Nothing Will Have Happened
Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of “world history,” but nevertheless, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die.
– One might invent such a fable, and yet he still would not have adequately illustrated how miserable, how shadowy and transient, how aimless and arbitrary the human intellect looks within nature.
There were eternities during which it did not exist. And when it is all over with the human intellect, nothing will have happened. For this intellect has no additional mission which would lead it beyond human life. Rather, it is human, and only its possessor and beget-ter takes it so solemnly – as though the world’s axis turned within it.
But if we could communicate with the gnat, we would learn that he likewise flies through the air with the same solemnity, that he feels the flying center of the universe within himself.
There is nothing so reprehensible and unimportant in nature that it would not immediately swell up like a balloon at the slightest puff of this power of knowing. And just as every porter wants to have an admirer, so even the proudest of men, the philosopher, supposes that he sees on all sides the eyes of the universe telescopically focused upon his action and thought.
On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense by Friedrich Nietzsche 1873
I got my hands on this essay and strangely enough I feel comfort when reading it. Above are rendered some of the introductory lines. The essay was published in 1896 after the death of Nietzsche by his sister. It was composed early in the writer’s career soon after he wrote the Birth of Tragedy.
Following the video display of President Donald Trump crowing over the US military attack upon Venezuela and the kidnapping of the Venezuelan President and his wife — Nietzsche’s essay provides a framing. Trump’s gibbering, halting, meandering, slurred delivery in the light of Nietzsche’s overview of the human prospect seems an accurate rendition of where America is situated presently on our journey.
The text high-lighted in red is emphasis of the ironic twist in the appearance of things. We tend to miss irony as a matter of course, because of inattention. Or is it because “I want what I/we want” in lieu of absorbing the thrust of experience-in-itself upon our psyche? We, (note the collective pronoun,) are bat-shit intoxicated with the power of our knowing. Nietzsche observes that even the gnat, endowed with this power of knowing, would be seduced to imagine the very eyes of the universe are locked in focus upon its every move, its every intention.
And so it goes…
There’s always time enough for a tune. This one, by the Youngbloods, Get Together is a frame that seems universal to me.
