The problem of unearned complacency. Where does merit come from, what responsibility can we actually take on? That of our own nature: “one becomes who one is, even if for a long time one has no idea who one is.”
In Goethe’s finest passages we notice what at first glance seems surreal, but in his finest passages it is simply him. Nietzsche and Jünger are a little bit German, but above all they are Goethean.
Surrealism is relative; this becomes obvious in the differences between species, in differences of type: a lion or an eagle are not distinguished from centaurs or chimeras by not being assembled out of different pieces.
It is too simplistic, but perhaps right all the same, to believe that in nature there is a modus in rebus, to deny that a castle can arise from stones thrown at random.
But the difference between the well-achieved and the surreal leads us to something of the kind: the puzzle pieces may fit even if they fit badly; this kind of assembly is the one that resists by not resisting idleness.
And isn’t this what we admire, and what we resent in the best?, that they are themselves and by their example show us what we have always intuited? What we are bound to be crystallizes, even more vehemently precisely when we try to inhibit it.
There is the unity: the parts come from the same place, from the totality that determines the point; once we think it through, the question of how different things can fit well, all assembled together in a smaller sphere, is a bit of nonsense we leave behind.
The totality has force in its subsets too—lesser force—this reveals its nature in negation. Goethe almost no longer negated at the end of his life, amor fati.
This brings us to Descartes: what distinguishes the living from the dead if both are assembled from parts?
The line is gold, the points silver, that is: perhaps the machine does not endanger life, as Jünger proposes; perhaps what is more decisive there is the failure to recognize that the parts come from the totality that determines that point.
Hence the point has no parts for Da Vinci, every point is a bridge, a line; this fits well with the fact that it is not wise to divide the world in two, but perhaps the notion of entropy is being misread?, how can chaos be increasing as a whole and yet within the whole it still be possible to form?, doesn’t formation have as much right as deformation, what tells us that nature’s capacity to restore itself is, in the whole, something of lesser rank, something that always loses.
Is this not perhaps a confession of the limits of physics as we know it so far?, and especially of most physicists. Stupidity is constant; it gives genius consistency, fewer hunt than cook: a handful of higher human beings is enough; engineers, on the other hand, we will never have enough of.
The natural value of changing one’s mind later is given more by the need in us for what cannot vary than by other uses, and that is healthy, “that is art in art”; if nature wants it so, if in this way nature expresses the totality that determines the point, so be it; responsibility does not lose its value because of that.
Both Jesus and Einstein brought us closer to the meaning of the local, Jesus through the cross—this reaches much farther than was once thought, it is also a good equation; “We represent the possibilities we were granted, but we do not execute them; existence not only as complement but as function; one way of seeing the capacity we were granted, the local portion of our nature, is the force of ‘crossing’ our nature, something present in the lion and the eagle, or in the human figure, but also as exaggeration (where it becomes more evident) in surrealism. It gives the impression that art and religion get ahead of technique.
Crossing our nature, a matter of integrity: approach the unfamiliar through the familiar; the spiritual dimensions go much farther beyond and much nearer than our nature, toward nature, toward the totality that determines our nature; that we can cross it is something close to free will.