How surprised the psychologists of the French army were when they discovered that Senegalese conscripts were more sensitive to the vicissitudes of the climate, and even to extreme heat, than the soldiers of “metropolitan” France; that they reacted to the least changes in the weather, and even to such barely discernible events as minute inflections of the voice. These warriors who had passed for brutes—these heroes—turned out to have the sensitivity of women. It is often said, and not without reason, that the Negro is a man of Nature. The African negro, whether peasant, fisherman, hunter or herdsman, lives outdoors, both off the earth and with it, on intimate terms with trees and animals and all the elements, and to the rhythm of seasons and days. He keeps his senses open, ready to receive any impulse, and even the very waves of nature, without a screen (which is not to say without relays or transformers) between subject and object. He does, of course, reflect; but what comes first is form and color, sound and rhythm, smell and touch.

Hail to the royal Kaicedrat! Hail to those who have invented nothing, To those who have explored nothing, To those who have subdued nothing, But abandoned themselves to the grip of the essence of every thing, Ignorant of the surface, but gripped by the movement of every thing, Not caring to subdue, but to play the game of the world.

Who is not familiar with Aristotle's Poetics? Who is not familiar with modern poetics, if only Boileau's Art poétique? But apart from specialists, who is familiar with the poetics of the entire period between classical antiquity and modern times, between Aristotle and the Pléiade or Boileau? Yet, this period extended over two thousand years. Furthermore, it possessed its own poetics, governed by the strictest principles, worked out to the last detail. It may be divided into two great epochs: the end of Hellenic-Roman antiquity, on the one hand, and the entire Middle Ages, on the other. The poetics of these two epochs were very similar, since the second depended in great part on the first. Nevertheless, they present differences which oblige us to study them separately.

Over the last few decades the biological sciences have developed a strong new branch which lays down certain important prerequisites for any conception of human nature. This is the science of behavior which has found a place half-way between its sister sciences, morphology and physiology, who are often very far apart from one another. The new science has given some of its representatives the will to try out new conceptions of the organism. “Behavior” combines structure and function in a new whole, and it promises to overcome the separation between individual and environment, for a larger synthesis brings more comprehensive phenomena into view. It also promises to overcome the isolation of the individual, for it makes it possible to comprehend the individual as an integral part of a whole which is of necessity supra-individual.

The changes in technology applied by industry, whose rhythm has been ever accelerating in the course of the last decades, have destabilized institutions in western societies: they change the meaning of these institutions, and modify their efficacity, without our collective awareness, and without our jettisoning the ballast of inertia and social anachronism. The techniques of industrialization which incomparably endow the great nations and national empires, and which the infant nations desire with a sure instinct, give rise to profound contradictions in the traditional doctrine and practice of national sovereignty.

The interest now being manifested in the history of African civilizations (an interest which one may be assured in advance can never be satisfied), raises the question whether the function which, in our societies devolves upon the diffusion of history, has not sometimes been fulfilled on the African continent by activities based on specific functions generally considered devoid of historical significance, as, for example, religion.

The existence of monsters throws doubt on life's ability to teach us order. This doubt is immediate, no matter for how long a time we have had confidence, no matter how accustomed we have been to see honeysuckle grow on honeysuckle vines, tadpoles become frogs, mares suckle colts, and in general to see like engender like. It is sufficient that this confidence be shaken once by a morphological variation, by a single equivocal appearance, for a radical fear to possess us. Perhaps, fear, you will say; but why radical? Because we are living beings, real effects of the laws of life, and in our turn future causes of life. A failure on the part of life concerns us doubly: a failure could affect us, and we could cause a failure. It is only because we men are living beings that a morphological failure is, in our eyes, a monster. Suppose we were pure reason, a pure intellectual machine for observing, calculating, and accounting—inert, and indifferent to the objects that give rise to thought: in that case the monster would simply be that which was different from the ordinary, of an order other than the most probable order.

