more from this thinker | more from this text
Full Idea
A Kierkegaard, a Nietzsche, had they appeared in the most anodyne age, would have had no less tremulous, no less incendiary an inspiration.
Gist of Idea
Some thinkers would have been just as dynamic, no matter when they had lived
Source
E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 6 'Truths')
Book Ref
Cioran,E.M.: 'A Short History of Decay', ed/tr. Howard,Richard [Penguin 2010], p.180
A Reaction
He is saying that some (only some) thinkers are independent of the age and culture in which they live. Personally I think of those two as distinctive products of a romantic age. Diogenes of Sinope seems a bit of a misfit!
| 12104 | All ideas must be understood historically [Comte] |
| 12105 | Our knowledge starts in theology, passes through metaphysics, and ends in positivism [Comte] |
| 19624 | Intelligence only fully flourishes at the end of a historical period [Cioran] |
| 19599 | Ideas are neutral, but people fill them with passion and weakness [Cioran] |
| 19631 | The history of ideas (and deeds) occurs in a meaningless environment [Cioran] |
| 19629 | A nation gives expression to its sum of values, and is then exhausted [Cioran] |
| 19645 | Some thinkers would have been just as dynamic, no matter when they had lived [Cioran] |
| 7460 | The great moments are the death of Aristotle, Machiavelli, and Romanticism [Berlin, by Watson] |
| 21852 | Nomads are the basis of history, and yet almost unknowable [Deleuze] |
| 7461 | The three key ideas are the soul, Europe, and the experiment [Watson] |
| 7464 | The big idea: imitation, the soul, experiments, God, heliocentric universe, evolution? [Watson] |