I am an impure thinker is a collection of essays, lectures and interviews by the social philosopher, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy. As such, the content varies greatly from chapter to chapter, though there are some common themes throughout.
The title comes from the notion of purity in the sense of a school of thought, and that as an impure thinker, Rosenstock-Huessy defies a single classification. Indeed, throughout the book he decries idealism, existentialism, naturalism, science, economics, art, classicism, and likely a dozen other -isms; though in so doing, he often uses elements of the schools of thought he recently derided.
The book is a fairly dense read, although slim. The forward, written by the famed poet W.H. Auden (one of Rosenstock-Huessy's greatest supporters), had this to say:
I should warn anyone reading him for the first time that, to begin with, he may find as I did, certain aspects of Rosenstock-Huessy's writings a bit hard to take. At times he may seem to claim to be the only man who has ever seen the light about History and Language.
When that's the first thing you see getting into a book, you know you're in for a long ride.
In plain terms, Rosenstock-Huessy's main philosophy seems to be that the only truth in the world is the human condition. To speak to one another, to feel, to be Christian. All else is illusion or fabrication. He deems all non-educational pursuits (excepting being a soldier, something he also was during the first World War) as juvenile. The tone of the book is best summed up by choice selections of his own words; physics is denounced as the root of all evil, for example:
... The four-hundred years' dominance of physics inevitably leads up to the social revolution of the "It's," the "quantity" into which the workers are degraded by a mechanistic society. The politics and education of the last centuries proved a disaster whenever they tried to establish the abnormal and most inhuman extremes of Ego and It as norms.
Naturalism prompts:
Here, I forego the temptation to accuse the naturalists of robbery and plagiarism. I could accuse them of having embezzled all our terms of the Spirit's life, presence, future, heredity, survival, history, acquired faculties. Originally, all these terms of Darwin hail from the Bible. Because only God can be present. Only the children of his inheritance can have a future, only the fruits of the spirit can survive in death. And only the apostles can succeed in transmitting the newly acquired faculties of our Savior. But I shall leave it to you to draw these conclusions yourselves.
and
Descartes is a gigantically expanded adolescent, full of curiosity, loathing his mental childhood, and frustrating his mental manhood.
Creativity is described thus:
The term "creative" nowadays is the fashion. It is meaningless, as we certainly are not God almighty, but very mortal, very corrupt and terribly stupid.
The remaining pages fill up with various theories, Latin terms and lists of elements of he invents for some aspect of human nature (e.g. the Four Phases of Speech, the Twelve Tones of the Spirit, and so forth. He seems terribly fond of making arbitrary lists of things and saying each element is essential and inexpandable.) Most of the text looks a lot like the following excerpt.
We know of time only in the form of twofold time - we distinguish before and after, and we know space only in the form of duplicate space - we distinguish inner and outer. These four units, two times and two spaces are the four phases of the total experience ... Hence, all men always have known of their quadrigeminal existence, as otherwise grammar's dramatic cycles of "go, let us go, we have gone, going," this unity in diversity, could never have been created.
It's not all doom and gloom though, there are moments of humor, though all thoroughly unintentional.
The United States of America did not exist before they were called the United States of America. This remains ununderstandable to a Greek mind.
Our children play hopscotch. This is a play which imitates the serious procession of the dead through heaven and hell, when they are brought before their judges in the after-life as we were taught by the Egyptian priests.
and my favourite:
Perhaps I am too childish and primitive myself, but the fact that two and two are four really and always still stirs my imagination.
There are a few other interesting moments. Apparently the direct cause of the first World War was that parents in the early 1900s stopped giving their children biblical names, a half-an-essay dedicated to why incest is a bad idea, a completely out of nowhere paragraph about a gymnasium full of "naked, beautiful but inexperienced boys" for some reason, and a truly bizarre rant about the value of acronyms (hint: it's not at all what you expect).
To sum it up, it's fairly clear why Rosenstock-Huessy never became a household name in philosophical circles, but the book is an interesting, if odd, read nonetheless. In closing, I'll leave you with a phrase Rosenstock-Huessy seems to know all-too-well.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur
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