At least since Aristotle, and up to the end of the seventeenth century, the form of literary works, envisaged and appreciated for itself, independent of content, has never ceased to be one of the major concerns of critics and lovers of belles lettres. Theories of style, poetics, phraseology and grammar form an imposing and coherent collection; each generation has enriched it; opinions have changed but not methods or intentions: the formulation of rules of the art of writing is itself a genre with its own laws. All of this was true up to the day when there appeared, at first rather modestly, a new spirit manifesting itself in the nineteenth century by two tendencies, apparently contradictory but deriving from the same source, and each vigorously developing. On the one hand, the notion of style is widened, and the word expressing it, which up to that time only affected the domain of letters, is extended bit by bit to the fine arts, to all arts, to all kinds of activities. Diderot was the first to apply it to painting; today we speak casually about the style of a swimmer or of a tennis player. On the other hand, and concurrently, literary art found itself affected by a sense of inferiority.

For the most part, American sociology has accepted the appealing formula of neutrality with regard to political and ideological values, a formula especially put forward by the functionalist school. It has the golden merit of posing issues in a seemingly natural science manner. The sociologist can adopt the physicist's pose toward his work. We provide society with carefully sifted information, comparative analysis of social structures, and at the upper range, the likely consequences of performing or not performing an action in terms of the given diagnosis. The social scientist using a functionalist philosophy can feel free of responsibility at a decision making level. Whether society decides to employ or ignore the provided data is held to be a matter of indifference, a situation requiring moral wisdom rather than social theory. Without minimizing the sound contributions of the function-Structure approach, particularly in overcoming the provincialism and conceit of the pre-functionalist schools of anthropology, there is a sure moral undercurrent in a method which sees the social scientist as diagnostician and society as a patient. It has the appearance of satisfying the historic identification of social theory to social welfare, and no less an emotional identification with a neutral-objective image culled from physics. Social history becomes a variable in the preparation of trend reports and thereby trivialized into a moment in the functionalist scheme.

A specter is haunting sociologists. It is the specter of “mass society.” This phantasm is not of the sociologist's own making. The conception of mass society, that had its origin in the Roman historians’ idea of the tumultuous populace and its greatest literary expression in Coriolanus, is largely a product of the nineteenth century. In this epoch, it is a product of the reaction against the French Revolutions which ran from 1789, through 1830 and 1848, to 1871. Jakob Burckhardt and Friedrich Nietzsche, fearful of the inflammability of the mob in the presence of a heated demagogue—that demagogue was Louis Napoléon—came to envisage modern society, particularly modern democratic society, as tending toward an inert and formless mass, lying in brutish torpor most of the time and occasionally aroused to plebiscitary acclamation by a “great simplifier.” Tocqueville's critique of the absolutist ancien régime, centered on a vision of a society which has lost its framework of feudal liberty through the destruction of the autonomous corporations and estates on which it rested, is a cornerstone of that construction. The no-man's land between the absolute prince and the mass of the population became a field open to passion and manipulation.

Prose is simply defined in the Shorter Oxford Dictionary as “… the ordinary form of written or spoken language without metrical structure” and certainly for a majority of native English speakers this definition serves well enough, though in English, prose is more usually understood to be written rather than spoken. Most people have a more or less clear idea of what they mean by prose, if only because there is a large body of accepted verse with which to contrast it, a contrast not materially affected by the problems posed by modern verse techniques. There is also a pretty wide measure of agreement as to what constitutes literature, again because there is a corpus of material, accumulated over the centuries, which is regarded as such by common consent. This material provides a basis for judgments of value on more recent work, so that one can make some sort of contrast between “Gibbon's History and to-night's evening paper” but there is bound to be futile argument over certain cases, and one can be sure that there will be divergence from the current view with the passage of time. All in all, however, there is likely to be a large area over which one may obtain a fair measure of agreement as to what may be termed the prose literature of English.

The truly great social drama of mankind has not been the oppression of the minorities by the majorities. This form of tyranny affects by definition only small groups of human beings, and if it has often assumed violent forms, it has nevertheless retained over the centuries its episodic character—excepting the case of the Jewish people.

