⁎ On the gravity of the smallest particles: without dropping over the invisible figures a net woven from the finest and heaviest threads, they do not reveal themselves: without a foundation, nothing is unveiled.
Perhaps the day will come when we can easily discount the human, all too human, in mathematics, and so see with less distortion what it brings to light for the first time.
The cardboard stiffness of our theories does not match current practice. Today even physicists sense as much. Quantum surrealism is affected for lack of «gravity and lightness.» Its topology still deforms what it wants to prove.1
⁎ Everything badly written shows itself in a surreal way; but in its genesis, and still in its impulse, it was better, and it remains so as a foundation. Water nets for invisible fish.2
⁎ The worker’s problem: he asks himself, from what angle does the intention of my superiors come?: but it comes from every angle. Every spiritual person recognizes that this is the basis of his abdication before political and systematizing powers.
⁎ It is easier to be a master of painting than a master of intelligence, perhaps because rational perception is younger than sensory perception. As intelligence develops, we see fewer and fewer things but intuit more atmospheres.3
Reverence for oneself shows through in pride over small achievements.4
«“Every man finds himself at the center of the world and beneath the center of his hemisphere and above the center of this world”.»
⁎ I like Borges, but the reading he likes strikes me as already subsumed in Goethe, Nietzsche, and Jünger—whom he met; he makes a similar criticism of Vargas Llosa. Maybe we have an inverted affinity. Opposites are close; they only have to reverse direction.
⁎ Perhaps neither Jesus nor Einstein added much value with respect to our location, but they did with respect to centralization; in this respect we can see them as philosophers. In a boundless, transcendent totality, every situation is more central than local.
“The toolkit is portable; it is not attached to races or landscapes. That is an advantage, and it can be seen in the fact that untouched soils are more favorable to the formation of the new world. Cuttings thus grow more robust than the trunk. It is not possible to localize evolution, but it is possible to centralize it. What remains to be asked is whether, along with the empirical characters, the intelligible world that rests behind them is also diffused. Is this an advance production of genuine culture, promising great gains, or is it its leaching away? The answer to this will be given not only by old Europe; it will also be given by the mutations that occur in the coming decades.”
⁎ Water nets for fish «of gold and diamond»—insoluble.
⁎ The dishonest person sleeps when he should be awake and is awake when he should be sleeping: this is avoided so long as we do not get used to not doing what we truly have to do and enjoy; it is one of the typical effects of modern society, something that has been intensifying since the Industrial Revolution.
Nietzsche saw how the function of public education is to make public servants; he saw how the key to its success depends on the person learning to be bored; that bourgeois society makes up 50% of the world’s population.
Darío Amodei plays (I don’t say this as a criticism) with that half; he seduces it, hence the contradictory and human aspect of his actions; «but we’ll never have enough engineers.»
References
- Ernst Jünger — The Scissors, Aph. 98.
The scissors that do not cut can also appear in the work of art; for example, in a painting on a domestic subject. Painters take pleasure in placing a pair of scissors near the good housewife; their representation should not, in contrast with the model, be too precise. Here one must expect this objection: what, then, about surrealism, where it is precisely precision that makes stylistic demands. For that reason, in surrealism precision moves away from pure copying, and from photographic copying as well. Among photographers, in any case, there are also good set designers, who do not copy the object but carry it into its proper dimension. Things that are too precise do not reinforce reality; they attack it. Hence the impression: one must look carefully again.
- Ernst Jünger — After Seventy, Diary V (1991–1996)
It is a pity when someone spends his powder too soon. The pressure to express oneself lacks a counterweight. Early brilliance. The trout leap out of the water and are caught in the air. Their gleam blinds. Had they been released into the water, their weight would have increased.
- Friedrich Nietzsche — The Portable Nietzsche
It is the stillest words that bring on the storm. Thoughts that come on doves’ feet guide the world.
- Ernst Jünger — Maxims and Minims on The Worker.
The laws that govern here are those of the balance; a handful of superior types is enough. Engineers, by contrast, we will never have enough of.
- Leonardo Da Vinci — Hans-Eberhard, translation of Leonardo’s maxims.
«Every man finds himself at the center of the world and beneath the center of his hemisphere and above the center of this world.»
- Ernst Jünger — Maxims and Minims on The Worker.
The toolkit is portable; it is not attached to races or landscapes. That is an advantage, and it can be seen in the fact that untouched soils are more favorable to the formation of the new world. Cuttings thus grow more robust than the trunk. It is not possible to localize evolution, but it is possible to centralize it. What remains to be asked is whether, along with the empirical characters, the intelligible world that rests behind them is also diffused. Is this an advance production of genuine culture, promising great gains, or is it its leaching away? The answer to this will be given not only by old Europe; it will also be given by the mutations that occur in the coming decades.