge other man as GOD come true. But more than 100 years have past from his writing, till today still there are still a lot of Human that believe other human as GOD. How tragic where did all those brain and knowledge that they have gone to.
Carlyle really has big hopes for his own species (Human) to develop their ideal potential intellectual in next 100 of years, but clearly those hopes are just hopes till today. -
أعجبتني فكرة الكتاب العامة، وأعجبتني بعض مواضعه ذات المعاني الشريفة، ويعيبه كثرة الإنشاء والقصور في التعريف بأبطاله، وبعض الاستطرادات وبعض الإطناب
ولو سلم منها الكتاب لكان بديعاً
وأفكار الكتاب بين الجيد والردئ، تعرف منها وتنكر
ولغة الترجمة أدبية جزلة عالية
وفي الكتاب فصل عن النبي محمد صلى الله عليه وسلم، وهو أجدر من أطلق عليه لفظ البطولة، وهو أفضل فصول الكتاب
مما اقتبسته من الكتاب
عن إنكار وجود الأبطال
عن رفع الأبطال الزائفين
-
I abandoned this at the 40% mark. I do not care for Carlyle's ugly, bloated, prose. I don't like that he uses more exclamation points than a teenage girl texting a friend to tell her she just saw Zac Efron at the mall. I don't like that he seems to assume that Odin, the Norse god, was an actual person and I also don't like that he says stupid and manifestly untrue things like "quackery" could never give birth to a religion. This book was originally a series of lectures, and I think a charismatic speaker could maybe make it work a little, but the prose is bloody, dead mess on the page.
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Carlyle’s book looks at the different forms of heroism he considers to have existed in the world. I found it very interesting that in the second chapter where he talks about the hero as a prophet he picked the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) as the prime example. Very interesting coming from a Scottish Christian I thought. the book got a bit boring in the middle and near the end but worth a read for his lectures (the chapters were a series of lectures) on the hero as a prophet as I mentioned and the hero as a priest where he talks about Luther and the revolution he bought in Christianity and the creation of Lutheran Protestantism and his 95 theses. Carlyle also talks about the hero as divinity, hero as a man of letters and hero as a king which has an interesting section on Cromwell and Napoleon.
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Parti com elevadas expectativas. Afinal a obra relata a faceta épica e ética de certos homens tido como heróis: Dante, Shakespeare, Lutero, etc.
Uma prosa com demasiados adjetivos e parcialidade. -
I hate the b**tish
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،كتاب الابطال وعبادة البطولة من تأليف توماس كارليل وترجمة المترجم العظيم محمد السباعي
الاستاذ محمد السباعي لم يكتفِ بنقله للعربية بل ارى انه اعاد تأليفه بصياغة عربية
حتى اصبح وكأنه قطعة فريدة من الادب العربي، فتراه زاخراً بالمحسنات البديعية كالجناس والطباق
،وفيه الاشعار وبعض الآيات
واعتقد انه تجاوز حد الترجمة المسموح، فأنا لم اعدْ اعرف هل حقاً هذه العبارات من وحي الكاتب الاصلي
،ام من إضافة المترجم، خصيصاً ان الكتاب بلغة مؤلفه اقل من نصف الكتاب بعد الترجمة
