"AUTOPSYCHOGRAPHY" by Fernando Pessoa

The poet is a faker

Who’s so good at his act
He even fakes the pain
Of pain he feels in fact.

And those who read his words
Will feel in his writing
Neither of the pains he has
But just the one they’re missing.

And so around its track
This thing called the heart winds,
A little clockwork train
To entertain our minds.

Ravel Quartet in F Major, II. Assez vif - Très rythmé

The Pervert's Guide to Cinema (2006)

Werner Herzog on images, TV, and shoes

Derrida: "What Comes Before The Question?"

From Cocteau

An original artist is unable to copy. So he has only to copy in order to be original.

Style is a simple way of saying complicated things.

When a work appears to be ahead of its time, it is only the time that is behind the work.

The Media is the Message 1967 Recording w/Video Mash-Up

Hegel critiques Isaiah Berlin

"We have considered two aspects of Freedom, – the objective [what Berlin calls the positive, but which is the negative for Hegel] and the subjective [what Berlin calls negative, but is positive for Hegel]; if, therefore, Freedom is asserted to consist in the individuals of a State all agreeing in its arrangements it is evident that only the subjective aspect is regarded. The natural inference from this principle is, that no law can be valid without the approval of all. This difficulty is attempted to be obviated by the decision that the minority must yield to the. majority; the majority therefore bear the sway. But long ago J. J. Rousseau remarked, that in that case there would be no longer freedom, for the will of the minority would cease to be respected. At the Polish Diet each single member had to give his consent before any political step could be taken; and this kind of freedom it was that ruined the State. Besides, it is a dangerous and false prejudice, that the People alone have reason and insight, and know what justice is; for each popular faction may represent itself as the People, and the question as to what constitutes the State is one of advanced science, and not of popular decision."

"If the principle of regard for the individual will is recognised as the only basis of political liberty, viz., that nothing should be done by or for the State to which all the members of the body politic have not given their sanction, we have, properly speaking, no Constitution. The only arrangement that would be necessary, would be, first, a centre having no will of its own but which should take into consideration what appeared to be the necessities of the State; and, secondly, a contrivance for calling the members of the State together, for taking the votes, and for performing the arithmetical operations of reckoning and comparing the number of votes for the different propositions, and thereby deciding upon them. The State is an abstraction, having even its generic existence in its citizens; but it is an actuality, and its simply generic existence must embody itself in individual will and activity. The want of government and political administration in general is felt; this necessitates the selection and separation from the rest of those who have to take the helm in political affairs, to decide, concerning them, and to give orders to other citizens, with a view to the execution of their plans. If, e.g., even the people in a Democracy resolve on a war, a general must head the army. It is only by a Constitution that the abstraction – the State – attains life and reality; but this involves the distinction between those who command and those who obey."

(Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History)

McLuhan/Hegel

Since Sputnik and the satellites, the planet is enclosed in a manmade environment that ends "Nature" and turns the globe into a repertory theater to be programmed. Shakespeare at the Globe mentioning "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players" (As You Like It, Act II, Scene 7) has been justified by recent events in ways that would have struck him as entirely paradoxical. The resunium arch of satellites is that the young now accept the public spaces of the earth as as role-playing areas. Sensing this, they adopt costumes and roles and are ready to "do their thing" everywhere.

Another theme of [Finnegans] Wake that helps in the understanding of the paradoxical shift from cliché to archetype is "past time are pastimes." The dominant technologies of one age become the games and pastimes of a later age. In the 20th century, the number of "past times" that are simultaneously available is so vast as to create cultural anarchy. When all the cultures of the world are simultaneously present, the work of the artist in the elucidation of form takes on new scope and new urgency. Most men are pushed into the artist's role. The artist cannot dispense with the principle of "doubleness" or "interplay" because this type of hendiadys dialogue is essential to the very structure of consciousness, awareness, and autonomy.