The Greek theater produced not only a single triumphal procession of Dionysus. The god of tragedy made his way into the Renaissance and the baroque period through the story of Orpheus, given new dramatic and musical life. This was the theme of my study in Diogenes, 1959: “The Birth and Rebirth of Tragedy.” But the god of comedy was none other than the god of tragedy, and his path led, already in ancient times, to a particular dramatic genre: a genre which in its last, mild form became at the same time the vehicle of humanity, as the actual, great herald of Greek culture, and the model for European drama, inasfar as the latter did not purport to be a continuation of Greek tragedy.

In order to achieve celebrity and more or less to dominate one's time, not to mention those that follow, it has often been said that a necessary condition is to be born at the right moment, and also to die at the opportune time.

One of the interesting aspects of the study of children's play is that it permits us to see clearly how an awareness of rules is built up in us against factors of wildness, and how this awareness of rules, little by little, pervades the child's behavior. Now, the child's experience can inform us about the experience of the species: if the processes of the acquisition of self-control cannot be exactly the same, as Stanley Hall thought, the very differences allow us to specify the importance and exact role of an environment which is not the same for the child and for early mankind. For example, the existence of a coherent, stable, adult group makes for the institutionalization and perpetuation in terms of an adult tradition of behavior which, in the child, cannot take on its full development for lack of that social, and so to speak, institutional co-efficient. Thus, all at once, childhood turbulence is transformed into adult techniques of ecstacy and intoxication, or playing according to rules, sloughs off in the adult as religion, art, or even philosophy.

The idea of decadence presents many variants of which two alone have a truly decisive importance. One is the biological, physiological and psychological variant; the other, the literary, esthetic and spiritual variant. The latter is so much more significant than the former that it often incarnates the very constant of the idea of decadence. This constant is eminently historical: everyone knows that when decadence, and nothing else, is being spoken about, it is not so much the degeneration of the species or of an individual that is under consideration, as the decline of a social and political organism or, more generally, of a society or a civilization. All modern speculation with regard to the notion of decadence derives from this principle.

If we are to understand the contradictory character of negro poetry in the Portuguese language, we have to be acquainted with the social conditions under which it was written. We are thus led to examine the origin of the creole societies of Cape Verde, Saint Thomas and Prince Island on the one hand, and of the negro societies of Angola and Mozambique on the other, whose evolution was entirely different. On Cape Verde, we can still find a system of agriculture based on small properties. On Saint Thomas and Prince Island, agriculture still predominates, but is based on large properties and shows many features of the capitalistic system. In Angola and Mozambique on the other hand, we encounter many different social and economic forms, ranging from tribal organization to urban concentration and agricultural exploitation of the capitalistic type.

By its very structure, the objective image tends to establish a new rapport between man and the world. One can hardly, if at all, speak of “image” in connection with photography. Originally the word signified: imitation, copy. The image which imitates the world remains distinct from it. In a drawing, faithful though it might be, there is always a distance, an interval between the object represented and its plastic transcription. This distance disappears entirely in photography. There, the image coincides so much with the given data that it is somehow destroyed as an image. It is this very data, magically repeated, covering the surface of the paper or of the screen with its presence, its double, so to speak. The photographic image is no longer a copy, but a statement of the world itself expressed in it, a simple opening into the world.

