Today is my birthday. It is early but already several have greeted me with, “happy birthday.” As an adult it has been difficult to dwell on my birthday. “Happy Birthday…” Really!? A pure happiness is not of this world. I am here after 75 years, an astonishing, lucky win. After all the odds of…
Nothing is so conditional that is so circumscribed, as our feeling for the beautiful. Anyone who has tried to divorce it from man’s pleasure would be to find the ground give way beneath him. the ‘beautiful in itself’ is not even a concept, merely a phrase. In the beautiful man sets himself up as…
Decadence (Oxford Dictionary): moral or cultural decline as characterized by excessive indulgence in pleasure or luxury. The whole is no longer a whole,.. a metaphor for every style of décadence; every time anarchy of atoms, scattering of will, ‘freedom of the individual’, morally speaking expanded into political theory, ‘equal rights for all’. life, equal…
The sight of the beautiful… a releasing stimulant to the chief force of his nature… so that this force then exploded and all at once became master of his consciousness. But that does not in any way exclude the possibility for that particular sweetness and plentitude which is characteristic of the aesthetic condition might…
Every art, every philosophy may be viewed as a remedy and an aid in the service of growing and struggling life; they always presuppose suffering and sufferers. But there are two kinds of sufferers: first those who suffer from the over-fullness of life -they want a Dionysian art and likewise a tragic view of…
Perhaps, we can discover a realm where originality is again possible as parodists of history and buffoons of God. Beyond Good and Evil, by Friedrich Nietzsche, aphorism 223 I am curious about this quote which is found in the essay by Michel Foucault, Nietzsche, Genealogy, History. History, the stories that we tell are compared…
A friend gave me an essay written by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, On Stupidity. Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran pastor, a leader of the “confessing church” opposing the policies of the Nazis. The Nazis aimed at eliminating Jews, promoting the ideology of Aryan purity. Bonhoeffer’s essay seems germane to our situation now, the rise of Trumpism, and…
“Effective history” deprives the self of the reassuring stability of life and nature, and it will not permit itself to be transported by a voiceless obstinacy toward a millennial ending… This is because knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting. “Effective history” deals with events in terms of their most…
Humanity does not gradually progress from combat to combat until it arrives at universal reciprocity, where the rule of law gradually replaces warfare; humanity installs each of its violences in a system of rules and thus proceeds from domination to domination. The nature of these rules allows violence to be inflicted upon violence and…
Descent attaches itself to the body.1 It inscribes itself in the nervous system, in temperament, in the digestive apparatus; it appears in faulty respiration, in improper diets, in the debilitated and prostrate body of those whose ancestors committed errors. Fathers have only to mistake the effects for causes, believe in the “afterlife,” or maintain…