،ولهذا فاني لا استطيع اعطاء تقييم واحد لكتابين ممزوجين
!!تقييم للمؤلف وتقييم للمترجم الذي اعاد التأليف
،ولكن على العموم
،المُؤلَّف الذي بين ايدينا يُقدّم افكاراً واطروحات جميلة جداً ومبدعة
يناقش مفهوم الابطال وحقيقة الفكرة وغريزة تقديس الناس دائماً وابداً للابطال
ومن ثم يضرب امثلة على ابطال حقيقيين وقد اُتخِذوا اشكال عدة
.(إله، نبي، شاعر، قسيس، كاتب، ملك)البطل كـــ
والبطل المقصود هنا ليس بطل السيف والمعركة بل هو شخصٌ حباه الله بقدرات فيرى حقائق الامور الباطنة
ويرى سر الله الجلي في الكون فيدعو الناس الى تلك الحقائق الكامنة في الوجود
فهو مُستَنقذ عصره على حد تعبير الكتاب، وعبادة الابطال الغريزة الفطرية التي تعني
.تعظيم وتبجيل البطل وطاعته من قبل الناس، لينهض بهم وينهض بعصره
اختار الكاتب الرسول محمد -عليه الصلاة والسلام- مثال��ً على البطل كــ نبي، وتحدث عن مقومات بطولته
،وعن النظرة الغربيّة للاسلام آنذاك ووصفها بالمشينة وبالعار
. وكيف ان النبي محمد انقذ الله به اعراب الصحراء ليقودوا العالم بعد ان كانوا خاملين خامدين
البطل في مذهب الكاتب يختاره الله ويرسله الى العوام لينقذهم
،ويعتبر ان البطل هو من الادلة على الله
طبعاً اختيار الله للبطل ليس عن طريق وحي السماء
بل تكون عن طريق القدرات التي يعطيها الله له
فيرى حقائق الامور الخفية والاسرار الجلية
.فيدعو اليها الناس ويقودهم الى الصلاح
----
مما ورد في الكتاب
ان تاريخ العام -تاريخ ما احدث الانسان في هذا العالم-انما هو"
"تاريخ من ظهر في الدنيا من العظماء..وكل ما تراه في هذا الوجود كاملاً متقنا فاعلم انه نتيجة افكار اولئك العظماء
"ليس تاريخ العالم الا مجموع سِيَر ابطاله"
اذا انحدرنا من قمة الدين الى منازل احط وادنى"
وجدنا في جميعها احترام الوضيع للشريف وولاء الحقير للجليل والصغير للكبير، فعبادة الابطال هي اساس المجتمع
"والرتب والدرج الذي يقوم عليه اساس كل دين
انه ما كان عصر من العصور ليخرب ويتلف "
"لوقد اتيح له رجل كبير يجمع بين العقل والتقوى، بين عقل يعرف به حاجة عصره وعزم يمضي به
حال الشعوب الضعيفة اشبه بحال حطبٍ يابسٍ ميت"
ينتظر من السماء شهاباً يُشعله
وما الرجل العظيم مرسلاً من قوس الله
يجيش في صدره العزم ويغلي في عروقه البأس
"الا ذلكم الشهاب
لقد اصبح من اكبر العار على اي فرد متمدن من ابناء هذا العصر"
ان يُصغي الى ما يُظن من ان دين الاسلام كذب وان محمداً خدّاعٌ ومُزوّر وآنَ لنا ان نحارب
"ما يُشاع من مثل هذه الاقوال السخيفة المخجلة
اذا خرجت الكلمة من اللسان لم تتجاوز الآذان"
واذا خرجت من القلب نفذت الى القلب
والقرآن خارج من فؤاد محمد فهو جديراً
"ان يصل الى افئدة سامعيه وقارئيه
"خير جامعة في هذه الاوقات هي مجموعة كتب"
"انك ان تأتِني بالمَلِك القادر الكفء لأجعلنّ له عليَّ حقاً مُقدسا"
"قيمة المرء بقدر بصيرته"
. -
Sudah lama mendengar tentang Thomas Carlyle, namun baru berkesempatan membaca tulisannya.
Thomas Carlyle sejarawan Christian Scotland bersikap jujur apabila menghuraikan peribadi Nabi Muhammad SAW dalam Lecture 3 Hero as Prophet. Nabi Muhammad SAW dinamakan sebagai satu satunya Hero yang dikategorikan sebagai Prophet.
Sumbangan terbesar buku ini adalah dalam bab pertama iaitu Hero as Divinity, Carlyle dengan jelas mengkritik golongan yang terlalu menyanjung manusia sehingga menyamakan mereka dengan tuhan.
sumbangan kedua adalah, Carlyle dengan jujur membetulkan kesalahfahaman dan fitnah yang dilakukan orientalist lain terhadap Nabi Muhammad SAW dan Islam.