(Marshall McLuhan, From cliché to archetype)

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The medium is the message - "A formalism which ceases to be external since the form is the innate development of the concrete content itself."

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Now the end of history does not mark the end of all sudden and new appearances. The moment of Absolute Knowledge only causes the dialectical suppression of one certain time, one specific temporality. From this moment on, far from closing all horizons, Absolute Knowledge announces in fact a new temporality, one born from the synthesis of two temporalities, the Greek and the Christian. The moment which dialectically gives rise to the two temporalities marks the emergence of a new era of plasticity in which subjectivity gives itself the form which at the same time it receives.

(Cathrine Malabou, The Future of Hegel)

Deleuze's reading of Gödel's incompleteness theorems

"In becoming a proposition a concept loses all the characteristics it possessed as a philosophical concept: its self-reference, its endoconsistency, and its exoconsistency."

(Gilles Deleuze, What is Philosophy?)

Negative Capability

"Brown and Dilke walked with me back from Christmas pantomime. I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke, on various subjects; several things dovetailed in my mind, & at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason."

(Letter from John Keats to George and Thomas Keats dated Sunday, December 22, 1817)

Searle on Derrida

'With Derrida, you can hardly misread him, because he's so obscure. Every time you say, "He says so and so," he always says, "You misunderstood me." But if you try to figure out the correct interpretation, then that's not so easy. I once said this to Michel Foucault, who was more hostile to Derrida even than I am, and Foucault said that Derrida practiced the method of obscurantisme terroriste (terrorism of obscurantism). We were speaking French. And I said, "What the hell do you mean by that?" And he said, "He writes so obscurely you can't tell what he's saying, that's the obscurantism part, and then when you criticize him, he can always say, 'You didn't understand me; you're an idiot.' That's the terrorism part." And I like that. So I wrote an article about Derrida. I asked Michel if it was OK if I quoted that passage, and he said yes.

'Foucault was often lumped with Derrida. That's very unfair to Foucault. He was a different caliber of thinker altogether.

'I think I sort of understand Richard Rorty's view, because I've talked to him more, and he's perfectly clearheaded in conversation. What Rorty would say is that he doesn't really deny that there's an external world. He thinks nobody denies that. What Rorty says is that we never really have objective knowledge of that reality. We ought to adopt a more pragmatic approach and think of what we call "truth" as what's useful to believe. So we shouldn't think of ourselves as answerable to an independently existing reality, though he wouldn't deny that there is such a thing.

'The problem that all these guys have is that once you give me that first premise--that there is a reality that exists totally independently of us--then the other steps follow naturally. Step 1, external realism: You've got a real world that exists independently of human beings. And step 2: Words in the language can be used to refer to objects and states of affairs in that external reality. And then step 3: If 1 and 2 are right, then some organization of those words can state objective truth about that reality. Step 4 is we can have knowledge, objective knowledge, of that truth. At some point they have to resist that derivation, because then you've got this objectivity of knowledge and truth on which the Enlightenment vision rests, and that's what they want to reject.'

(John Searle, from an interview in Reason Magazine)

Specters of Marx in Nietzsche? (From Martin Heidegger's Basic Concepts)

"The workers shall live one day as the bourgeoisie do now--but above them, distinguished by their freedom from wants, the higher caste: thus poorer and simpler but in possession of power."

"Modern socialism wants to create the secular counterpart to Jesuitism: everyone a perfect instrument. But the purpose, the wherefore has not been found."

"From the future of the worker--worker should learn to feel like soldiers. An honorarium, an income, but no pay!"

"No relation between payment and achievement! But to place the individual, each according to his kind, so that each can achieve the highest that lies within his realm."

(Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power)

Schopenhauer on Hegel

"Schopenhauer despised Fichte and Schelling, but he hated Hegel and described him as ‘that clumsy and nauseating charlatan, that pernicious person, who completely disorganized and ruined the minds of a whole generation.’ On almost any square foot of ground in the landscape of his writings a geyser of wrath may suddenly erupt, spewing out imprecations against the same three men. ‘What was senseless and without meaning at once took refuge in obscure exposition and language. Fichte was the first to grasp and make use of this privilege; Schelling at best equalled him in this, and a host of hungry scribblers without intellect or honesty soon surpassed them both. But the greatest effrontery in serving up sheer nonsense, in scrabbling together senseless and maddening webs of words, such as had previously been heard only in madhouses, finally appeared in Hegel...’ Hegel, said Schopenhauer, was ‘a commonplace, inane, loathsome, repulsive and ignorant charlatan, who with unparalleled effrontery compiled a system of crazy nonsense that was trumpeted abroad as immortal wisdom by his mercenary followers...’ I do not think anything in the whole history of philosophy compares with this invective by one now world-famous philosopher against another, especially when one considers that they were near-contemporaries and colleagues."

(Bryan Magee from Confessions of a Philosopher, 1997)

On the Relevance of Marxism

"Behind Marxist statements confirmed of disconfirmed there is alway Marxism as a matrix of intellectual and historical experiences which can always be saved from total failure by means of some additional hypothesis, just as one can maintain on the other hand that it is not validated in toto by success."

"Marx's theses can remain true as the Pythagorean Theorem is true: no longer in the sense it was true for the one who invented it--as an immobile truth and a property of space itself--but as a property of a certain model of space among other possible spaces."

"The history of though does not summarily pronounce: This is true; that is false. Like all history, it has its veiled decisions. It dismantles or embalms certain doctrines, changing them into "messages" or museum pieces. There are others on the contrary, which it keeps active. These do not endure because there is some miraculous adequation or correspondence between them and an invariable "reality"--such exact and fleshless truth is neither sufficient nor necessary for the greatness of a doctrine--but because, as obligatory steps for those who want to go further, they retain an expressive power which exceeds their statements and propositions. These doctrines are the classics. They are recognizable by the fact that no one takes them literally, and yet new facts are never absolutely outside their province but call forth new echoes from them and reveal new lusters in them. We a saying that re-examination of Marx would be a meditation upon a classic, and that it could not possibly terminate in a nihil obstat or a listing on the Index. Are you or are you not a Cartesian? The question does not make much sense since those who reject this or that in Descartes do so only in terms of reasons which owe a lot to Descartes. We say Marx is in the process of becoming such a secondary truth."

(Marice Merleau-Ponty, From the Introduction to Signs)

Piracy is Terrorism

"Music runs parallel to human society, is structured like it, and changes when it does." It is our "collective memory of the social order."

"Its styles and economic organization are ahead of the rest of society because it explores, much faster than material reality can, the entire range of possibilities in a given code."

(Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music)

Notes on my generation

"A generation that has lost all bodily and natural aids to remembrance, and that , poorer than before, was left to itself to take possession of childhood in merely an isolated, scattered, and pathological way."

"The child, in fact, can do what the grown up cannot, recognize the new once again."

(Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project)

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"His ability to perceive what he saw and heard was unimpaired. But he did not seem to be able to retain any impression of anything for more than a blink. Indeed, if he did blink, his eyelids parted to reveal a new scene. The view before the blink was utterly forgotten. Each blink, each glance away and back, brought him an entirely new view. I tried to imagine how it was for him. . . Something akin to a film with bad continuity, the glass half empty, then full, the cigarette suddenly longer, the actor’s hair now tousled, now smooth. But this was real life, a room changing in ways that were physically impossible."

"It was as if every waking moment was the first waking moment. Clive was under the constant impression that he had just emerged from unconsciousness because he had no evidence in his own mind of ever being awake before. . . . 'I haven’t heard anything, seen anything, touched anything, smelled anything,' he would say. 'It’s like being dead.'"

