THE WORK OF GEORGE STEINER CAN BE READ, AMONG OTHER things, as an intellectual moral code:
The heart of a culture is the classic—that is to say, timeless, works. They are timeless and imperishable because their meaning transcends death. In the words of Hölderlin: ‘Was bleibet aber, stiften die Dichter.’
Characteristic of the great works is that they question us, they demand a reaction. The archaic torso of Apollo in Rilke’s famous poem tells us, in no uncertain terms: ‘Du sollst dein Leben ändern.’
Do not shy away from that which is difficult. Spinoza: ‘All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.’
Only fools ignore the significance of tradition, fact, and knowledge. Hölderlin: ‘Wir sind nur Original, weil wir nichts wissen.’
Being a critic means: being able to make distinctions.
Being at home in the world of culture means being at home in many worlds, many languages: being at home in the history of ideas, in literature, music, art. It requires erudition and the ability to see the connections between the various worlds: the nexus.
There is a connection between language and politics, between culture and society. In order to understand cultural developments, to see which ideas prevail and what their consequences will be, cultural-philosophical reflection is indispensable.
It is essential to be elitist—but in the original sense of the word: to take responsibility for ‘the best’ of the human mind. A cultural elite must bear the responsibility for the knowledge and preservation of the most important ideas and values, for the classics, for the meaning of words, the nobility of our spirit. Being elitist, as Goethe explained, means being respectful: respectful of the divine, of nature, of our fellow human beings, and so, of our own human dignity.
To sum up in a single sentence what we have learned from the intellectual tradition to which George Steiner belongs: the world of culture is of vital importance to the quality of human life. But: culture is also vulnerable. Not for nothing does a dictatorship silence its poets and thinkers and impose censorship. And in this period of the fascism of vulgarity (Steiner’s own term), of censorship of the market and of the ‘knowledge economy’, cultural knowledge and cultural-philosophical reflection are being undermined, or even made impossible, more often than we may realize.