Abstract
What I am after I cannot hope to accomplish, for it is nothing less than to grasp our time and place. What I mean by “1984” is not the particular year nor Orwell’s book, even though Orwell’s book is pertinent to an understanding of our time. I will only present some vignettes and some aspects to illustrate my sense of “1984,” and these will be the catch of my surrender to the topic “‘Nineteen-Eighty-Four’ and Surrenderand-Catch.” The catch is the fulfillment of the hope that incapable of presenting the totum I may be able to present at least a small partem pro toto from which it might be possible to envisage one approach to the theme as a whole.
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Cf. Pascal. Man is “as if suspended in the mass nature has given him between these two abysses, infinity and nothing, from which he is equally distant. He will tremble in the face of these marvels, and I think that because his curiosity changes into admiration, he will be more inclined to contemplate them in silence than presumptuously research them”: Pascal, Pensées (1665), Paris: Guillaume Desprez, 1754, p. 143. (My thanks to Eleanor Godway for alerting me to this.) It is a reminder of how far we are from silent contemplation.
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© 1995 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Wolff, K.H. (1995). “Nineteen-Eighty-Four” and Surrender-and-Catch. In: Transformation in the Writing. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 166. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8412-8_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8412-8_12
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