In the plastic image, either painting or drawing, the world was denied. I mean denied not in its forms or colors, but in its very essence, denied insofar as it was the world. It was a world trans-posed, trans-figured, abstracted from that exteriority in which it is displayed as the world. A world in which man made his mark by interpreting it in plastic terms. Van Gogh's Orchard is a picture before being the representation of an orchard. Man can gaze upon it as on a beautiful creation in itself, added to the world, and if subsequently he is referred to a real orchard, the spectator will discover it with Van Gogh's eyes, through the transfigurating vision of the painter. The image traced by man's hand acts as a transmutation: it appropriates the substance of the world in order to integrate it into the human domain. In a second phase, it shapes the world to our visual taste. The revolution accomplished by photography, on the contrary, depends on what the world henceforth predicates—in its autonomy and difference—in the very image which man forms of it. Where once there was an exercise of power, now there is nothing but submission. Photography is the total effacement before the real with which it coincides. It is the world as it is, in its immediate verity which it reproduces on paper or on the screen. It confers upon it, as it were, a second presence, effacing itself insofar as it is an image in order to be no more than a field open to this presence, repeated each time. To the denied world of plastic representation, there consequently succeeds the world affirmed as pure in itself, established in its difference before the observer. The objective image makes possible the paradox that the world unveils itself as it is in itself, pro-nounces itself, if I may say so, prior to all human language. Up to then, it was manifested as a world only via the mediation of the observer. It was the “given” matter of an observation: that of the man who simply was orienting himself or contemplating, or the creative gaze of the artist. In the photographic image, the world somehow precedes this observation: it determines its content, imposing a vision. The traditional schema is reversed: from pure matter to a discourse, the world becomes itself a language and “accosts” man in this language. The relationship between man and the world, summed up in classic vision, becomes, via the interpretation of the twin-image, a sort of relationship of the world to man.

Acculturation, or more precisely Westernization, in the Near and Middle East has gone through distinct typical phases. After the shock of inferiority discovered, an almost complete surrender to the foreign values and (not infrequently misunderstood) aspirations; then, with Westernization partially realised, a recoiling from the alien, which however continues to be absorbed greedily, and a falling back on the native tradition; this tradition is restyled and, in some cases, newly created with borrowed techniques of scholarship to give respectability to the results. Finally, with Westernization very largely completed in terms of governmental reforms, acceptance of the values of science and adoption of Western literary and artistic form, regained self-confidence expresses itself in hostility to the West and insistence on the native and original character of the borrowed product.

The most illustrious tradition of romantic poetry on oriental subjects, from the Westöstlicher Diwan to Rückert, Platen, Hugo and Leconte de Lisle, was inspired essentially by Indian and Persian epic, lyric and gnomic poetry, referring only to a minor degree to the ancient poetry of the Arabs—although it is precisely Rückert to whom we are indebted for a version of the Hamâsa, a famous anthology of pagan Arabic poetry. Goethe approached this anthology through the versions of Jones, described it briefly in the “Notes and Commentary” to the Diwan, and among other sections retold one tale splendidly in verse: the “Song of Vengeance” of Taâbbata Sharran. Here the force of his genius lifted him well above the bristling Latin of Freytag, through whom he had come to know the song, and brought him very close in lyrical intuition to the original of this masterpiece of debated authenticity. But on the whole, the poetic heritage of the ancient Arabs was not adequately echoed in the literature of the romantic age. Rückert himself, inspired by pagan Arabic poetry, is read by few people today; and the poetry that was his model is studied rather by philologists, for its documentary value. Theodor Noeldeke, at the beginning of his classic study of the Mu'allakat, declared frankly: “It is questionable whether the aesthetic pleasure provided by the study of ancient Arabic poetry is worth the great pains required even to approach an understanding of the same.” It is difficult to stand in opposition to the authority of the “old master” of German orientalists, who confessed that “the more he studied the Semites, the more he loved the Greeks.” Even the most humble author of these lines dares to appropriate for himself the lines of Noeldeke; and yet, beyond every comparison, which cannot help resulting unfavorably for the ancient poets of the desert, he who knows how to love and seek out poetry will find in them authentic artistic values. Even the harsh pagan song can in certain passages interest us, fill us with enthusiasm, and move us.

“God the Creator, Amma,” says a Dogon fable, “asked a hyena to bring him the best thing in the world. The hyena brought him a woman. Amma then asked him to go in search of the worst thing in the world. The hyena returned once again with a woman. When Amma wanted to know the reasons for this choice, the hyena replied ‘All the good and all the evil in the world come from woman.’ “ Amma agreed.