I love intellectual journeys, so check this out. I've been reading a book, called
Napoleon and Wellington, and it briefly mentions the Prussian field marshall Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher. Being of German (along with scandinavian and dutch) descent, I enjoy reading about germanic history. Feeling that I've neglected german art recently I went to my
go-to source for art, where I searched for german-looking names. One of the artists whose works I enjoyed was Durer, and specifically the
Knight, Death and Devil engraving stuck out because I remembered it from one of my Art History classes. That was a few days ago, and just earlier tonight I decided to look for interpretations of this work on the internet. One interpretation mentioned Gnostic symbols found in the painting, so of course I wikipedia-ed Gnostic, which is a very intruiging religion-esque view, though its followers are particularly un-categorical. After reading a little bit about it and not understanding anything, I looked at the interpretation of another Durer piece called
St. Jerome in His Study. This mentioned a famouse pumpkin from the renassaince, which led me to looking at Donatello's statue Habbakuk, which was the supposed reference in the engraving. I googled Habbakuk and pumpkin to get a piece by a writer named
Chesterton about the flaws of modern Materialistic arguments against the possibility of miracles. I suggest to go to that link and at least peruse this essay. Eventually I returned to Gnosticism and found a list of a few 19th centure Gnostics and recognized the name Schopenhauer, so I wikipedia'ed him and found another intruiging view of the world. He criticized Kant's views, some of whose works I read in one of my philosophy classes. The mention of his critiques of Kantian philosophy reminded me of another german philosopher I looked up a while ago for obvious reasons, named Johann Georg Hamann, who was extremely anti-enlightenment. Anyway, all of these ideas are bouncing in my head and it just feels great, and confusing, especially since I don't see a lot of ideas that aren't entirely about western liberalism.
