1 Fiction can represent any truth — algebra. This does not show fiction’s limitlessness, but the limits of truth.
“All great things bring about their own destruction through an act of self-overcoming: thus the law of life will have it, the law of the necessity of “self-overcoming” in the nature of life—the lawgiver himself eventually receives the call: “patere legem, quam ipse tulisti.” In this way Christianity as a dogma was destroyed by its own morality; in the same way Christianity as morality must now perish, too: we stand on the threshold of this event. After Christian truthfulness has drawn one inference after another, it must end by drawing its most striking inference, its inference against itself; this will happen, however, when it poses the question “what is the meaning of all will to truth?” And here I again touch on my problem, on our problem, my unknown friends (for as yet I know of no friend): what meaning would our whole being possess if it were not this, that in us the will to truth becomes conscious of itself as a problem? As the will to truth thus gains self-consciousness—there can be no doubt of that—morality will gradually perish now: this is the great spectacle in a hundred acts reserved for the next two centuries in Europe—the most terrible, most questionable, and perhaps also the most hopeful of all spectacles.—”
“What is the «world revolution»? Visible modifications are preceded by less visible ones, and these by invisible ones. Technique itself, as a modus vivendi, rises up from great depths. The preeminence of spiritual modifications over technical ones, of technical over political, of political over strategic. A war can already be won politically before it has begun. Hence the «cold war» too brings shifts in power. Positions are won by playing with peasant victims, with cosmic flanking maneuvers. Gains and losses lie in unsuspected things. And for that very reason one should not lose faith too soon, not even in matters of power.”
“The best angle of vision is the outsider’s. Whoever makes a description must be both inside and outside at once. This is made possible by differences of level based on origin or race and also on the centuries, and it creates not only the intermediate position, the position of someone who is with neither one side nor the other - in such a position there is also betrayal, a betrayal of one side and, almost always, a betrayal of both. To this is added the bad luck of having a little less fear than the others. One has been singing in the fire and arrives with matters people do not want to know about. Fate masks itself in those things that cannot be known. Hence the best forecasts are those that astonish their own author when he looks back at them.”
2 Reality as a «proposition» is far subtler than we think when awake (in waking life); even the ones we manage to grasp are hard for us to grasp twice; it is easier to capture them in language in half-sleep; from these propositions of reality, it seems, reality «encompasses itself».
This brings to mind the expansion of the universe. Every “discovery” in physics can also be seen as a confession, since «science is feeling its way toward the origin,»1 for the observer. It is through intuition and algebra that we can suppose reality encompasses itself.
“We can no longer conceal from ourselves what is expressed by all that willing which has taken its direction from the ascetic ideal: this hatred of the human, and even more of the animal, and more still of the material, this horror of the senses, of reason itself, this fear of happiness and beauty, this longing to get away from all appearance, change, becoming, death, wishing, from longing itself—all this means—let us dare to grasp it—a will to nothingness, an aversion1 to life, a rebellion against the most fundamental presuppositions of life; but it is and remains a will! … And, to repeat in conclusion what I said at the beginning: man would rather will nothingness than not will—.”
3 What dreams contain is the capacity to be the algebra of the propositions of reality. Dreams are those propositions and dreaming is that capacity; by comparison, in half-sleep we see instead the value of everything semi-, of our “imperfection”: the imperfect is the way we have of intuiting the algebra of propositions; otherwise we could not separate ourselves from the universe.
4 Man and woman: they move in opposite directions but toward the same goal: to find each other; and how could it not be so in the case of human life?
5 Between being master of things «and» watching over them, too, there is that distinction between the quantum and the classical, between «poetry and truth».
6 Someone who sees only the vulgar in others is just as unpleasant as someone who refuses to see the vulgar in himself.
7 We want more than lasting works—this we already get from the material with which we conceive; we want ourselves to last.
8 Is a figment what works of fiction are called? Is it something more natural than a meme?
9 Is popularity based on a cost of exposure we can pay at any given moment? Hence famous people are called stars.
10 People look for a formula for success: knowing how to fish, not being handed fish. They want to be hunters, not merely to have game.
11 Do we have, for the age of artificial intelligence, a great mp3? That is, the capacity to encode reality’s great subtlety, to make it lighter, brilliantly masking the loss of those subtleties of analog curves.
12 The discoveries of science are also a confession, since the human being knows the origin by experience, from the first pinnacle of his existence. This is interesting!
