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Culture must have its ultimate aim in the metaphysical or it will cease to be culture.

Johan Huizinga

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Johan Huizinga
Age: 72 †
Born: 1872
Born: January 1
Died: 1945
Died: January 1
Cultural Historian
Historian
Linguist
Philosopher
Resistance Fighter
University Teacher
J. Huizinga
Huizinga
Aim
Cease
Ultimate
Culture
Must
Metaphysical

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From whichever angle one looks at it, the application of racial theories remains a striking proof of the lowered demands of public opinion upon the purity of critical judgment.
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The awareness of the all-surpassing importance of social groups is now general property in America.
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What the study of history and artistic creation have in common is a mode of forming images.
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Systematic philosophical and practical anti-intellectualism such as we are witnessing appears to be something truly novel in the history of human culture.
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We have to transpose ourselves into this impressionability of mind, into this sensitivity to tears and spiritual repentance, intothis susceptibility, before we can judge how colorful and intensive life was then.
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A crude mind could easily think: something is valid, therefore it is true.
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The things which can make life enjoyable remain the same. They are, now as before, reading, music, fine arts, travel, the enjoyment of nature, sports, fashion, social vanity (knightly orders, honorary offices, gatherings) and the intoxication of the senses.
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The content of the ideal is a desire to return to the perfection of an imaginary past.
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Every age yearns for a more beautiful world. The deeper the desperation and the depression about the confusing present, the more intense that yearning.
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Whether the aim is in heaven or on earth, wisdom or wealth, the essential condition of its pursuit and attainment is always security and order.
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People accept a representation in which the elements of wish and fantasy are purposely included but which nevertheless proclaims to represent the past and to serve as a guide-rule for life, thereby hopelessly confusing the spheres of knowledge and will.
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Play is a uniquely adaptive act, not subordinate to some other adaptive act, but with a special function of its own in human experience.
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All seemingly profound thinking which passes for realism, because it conveniently does away with all troublesome principles, has agreat attraction for the adolescent mind.
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Culture arises and unfolds in and as play... culture itself bears the character of play.
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A new culture can only grow up in the soil of a purged humanity.
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The second fundamental feature of culture is that all culture has an element of striving.
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It is an evil world. The fires of hatred and violence burn fiercely. Evil is powerful, the devil covers a darkened earth with hisblack wings. And soon the end of the world is expected. But mankind does not repent, the church struggles, and the preachers and poets warn and lament in vain.
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We are living in a demented world. And we know it. It would not come as a surprise to anyone if tomorrow the madness gave way to afrenzy which would leave our poor Europe in a state of distracted stupor, with engines still turning and flags streaming in the breeze, but with the spirit gone.
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Play is older than culture, for culture, however inadequately defined, always presupposes human society, and animals have not waited for man to teach them their playing.
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Science, unguided by a higher abstract principle, freely hands over its secrets to a vastly developed and commercially inspired technology, and the latter, even less restrained by a supreme culture saving principle, with the means of science creates all the instruments of power demanded from it by the organization of Might.
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