Zusammenfassung
Zusammenfassung von Ketzer
Für wen es gedacht ist
For readers who enjoy argument, essays and quick wit, and anyone curious about how a believer answered the doubters of his time. Lovers of paradox and debates about faith, joy and ordinary life will find plenty to explore.
Worum es in diesem Buch geht
Heretics is a book of essays by G. K. Chesterton, first published in 1905. Chesterton was then a young London journalist, already known for his columns, his wit and his huge frame. The essays began as newspaper pieces and were gathered into one argument. The book is a tour of the leading writers and fashions of his day, from Rudyard Kipling and Bernard Shaw to H. G. Wells, the aesthetes and the champions of simple living.
Why call them heretics? Chesterton says the word has lost its sting, because people no longer believe there is a right view to depart from. He holds that this is the real problem of the age. Everyone has opinions about art, politics and manners, but few will say what they think life is for. Without that, he argues, no opinion can be tested, and every thinker ends up praising a part of life while forgetting the whole.
You get a fast, funny and sharply argued book, full of paradox, which means a claim that sounds wrong until you think it through. You also get a portrait of Edwardian England and its quarrels. Chesterton later answered his own challenge in Orthodoxy, but this book is where the challenge is made. Let us begin with his first claim, that a person's view of the universe matters more than anything else about them.
In dieser Zusammenfassung
- 1Your view of the universe comes firstFree
- 2Doubt by itself builds nothing
- 3A wide world can make a small mind
- 4Shaw and Wells: bold minds without a fixed measure
- 5Joy is more basic than gloom
- 6Nations, races and the lure of fashionable science
- 7Wit, play and the dignity of the ordinary
- 8How the challenge has lasted and been answered
Punkt 1 von 8
Your view of the universe comes first
Chesterton opens by attacking a habit of his age. People, he says, treat the question of what life means as a boring matter for priests, and they call themselves practical for ignoring it. He argues that this gets things backward. The most practical thing about a person is the picture of the world they carry in their head, because every choice grows out of it.
He gives an everyday comparison. If you rent a house, you would like to know the landlord's income, but it matters even more to know his philosophy. If you meet a general about to fight a war, you want to know the enemy's strength, and even more, the philosophy of the enemy. In each case the belief shapes the action.
From this he draws his main complaint. Modern writers love to say that they are free of dogma, meaning fixed belief. Chesterton replies that this freedom is only a way of dodging the hard question. A man who will not say what he thinks is good cannot tell whether a thing is better or worse. He can only say that it is new.
That is why he uses the word heretic. A heretic, in the old sense, was someone who chose one truth and pushed it so far that it crowded out the rest. Chesterton says the age is full of such people, though nobody calls them that. The word orthodoxy has become an insult, and he finds this a sign of something sick.
He is also careful about tone. He says he does not want to silence anyone, and he admires many of the men he criticizes. His quarrel is with the idea that argument about the final things is a waste of breath. If you care about people, he says, you will care what they believe, and you will say so plainly.
That’s 1 of 8 key points.
The rest of the summary, written and spoken, and the whole book: free to start.
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