This presentation accompanies a lecture on the sickness of consciousness in the Western philosophical tradition.

1. The Sickness of Consciousness
in the Western Philosophical Tradition

2. The Decadence
of Western Civilization

3. The Romans of the Decadence
Thomas Couture, 1847

4. The Collapse of Civilization

5. The Last Days of Babylon
Georges Rochegrosse, 1891

6. The Sickness of Civilization

7. The Plague
Arnold Böcklin, 1898

8. “I am a child of my time, that
is, a decadent:
the difference is that I
understand this, that I revolt
against it.”
--Friedrich Nietzsche (1888)

9. “The tragedy of all culture [is that]
the higher and more noble it is,
the less right it has to exist,
for it is a superfluous and harmful hotbed
in which life rots and weakens.”
--František V. Krejčí (1896)

10. Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from
the Underground

12. The Reader of Dostoevsky
Emil Filla, 1907

13. The Sickness of Consciousness

14. “Too much consciousness is a sickness…
any consciousness at all is a sickness.”
--Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground (1864)

15. “[E]very line in Notes from the
Underground is important…
no thinking person can afford not to
consider carefully all of the ideas expressed
in it.”
--Vasily Rozanov (1891)

16. “Civilization has done for mankind what life
has done for the Underground Man:
provided it with an excess of
consciousness,
a sick consciousness which has come to
find pleasure in its moral fall.”
--Robert Louis Jackson (1958)

17. “Pure reflection [...]
is a sickness [and] an evil.”
--Friedrich Joseph Schelling (1792)

18. “Consciousness of life…
is mere pain and sorrow
over this existence.”
--G. W. F. Hegel (1807)

19. “[Suffering] is heightened
in proportion to
the clearness of [one’s] consciousness.”
--Arthur Schopenhauer (1818)

20. “It is the rising level of consciousness,
or the degree to which it rises,
that is the continual intensification of
despair:
the more consciousness,
the more intense the despair.”
--Søren Kierkegaard (1849)

21. “[O]ur souls have become corrupted in
proportion as our sciences and arts have
advanced toward perfection.”
--Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1750)

22. “All progress has been in appearance
steps toward
the perfection of the individual,
but in fact toward
the decay of the species.”
--Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1754)

23. “[I]n following the history of civil society,
we shall be telling also that of
human sickness.”
--Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1754)

24. “Our feeling for nature
is like the sick person’s
feeling for health.”
--Friedrich Schiller (1796)

25. “[A]s soon as we experience
the misery of culture
we long to be back where we began.”
--Friedrich Schiller (1796)

26. “I have never been able to understand the idea
that only one-tenth of the people
should be given higher education,
while the remaining nine-tenths should serve merely
as material and means to that end...
I do not wish to think...
otherwise than with the faith
that all the ninety millions of us Russians...
will some day be educated, humanized, and happy.”
--Fyodor Dostoevsky (1876)