Advice to young scholars, and old

In the same 1962 interview, Rosenstock-Huessy has some shrewd advice about the corrupting power of grant money on youn scholars. “If I have to solicit great foundations for money for my research,” he says, “then I have to propose something which is already obsolete for me. I know no researcher who in the first moment of a new inspiration could have found the sympathy and approval of the establishment. Whether it’s Galileo, Copernicus, Fichte, or I myself, it’s always the same: the new thought has to break through in battle against the vested interests, the power of the establishment, the conception of squandered money, against money itself – in short, against powers of all sorts.”

To ask “What do I have to propose to get money?” is to yield to these powers: “A man who does that once in his life has ceased to be of any possible significance for science He is corrupt.” The grim irony is that this temptation does not arise from evil motives, but “the opposite; it is caused by too much good will, by the belief that spirit can be aroused by cash.”