To the Greeks the Private Realm was the sphere of life ruled by the necessity of sustaining life, and the Public Realm the sphere of freedom where a man could disclose himself to others. Today, the significance of the terms private and public has been reversed; public life is the necessary impersonal life, the place where a man fulfills his social function, and it is in his private life that he is free to be his personal self.
In consequence the arts, literature in particular, have lost their traditional principal human subject, the man of action, the doer of public deeds.—W. H. Auden
Monday, April 26, 2010
The man of action
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2 comments:
Don't you think there's a trend toward disclosing "private" life again (but probably in a different way than the Greeks saw it and in a different way than Auden means)?
I haven't decided if the "Facebook effect" is a change in this relationship or just a narrowing (to near erasure) of the freedom part.
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