13 «Brilliant errors»: lack of precision has a cost, but so does excess precision, since through lack of precision it invalidates errors that have an adjacent correction. I didn’t read Deutsch’s paper (if it exists) on «quantum error correction», but it must imply this or could make use of it.
14 That correction is also a precision. But it cannot be the same one that produces the error through an excessive demand for precision. As we approach the problem, we notice that what wants to kick over the board there is a kind of tantrum, a response to bewilderment.
But that means kicking away the context, the totality that determines all precision, hybris—despising the rules of the game. Nietzsche and Dostoevsky came close to this, each in his own way. When they speak of nihilism, what they are talking about is that tantrum caused by bewilderment and failure.
What is interesting about this, about the position near the origin that science has reached, is that it shows us not only that the universe’s expansion is also a confession, but that a confession like this bewilderment also applies to the cosmos of which we are part and in which we are immersed.
15 The demand for precision born of bewilderment, followed by nihilism, that ingratitude that can arise in someone who misses the mark, is not only a confession; it is a property of the cosmos.
When we ask ourselves how there can be people who can know that something is true in the cosmos, and we want to know how they can know it, we have to take into account what we have been saying: that at a stage on the road where science and human consciousness «are feeling their way toward the origin», the discoveries of science are confessions and confessions are discoveries of science.
Not only is the universe expanding; when we guess at and discover the algebra of human propositions, we also notice that they encompass themselves.
16 But it is not only a matter of hunting truths with imprecision; it is also worth making them precise, since «in order to use things without depending on understanding them», precision is necessary.
17 Most people really hate innovation; that is why they keep making mistakes. They appreciate the cellphone, but because they are excessively partisan, divided, scattered (as we all are on a bad day), they use it to «confirm their errors».
18 For us, innovating is better than the “new”, just as the Dionysian is superior to the gods, or heroism to heroes—not in its power—the universe is sovereign—but as a fair measure for assessing humanity’s capacity.
19 Saving in advance or protecting beforehand: but sterility can be a problem; it is a problem if it inhibits creativity, which is based not only on the why and the how, but also on assimilating and appropriating, on «what to live from».
20 «A false hypothesis is better than none»2. Better still than a chaotic letting oneself go, which later shows itself in a nihilistic tantrum.
“A system is shaken by the mere demonstration that it can be viewed from another angle - that there are other systems. The new approach shows that the things believed, which are the foundation of all knowledge, are still not enough, and that the search must continue. The cosmos should not come to have an excess of power; as it grows, it must deepen.”
21 The same happens with human power: it must not be excessive, it has to deepen; in that way one part takes care «not to dominate everything»—which is perhaps as foolish as thinking the West can dominate the East: what differentiates them remains, just as it is not advisable for diastole to dominate systole either; that produces problems of character and of the heart.
22 It is true that theories are left behind once they have fulfilled their function, but it is also true that they worked.
23 If every day you find yourself surrounded by valuable things, describing them is valuable to others.
24 There are people with a talent for making nightmares come true. «But there comes a point in a person’s development when problems themselves are only a nuisance», and from then on what is sought is virgin ground where dreams can be made real.
The queen of the night has her limits, «it is easier to describe hell than paradise»—in this way what the earth seeks is to be consumed; that is, it is only a theory, a stage on the road, something to deal with only in passing.
25 If a business has no economic problems, it should not have financial problems. If it does, creativity must be lacking.
26 Romanticism is an old-fashioned way of giving life meaning; it is different from «the love of fate»3; what is romantic is sacrificing yourself for things others won’t thank you for, yourself included.
How is it that each of us is everyone else? Because «human capacity remains implicit, sovereign, by having no purpose or goal»4, it is universal, much as reality is, «it has no goals, it has horizons»5.
27 There is much more than one thinks in keeping it resonating within oneself that «the best insights are unexpected, and therefore are the ones that surprise their own author.» That resonance, if we hold it as a good, helps us hit the mark in the right measure.
28 Intuition is the superior locality and position from which to act, but there we not only get things right, we also make mistakes. Still, it remains the best place from which to get things right, to improve, and to innovate.
29 Romanticism is not the same as love of fate; romanticism is an anachronistic form of guidance, an outworn way of giving meaning to life.
30 Dreams are propositions of reality that the dreamer experiences; waking life takes possession of them and can therefore assimilate them, as becomes obvious in the experience of half-sleep; two different halves, each at 50% transparency, are a static dynamism and «something» dynamic (interference).
