Norbert Elias > Quotes

“Death is a problem of the living. Dead people have no problems.”
― Norbert Elias

“I wish you all the pleasurable excitement one can have without hurting others and one's own dignity.”
― Norbert Elias

“The peculiarity of innovative fantasies in the form of works of art is that they are fantasies kindled by material which is accessible to many people. In a word, they are de-privatised fantasies. That sounds simple, but the whole difficulty of artistic creation shows itself when someone tries to cross this bridge — the bridge of de-privatisation. It could also be called the bridge of sublimation.”
― Norbert Elias, Mozart: Portrait of a Genius

“Az egyes emberi terveknek és cselekedeteknek ez az alapvető összeszövődése olyan változásokat és alakzatokat idézhet elő, amelyeket egyetlen ember sem tervezett vagy hozott létre. Ebből, az emberek interdependenciájából, egészen sajátos rend származik, amely kényszerítőbb és erősebb, mint az őt alkotó egyes emberek akarata és esze. Az összeszövődésnek ez a rendje szabja meg a történelmi változás menetét; ez alapozza meg a civilizáció folyamatát.”
― Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process

“In other words, the more differentiated, relatively developed societies have cultivated a comparatively high tolerance for highly individualised ways of further developing the existing art canon; this facilitates experimentation and the breaching of stale conventions and can thus help to enrich the artistic pleasures available through seeing and hearing.”
― Norbert Elias, Mozart: Portrait of a Genius

“A vallás, a mindenható Isten büntető és üdvözítő mivoltának tudata önmagában sohasem hat "civilizálólag" vagy az affektusokat tompítólag. Ellenkezőleg: a vallás mindenkor éppen annyira "civilizált", mint amennyire az a társadalom vagy az a réteg, amelynek a vallása.”
― Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process

“Many standard comments on Mozart that we meet in this context, assertions such as "Mozart simply did not understand himself", reinforce the idea that artistic conscience is one of the inborn functions of a person, and therefore of Mozart. But conscience, whatever its specific form, is innate to no one. At most the potential for forming a conscience is a natural human endowment. This potential is activated and shaped into a specific structure through a person's life with others. The individual conscience is society-specific.”
― Norbert Elias, Mozart: Portrait of a Genius

“The trouble is that such categories do not take us much further. They are academic abstractions that do not do justice to the process-character of the observable social data to which they refer. Underlying them is the idea that the tidy division into epochs we usually find in history books best fits the actual course of social development. Each figure who is known through the magnitude of his or her achievement is then allocated to one epoch or the other as its high point. On closer examination, however, it not uncommonly emerges that outstanding achievements occur most frequently at times which could at most be called transitional phases if static concepts of epochs are used. In other words, such achievements arise from the dynamics of the conflict between the canons of older declining classes and newer rising ones.”
― Norbert Elias, Mozart: Portrait of a Genius

“Tässä kommunistien ja kapitalistien näkemykset käyvät yksiin: molemmat ajattelevat saman paradigman mukaisesti, että talous on jokaisen yhteiskunnan keskeisin alue. Itse en ole samaa mieltä. Hitaasti hiipivä identiteettikriisi, joka liittotasavaltaa on kohdannut, on vähintään yhtä vaarallinen.”
― Norbert Elias, The Germans

“The acquired knowledge, which includes acquired thinking or, in Freudian terms, the "ego", opposes the more animal energy-impulses when they try to take control of the skeletal muscles and thus of action. That these libidinal impulses also flow through the chambers of memory in their effort to control human action, kindling the fire of dream fantasies in them — that in the work of the artist they are purified by a stream of knowledge until they finally merge with it — therefore represents a reconciliation between originally antagonistic tendencies of the personality.”
― Norbert Elias, Mozart: Portrait of a Genius

“The libidinal fantasy-stream only becomes significant for other people, i.e. capable of mediation, if it is socialised through fusion with the canon, while at the same time energizing and individualizing the canon or the conscience.”
― Norbert Elias, Mozart: Portrait of a Genius

“In giving latitude to his individual fantasy, and especially to his ability to synthesise previously separate elements in a way which breaches the existing canon of taste, he initially reduces his chance of finding resonance in the public. [...] In this respect, too, without realizing it, Mozart had inaugurated another shift in the balance of power.”
― Norbert Elias, Mozart: Portrait of a Genius

“The split in his social existence made itself felt in his personality structure as well. Mozart's entire musical activity, his whole training as a virtuoso performer and composer, were shaped by the music canon of the hegemonic court societies of Europe. [...] At the same time, in his personality structure, especially as far as his social relations were concerned, he remained a man of the petty bourgeois ...”
― Norbert Elias, Mozart: Portrait of a Genius

“Unlike dream ideas, those of the artist are attuned both to the material and to society. They are a specific form of communication, intended to elicit applause, resonance of a positive or negative kind, to arouse jor or anger, clapping or booing, love or hate.”
― Norbert Elias, Mozart: Portrait of a Genius

“[T]he social canons and methods by which people build up instinct controls in their communal life are not brought into being deliberately; they evolve over long periods, blindly and without plan. Irregularities and contradictions in drive-controls, huge fluctuations in their severity or leniency, are therefore among the recurrent structural features of the civilizing process.”
― Norbert Elias, Mozart: Portrait of a Genius

“[A] person is not an artist in one compartment and a human being in another.”
― Norbert Elias, Mozart: Portrait of a Genius