Namun bermula bab Hero as Poet ( Dante and Shakespeare) huraiannya mula terasa membosankan hingga ke penghujung bab Hero as Man of Letter (Rousseau, Johnson, Burns).
Carlyle dalam bab Hero as Divinity ( Norse Gods dan lain lain mitos kedewaan), dengan optimis mengatakan bahawa dalam tempoh 100 tahun lagi (buku ditulis pada 1840) bahawa kepercayaan penyembahan kepada manusia akan berakhir dan manusia akan bijak untuk memikirkannya.
Optimisme ini walaupun masih belum terealisasi namun menunjukkan beliau percaya bahawa betapa manusia akhirnya akan kembali kepada mengimani Tuhan yang Satu. -
Not exactly a typical biography. The book offers sketches of select individuals of historical significance in order to justify a neo-hegelian reading of history; basically an 'all the world's a stage' mentality and most of us are mere spear chuckers and cannon fodder for the Great Men who pop up from time to time as exemplars for the rest of us to follow. Hegel had described Napoleon in this way, riding his white horse through town just as he was finishing writing one of his books. He is seen as an incarnation of Geist, a particular finite expression of the spirit of the times, embodied in one man.
Carlyle was a great popularizer of German thought to the British people, and a contemporary of the American equivalent, Ralph Waldo Emerson. -
It's many years since I read any Carlyle, probably not since my first year at university. It's great to be reminded of his wonderful prose. It's unorthodox, dynamic, kinetic, full of allusions in many languages, and yet somehow conveying something of the man himself, opinionated, warm, very human. Much of what he has to say seems simply wrongheaded these days, but the manner in which he says it is admirable.
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Carlyle, you're a little nuts, but I love you very much.
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"The history of the world is but the biography of great men."
Probably an only good thing in this god awful book.
I swear to god, point Carlye is trying to make is, great people do great things and that why they are remembered as heroes; then he stretches that over 200 pages with little cohesion or some conclusion.
There are 6 types of heroes but explanations are so broad, messy and disconnected with the subject you forget what is the point Carlyle is trying to make or why you even bother reading this book.
Furthermore, he is emphasizing how heroes must be honest and sincere but then he sais well Cromwell wasn't, Napoleon as well, when I come to think about it prophet Mohammed and his Quran are full of lies, so you as a reader have no bloody idea what the f*** is he trying to say.
Awful, god awful.
Style of writing doesn't help either.
I can appreciate his admiration of the heroes and of the great men and how extraordinary feet needs to be remembered, but I didn't need to read 200 pages of an incoherent mess.
PS That quote from the beginning is so awesome, that even I don't like this book one bit, I don't necessarily hate Carlyle. -
Excellent series of lectures given in May 1840. Carlyle moves progressively through the forms the archetypal hero has taken in culture, as well as the responses these characters have received over time. Extremely quotable & articulate, almost everything he covers on the subject is not only relevant today but perhaps even more so. Not much has changed it seems, with the corrosive influence of cynicism & atheism of his day simply having flowered into the postmodernism of today. The effect is the same. Reading this gave me renewed my appreciation of sincerity above all things. Carlyle’s ideas on how to look at and appreciate great men are as important & valuable today as they were back when he gave his famous lectures.
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"A man lives by believing something. A sad case for him when all that he believes in is something he can button in his pocket."
Beautiful prose but I didn't think the thoughts as interesting. The first lecture (on Odin) was the most innovative to me. It managed to communicate (!) something of the awe we should all feel towards the wonder that is language, written or spoken.
The rest of the lectures I found boring, either because of the subject matter itself (Muhammad) or because Carlyle assumed historical knowledge of which I had none (Knox, Cromwell).
But it was at times a fascinating look inside a mind only a century or so old, yet so distant. -
Update 2021-07-13:
“The great silent men! Looking round on the noisy inanity of the world, words with little meaning, actions with little worth, one loves to reflect on the great Empire of Silence. The noble silent men, scattered here and there, each in his department; silently thinking, silently working; whom no Morning Newspaper makes mention of! They are the salt of the Earth.” Page 294 Oxford University press, classics number 62. Old hardback edition.