Physics speaks of multiple universes, but that could be a romanticism—a desire already left behind and nowadays superstitious. Transparency offers endless possibilities «without having to split the world in two.»
31 Secondary interests live off our primary interests; there is no way to satisfy the primary secondarily.
References
- Ernst Jünger — La Tijera, Af. 58
The spirit has reached the stratum situated directly above the origin and is now feeling its way toward the origin. The fact that its soundings concern both the organic and the inorganic is an indication of their unity. Leibniz becomes current again. The disquiet of transitions manifests itself in the appearance of figures that had become alien to historical consciousness, above all to that of the last century - alchemists, inquisitors, Cainite rogues…
- Goethe
- Friedrich Nietzsche
- Goethe — Carta de Goethe a Humboldt, 17th March 1832
Every action, and so every talent, needs some inborn faculty which acts naturally, and unconsciously carries with it the necessary aptitude, and which, therefore, continues to act in such a way that though its law is implicit in it, its course in the end may be aimless and purposeless… The earlier man becomes aware that there exists some craft, some art that can help him towards a controlled heightening of his natural abilities, the happier he is; whatever he may receive from without does not harm his innate individuality. The best genius is that which absorbs everything within itself, knows how to appropriate everything, without this in the least impairing its fundamental dispositions, called its character, but rather enhancing and furthering them throughout as much as possible… The strangest thing about it is that the best part of our convictions cannot be put into words. Language is not suited to every purpose, and we often do not fully know whether we are really seeing, perceiving, thinking, remembering, imagining or believing. That is what often depresses me, especially as at present I cannot get the help of any discussion on this subject…
- Ernst Jünger — La Tijera
- Friedrich Nietzsche — On the Genealogy of Morals
All great things bring about their own destruction through an act of self-overcoming:2 thus the law of life will have it, the law of the necessity of “self-overcoming” in the nature of life—the lawgiver himself eventually receives the call: “patere legem, quam ipse tulisti.”3 In this way Christianity as a dogma was destroyed by its own morality; in the same way Christianity as morality must now perish, too: we stand on the threshold of this event. After Christian truthfulness has drawn one inference after another, it must end by drawing its most striking inference, its inference against itself; this will happen, however, when it poses the question “what is the meaning of all will to truth?” And here I again touch on my problem, on our problem, my unknown friends (for as yet I know of no friend): what meaning would our whole being possess if it were not this, that in us the will to truth becomes conscious of itself as a problem? As the will to truth thus gains self-consciousness—there can be no doubt of that—morality will gradually perish now: this is the great spectacle in a hundred acts reserved for the next two centuries in Europe—the most terrible, most questionable, and perhaps also the most hopeful of all spectacles.—
- Ernst Jünger — Máximas y mínimas a El Trabajador
What is the «world revolution»? Visible modifications are preceded by less visible ones, and these by invisible ones. Technique itself, as a modus vivendi, rises up from great depths. The preeminence of spiritual modifications over technical ones, of technical over political, of political over strategic. A war can already be won politically before it has begun. Hence the «cold war» too brings shifts in power. Positions are won by playing with peasant victims, with cosmic flanking maneuvers. Gains and losses lie in unsuspected things. And for that very reason one should not lose faith too soon, not even in matters of power.
- Ernst Jünger — Máximas y mínimas a El Trabajador
The best angle of vision is the outsider’s. Whoever makes a description must be both inside and outside at once. This is made possible by differences of level based on origin or race and also on the centuries, and it creates not only the intermediate position, the position of someone who is with neither one side nor the other - in such a position there is also betrayal, a betrayal of one side and, almost always, a betrayal of both. To this is added the bad luck of having a little less fear than the others. One has been singing in the fire and arrives with matters people do not want to know about. Fate masks itself in those things that cannot be known. Hence the best forecasts are those that astonish their own author when he looks back at them.
- Friedrich Nietzsche — On the Genealogy of Morals
We can no longer conceal from ourselves what is expressed by all that willing which has taken its direction from the ascetic ideal: this hatred of the human, and even more of the animal, and more still of the material, this horror of the senses, of reason itself, this fear of happiness and beauty, this longing to get away from all appearance, change, becoming, death, wishing, from longing itself—all this means—let us dare to grasp it—a will to nothingness, an aversion1 to life, a rebellion against the most fundamental presuppositions of life; but it is and remains a will! … And, to repeat in conclusion what I said at the beginning: man would rather will nothingness than not will.
- Ernst Jünger — Máximas y mínimas a El Trabajador