Preface

Summary

We should do our utmost to encourage the Beautiful, for the Useful encourages itself.

—Goethe

By their capacity for the immortal deed, by their ability to leave non-perishable traces behind, men, their individual mortality notwithstanding, attain an immortality of their own and prove themselves to be of a “divine” nature.

—Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (1958, 19)

Oh People! Behold, we have created you all out of a male and female, and have made you into nations and tribes so that you might come to know one another.

—The Quran 49: 3

…Why should the hermeneutic model of understanding, which is derived from everyday conversation, and since Humboldt, has been methodology refined from the practice of textual interpretation, suddenly break down at the boundaries of our own culture, of our own way of life and traditions?

—Jürgen Habermas, The Divided West (2006, 17)

My desire for knowledge is intermittent, but my desire to bathe my head in atmospheres unknown to my feet is perennial and constant. The highest that we can attain to is not Knowledge, but Sympathy with Intelligence. I do not know that this higher knowledge amounts to anything more definite than a novel and grand surprise on a revelation of the insufficiency of all that we called Knowledge before – a discovery that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy. It is the lighting up of the mist by the sun…Live free, child of the mist – and with respect to knowledge we are all children of the mist.

—Henry David Thoreau “Walking” (1947, 623–4)