"...holding something in the palm of one hand, and repeatedly covering and uncovering it with the other hand as if he were a magician practising a disappearing trick. He was holding a chocolate. He could feel the chocolate unmoving in his left palm, and yet every time he lifted his hand he told me it revealed a brand new chocolate."

"To imagine the future was no more possible for Clive than to remember the past—both were engulfed by the onslaught of amnesia. Yet, at some level, Clive could not be unaware of the sort of place he was in, and the likelihood that he would spend the rest of his life, his endless night, in such a place."

"Clive’s scripts were repeated with great frequency, sometimes three or four times in one phone call. He stuck to subjects he felt he knew something about, where he would be on safe ground, even if here and there something apocryphal crept in. . . . These small areas of repartee acted as stepping stones on which he could move through the present. They enabled him to engage with others."

"I would put it even more strongly and use a phrase that Deborah used in another connection, when she wrote of Clive being poised upon 'a tiny platform . . . above the abyss.' Clive’s loquacity, his almost compulsive need to talk and keep conversations going, served to maintain a precarious platform, and when he came to a stop the abyss was there, waiting to engulf him. This, indeed, is what happened when we went to a supermarket and he and I got separated briefly from Deborah. He suddenly exclaimed, 'I’m conscious now . . . . Never saw a human being before . . . for thirty years . . . . It’s like death!' He looked very angry and distressed. Deborah said the staff calls these grim monologues his 'deads'—they make a note of how many he has in a day or a week and gauge his state of mind by their number."

"Back in his room, I spotted the two volumes of Bach’s 'Forty-eight Preludes and Fugues' on top of the piano and asked Clive if he would play one of them. He said that he had never played any of them before, but then he began to play Prelude 9 in E Major and said, 'I remember this one.' He remembers almost nothing unless he is actually doing it; then it may come to him. He inserted a tiny, charming improvisation at one point, and did a sort of Chico Marx ending, with a huge downward scale. With his great musicality and his playfulness, he can easily improvise, joke, play with any piece of music."

"Semantic memory is not of much use in the absence of explicit, episodic memory."

"The amnesic patient can think about material in the immediate present. . . . He can also think about items in his semantic memory, his general knowledge. . . . But thinking for successful everyday adaptation requires not only factual knowledge, but the ability to recall it on the right occasion, to relate it to other occasions, indeed the ability to reminisce."

"The neuroscientist Neal J. Cohen recounts the famous story of Édouard Claparède, a Swiss physician who, upon shaking hands with a severely amnesic woman,pricked her finger with a pin hidden in his hand. Subsequently, whenever he again attempted to shake the patient’s hand, she promptly withdrew it. When he questioned her about this behavior, she replied, 'Isn’t it allowed to withdraw one’s hand?' and 'Perhaps there is a pin hidden in your hand,' and finally, “Sometimes pins are hidden in hands.' Thus the patient learned the appropriate response based on previous experience, but she never seemed to attribute her behavior to the personal memory of some previously experienced event. "

"He can shave, shower, look after his grooming, and dress elegantly, with taste and style; he moves confidently and is fond of dancing. He talks abundantly, using a large vocabulary; he can read and write in several languages. He is good at calculation. He can make phone calls, and he can find the coffee things and find his way about the home. If he is asked how to do these things, he cannot say, but he does them. Whatever involves a sequence or pattern of action, he does fluently, unhesitatingly."

"Without intact explicit memory, Jascha Heifetz would not remember from day to day which piece he had chosen to work on previously, or that he had ever worked on that piece before. Nor would he recall what he had accomplished the day before or by analysis of past experience what particular problems in execution should be a focus of today’s practice session. In fact, it would not occur to him to have a practice session at all; without close direction from someone else he would be effectively incapable of undertaking the process of learning any new piece, irrespective of his considerable technical skills."

"No one remembers, word for word, all that was said in any lecture, or played in any piece. But if you understood it once, you now own new networks of knowledge, about each theme and how it changes and relates to others. Thus, no one could remember Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony entire, from a single hearing. But neither could one ever hear again those first four notes as just four notes! Once but a tiny scrap of sound; it is now a Known Thing—a locus in the web of all the other things we know, whose meanings and significances depend on one another."