“The pinnacle of artistic creation is achieved when the spontaneity and inventiveness of fantasy-stream are so fused with knowledge of the regularities of the material and the judgement of the artist's conscience that the innovative fantasies emerge as if by themselves in a way that matches the demands of both material and conscience. This is one of the most socially fruitful types of sublimation process.”
― Norbert Elias, Mozart: Portrait of a Genius

“In the course of the changing relationship between those who produce art and those who need and buy it, the structure of art changes, not its value.”
― Norbert Elias, Mozart: Portrait of a Genius

“[W]e must add at once that a judgement on Mozart's verbal coprophilia would necessarily miss the mark if it applied present-day standards of civilization, thus implicitly regarding our own canon of sensibility as universal, a canon for the whole mankind, and not as one that has developed. To do justice to Mozart's tendency, we need to have a clear idea of the civilizing process in the course of which the social canon of behavior and feeling changes in a specific way.”
― Norbert Elias, Mozart: Portrait of a Genius

“Moreover, the change hinted at in this statement does not concern merely the social position of the artist. With it, the canon of artistic creation, or expressed differently, the structure of art, also changed. But such connections do not emerge very clearly if the transition from art production for a personally known employer or patron to art production for a paying public, from patronage to the free, more or less anonymous market, is considered merely as an economic event. To take this view is to overlook an essential point: that this was a structural change in the relation of people to each other, which can be precisely defined. In particular, it involved a power-gain by the artist in relation to his public. This human change, this change in the balance of power — not simply between individuals as such but between them as representatives of different social functions and positions, between people in their capacity as artists and as public — remains incomprehensible as long as the pattern of our thinking aims solely at spinning out dehumanised abstractions.”
― Norbert Elias, Mozart: Portrait of a Genius

“But the significance of this experience for Mozart's personal development — and so for his development as a musician or, to put it differently, for that of his music — cannot be convincingly and realistically assessed if one merely describes the fate of the individual person, without also offering a model of the social structures of his time, especially where they led to differences of power. Only within the framework of such a model can one discern what a person like Mozart enmeshed in this society was able to do as an individual, and what — no matter how strong, great or unique he may have been — he was not able to do.”
― Norbert Elias, Mozart: Portrait of a Genius

“What is decisive is that, in his personal goals and wishes, in his sense of what had meaning and what did not, he anticipated the attitudes and feelings of a later type of artist. [...] In other words, Mozart represented the free artists who places his trust largely in individual inspiration.”
― Norbert Elias, Mozart: Portrait of a Genius

“De um modo geral, as vítimas da história, os grupos menos poderosos que foram derrotados, têm tido apenas uma pequena oportunidade de serem recordados. O principal quadro de referência do que é recordado como história continua sendo até hoje um Estado, e os livros de história ainda são, sobretudo, crônicas de Estados.”
― Norbert Elias, The Germans

“As pessoas que estão preparadas para usar a violência e o homicídio como instrumentos normais de política nunca podem sentir-se livres do medo de que outros possam recorrer aos mesmos instrumentos contra eles.”
― Norbert Elias, The Germans

“Las formulas y ritos convencionales de antes se siguen efectivamente utilizando, pero cada vez son mas las personas que encuentran embarazoso servirse de ellas, por que se les antojan vacías y triviales. Ya no creemos en las formulas, pero no hemos creado un lenguaje que las reemplace, los hechos como siempre, acorralan las palabras”
― Norbert Elias

“Se considerarmos o desenvolvimento de Estados neste século, damo-nos conta, repetidas vezes, de como a massa da população é realmente impotente, face a grupos institucionalizados relativamente pequenos, em especial os ocupantes de posições no governo, que tomam decisões sobre o bem-estar e, por vezes, a vida e morte das pessoas a quem governam. Com muita freqüência, resulta que essas decisões são desastrosos equívocos. Mas ainda que soubessem isso, os governantes dificilmente estariam em situação de mudar as coisas. Seus recursos de poder não teriam sido suficientes. E, na maioria dos casos, não se apercebiam de que eram as vítimas de decisões erradas, talvez se mostrassem até exultantes a tal respeito. Os movimentos de protesto, em geral, apenas demonstram a impotência dos governados — não só em relação ao seu próprio regime de governo, mas também em relação às decisões de outros governos de que depende o seu destino.”
― Norbert Elias, The Germans

“Se uma nação varre os seus crimes para debaixo do tapete, aumenta o risco de repeti-los e perpetua a falsa imagem de si mesma, a qual é suscetível de distorcer as suas outras percepções.”
― Norbert Elias, The Germans

“However, the power difference between economic establishments and outsiders in societies where there is a fairly free market for supply and demand and even, in some areas, for professional appointments, is much less than that between absolute rulers or their councillors and their court musicians — even though artists who were famous and à la mode could take some liberties.”
― Norbert Elias, Mozart: Portrait of a Genius

“Mozart experienced the fundamental ambivalence of the bourgeois artist in court society, which can be summed up by the following dichotomy: identification with the court nobility and its taste; resentment of his humiliation by it.”
― Norbert Elias, Mozart: Portrait of a Genius

“To understand a person, one needs to know the primordial wishes he or she longs to fulfill. Whether or not people's lives make sense to them depends on whether or how far they are able to realise these wishes. But they are not embedded in advance of all experience. They evolve from early childhood in life with other people, and are fixed gradually, over the years, in the form that will determine the course of life; sometimes, however, this will happen suddenly, in conjunction with an especially momentous experience.”
― Norbert Elias, Mozart: Portrait of a Genius