2021-06-29:
”Certainly the art of writing is the most miraculous of all things man has devised. Odin’s Runes were the first form of the work of a Hero; Books, written words are still miraculous Runes, the latest form! In Books lies the soul of the whole past time; the articulate audible voice of the past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream. Mighty fleets and armies, harbours and arsenals, vast cities, high-domed, many-engined, - they are precious, great: but what do they become? Agamemnon, the many Agamemnons, Pericleses, and their Greece; all is gone now to some ruined fragments, dumb mournful wrecks and blocks: but the Books of Greece! There Greece, to every thinker, still very literally lives; can be called-up again into life. No magic Rune is stranger than a Book. All that Mankind has done, thought, gained or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of Books. They are the chosen possession of men.” 209-210
“The true University of these days is a Collection of Books.” 213 -
For the reader of today, the first three chapters seem to be the most insightful/interesting.
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توماس كارليل في هذا الكتاب يقدم نماذج إنسانية كا��ت في نظرة نماذج لأبطال بعدهم الدنيا لم تعد كما كانت
الكتاب مقسَّم لستة فصول كالآتي:-
البطل في صورة إله :- متمثل في الشخصية الأسطورية "أدوين" وتأثيره في دول الشمال الاسكندنافي
البطل في صورة نبي:- متمثل في شخص النبي الكريم محمد صلى الله عليه وسلم
البطل في صورة شاعر:- دانتي وشكسبير
البطل في صورة قسيس:- لوثر ونوكس
البطل في صورة كاتب:- جونسن،روسو و بارنر
البطل في صورة ملك:- كرومويل ونابيليون بونابرت
استمتعت كثيراً بفصل "البطل في صورة قسيس" تحديداً شخصية مارتن لوثر .. .. قرأت الكتاب لشهرته وللإنصاف يتصف الكتاب بزخم المحتوى وجودة الترجمة، وقيَّمته بنجمتين لأنه ليس من نوع الكتب المفضلة لدي وشعرت بالملل في أغلب الأجزاء -
ترجمة الأستاذ محمد السباعي للكتاب جعلت القارئ يقرأ أدباً إنكليزياً رصيناً ولكن بلسان عربي قويم .
أما الكتاب فهو يشرح نظرية المؤلف الفيلسوف البريطاني توماس كارليل عن التاريخ وأنه صناعة العظماء والذين يسميهم الأبطال ويقول الكاتب بصريح العبارة "تاريخ العالم إنما هو تاريخ العظماء".
اختار الكاتب ممن أسماهم الأبطال سيدنا ونبينا محمد صلى الله عليه وسلم ، ورغم بعض الأخطاء إلا أن الكاتب تحدث بكثير من الإنصاف عن النبي الكريم .
وأورد الكاتب شخصيات عديدة أخرى ليشرح نظريته عن البطولة ومنهم :دانتي وشكسبير وروسو ونابليون وغيرهم
رغم أن الكتاب يشرح فلسفة المؤلف إلا أن الترجمة الرائعة جعلت مادته دسمة من ناحية الأدب أيضاً ممازاد الكتاب فائدة وجمالاً. -
I really liked the first several types of heroes, but when it came to the hero king, I got bogged down in all the Cromwell stuff. I don't think I knew enough about him and his place in history. The rest of it was great and very interesting. The part that I found the most interesting was the part on Muhammad.
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استمتعت بالفكرة مش باللغة
في نظري الترجمة ضعيفة شوية بتوصل احيانا للركاكة في بعض التركيبات
لكن فكرة الكتاب فعلا جيدة
قرأت مختصر له من قبل و الان قرأتها كاملا
له قراءة اخري مرة ثانية ولكن اما بلغته الاصلية او بترجمة اخري
محمد عطية
فبراير 2013 -
«El rudo mensaje que proclamó fue real, una voz celosa y confusa desde el abismo desconocido. Sus palabras no fueron falsas, tampoco su conducta; no siendo Inanidad y Simulación, sino ardiente masa de Vida fundida en el seno mismo de la Naturaleza»