"It may be that Clive, incapable of remembering or anticipating events because of his amnesia, is able to sing and play and conduct music because remembering music is not, in the usual sense, remembering at all. Remembering music, listening to it, or playing it, is wholly in the present."

"The hearing of a melody is a hearing with the melody. . . . It is even a condition of hearing melody that the tone present at the moment should fill consciousness entirely, that nothing should be remembered, nothing except it or beside it be present in consciousness. . . . Hearing a melody is hearing, having heard, and being about to hear, all at once. . . . Every melody declares to us that the past can be there without being remembered, the future without being foreknown."

"In some ways, he is not anywhere at all; he has dropped out of space and time altogether. He no longer has any inner narrative; he is not leading a life ... And yet one has only to see him at the keyboard or with Deborah to feel that, at such times, he is himself again and wholly alive. It is not the remembrance of things past, the 'once' that Clive yearns for, or can ever achieve. It is the claiming, the filling, of the present, the now, and this is only possible when he is totally immersed in the successive moments of an act. It is the 'now' that bridges the abyss."

(Selections from "The Abyss" by Oliver Sacks in the New Yorker Magazine 9/24/2007)

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"What we call 'understanding a sentence' has, in many cases, a much greater similarity to understanding a musical theme than we might be inclined to think."

(Ludwig Wittgenstein)

On History and Tradition

He who cannot draw on 3000 years of history is living merely from hand to mouth.
Incidentally, I despise everything which merely instructs me without increasing or immediately enlivening my activity.

(Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)

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It is by History which is created, lived, and really remembered as "tradition" that Man realized himself or "appears" as a dialectical totality, instead of annihilating himself and "disappearing" by "pure" or "abstract" negation of every given whatsoever, real or thought. It is in the lack of historical memory (or understanding) that the moral danger of Nihilism or Skepticism resides which would negate everything without preserving anything, even in the form of memory. A society that spends its time listening to the radical "nonconformist" Intellectual, who amuses himself by (verbally!) negating any given at all ( even the "sublimated" given preserved in historical remembrance) solely because it is a given, ends up sinking into active anarchy and disappearing. Likewise, the Revolutionary who dreams of a "permanent revolution" that negates every type of tradition and takes no account of concrete past, except to overcome it, necessarily ends up either in the nothingness of social anarchy or in annulling himself physically or politically. Only the Revolutionary who manages to maintain or reestablish the historical tradition, by preserving in a positive memory the given present which he himself has relegated to the past by his negation, succeeds in creating a new historical World capable of existing.

(Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel)

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No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of æsthetic, not merely historical, criticism. The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not one-sided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new. Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the form of European, of English literature, will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past.
...
What is to be insisted upon is that the poet must develop or procure the consciousness of the past and that he should continue to develop this consciousness throughout his career.
What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality....
Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.

(T.S. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent)

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We must in all seriousness despise instruction without vitality, knowledge which enervates activity, and history as an expensive surplus of knowledge and a luxury, because we lack what is still most essential to us and because what is superfluous is hostile to what is essential. To be sure, we need history. But we need it in a manner different from the way in which the spoilt idler in the garden of knowledge uses it, no matter how elegantly he may look down on our coarse and graceless needs and distresses. That is, we need it for life and for action, not for a comfortable turning away from life and from action or for merely glossing over the egotistical life and the cowardly bad act. We wish to serve history only insofar as it serves living. But there is a degree of doing history and a valuing of it through which life atrophies and degenerates. To bring this phenomenon to light as a remarkable symptom of our time is now every bit as necessary as it may be painful.

...
History belongs, above all, to the active and powerful man, the man who fights one great battle, who needs the exemplary men, teachers, and comforters and cannot find them among his contemporary companions.

