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Novel Ideas - By Charles Hill | Foreign Policy →
From the article:
“Statesmen once looked to great works of literature to help them understand the world. No longer”.
“Literature informs leaders whose actions may later become the stuff of literature. Imperfection — the conflicts, stratagems, and surprises of world affairs — can convey an ineffable, transcendent sense of things. Clausewitz called it the coup d’oeil: an integration of experience, observation, and imagination that “constructs a whole of the fragments that the eye can see.” Imprinting it “like a picture, like a map, upon the brain.” The approach is like a poet’s, involving the quick recognition of a truth that the mind would ordinarily miss, or would perceive only after long study and reflection. Oswald Spengler, at the end of The Decline of the West, a kind of tome-poem, praises something similar, the sense possessed by a judge of “horseflesh.” A statesman requires such a sense, but in every category of life literature can capture the multifarious whole”.
Source: foreignpolicy.com