Anyone who has learned to recognize the sense of history in this way must get annoyed to see inquisitive travelers or painstaking micrologists clambering all over the pyramids of the great things of the past. There, in the place where he finds the stimulation to breathe deeply and to make things better, he does not wish to come across an idler who strolls around, greedy for distraction or stimulation, as if among the heaped-up art treasures of a gallery.
In order not to despair and feel disgust in the midst of weak and hopeless idlers, surrounded by apparently active, but really only agitated and fidgeting companions, the active man looks behind him and interrupts the path to his goal to take a momentary deep breath. His purpose is some happiness or other, perhaps not his own, often that of a people or of humanity collectively. He runs back away from resignation and uses history as a way of fighting resignation. For the most part, no reward beckons him on, other than fame, that is, becoming a candidate for an honoured place in the temple of history, where he himself can be, in his turn, a teacher, consoler, and advisor for those who come later.
...
History is borne only by strong personalities; the weak personalities it obliterates completely.
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History belongs secondly to the man who preserves and honours, to the person who with faith and love looks back in the direction from which he has come, where he has been. Through this reverence he, as it were, gives thanks for his existence. While he nurtures with a gentle hand what has stood from time immemorial, he want to preserve the conditions under which he came into existence for those who are to come after him. And so he serves life. His possession of his ancestors' household goods changes the ideas in such a soul, for those goods are far more likely to take possession of his soul. The small, limited, crumbling, and archaic keep their own worth and integrity, because the conserving and honouring soul of the antiquarian man settles on these things and there prepares for itself a secret nest. The history of his city becomes for him the history of his own self. He understands the walls, the turreted gate, the dictate of the city council, and the folk festival like an illustrated diary of his youth, and he rediscovers for himself in all this his force, his purpose, his passion, his opinion, his foolishness, and his bad habits. He says to himself, here one could live, here one can live, and here one can go on living, because we endure and do not collapse overnight. Thus, with this “We” he looks back over the past amazing lives of individuals and feels himself like the spirit of the house, the generation, and the city. From time to time he personally greets from the distant, obscure, and confused centuries the soul of his people as his own soul, with a feeling of completion and premonition, a scent of almost lost tracks, an instinctively correct reading even of a past which has been written over, a swift understanding of the erased and reused parchments (which have, in fact, been erased and written over many times). These are his gifts and his virtues.

...

a third method of analyzing the past is necessary for human beings, alongside the monumental and the antiquarian: the critical method. Once again this is in the service of living. A person must have the power and from time to time use it to break a past and to dissolve it, in order to be able to live. He manages to do this by dragging the past before the court of justice, investigating it meticulously, and finally condemning it. That past is worthy of condemnation, for that is how it stands with human things: in them human force and weakness have always been strong. Here it is not righteousness which sits in the judgment seat or, even less, mercy which announces judgment, but life alone, that dark, driving, insatiable self-desiring force. Its judgment is always unmerciful, always unjust, because it never emerges from a pure spring of knowledge, but in most cases the judgment would be like that anyway, even if righteousness itself were to utter it. “For everything that arises is worth destroying. Therefore, it would be better that nothing arose.” It requires a great deal of power to be able to live and to forget just how much life and being unjust are one and the same. Luther himself once voiced the opinion that the world only came into being through the forgetfulness of God; if God had thought about “heavy artillery,” he would not have made the world. From time to time, however, this same life, which uses forgetting, demands the temporary destruction of this forgetfulness. For it should be made quite clear how unjust the existence of something or other is, a right, a caste, a dynasty, for example, and how much this thing merits destruction.
Each of the three existing types of history is right only for a single area and a single climate; on every other one it grows up into a destructive weed. If a man who wants to create greatness uses the past, then he will empower himself through monumental history. On the other hand, the man who wishes to emphasize the customary and traditionally valued cultivates the past as an antiquarian historian. Only the man whose breast is oppressed by a present need and who wants to cast off his load at any price has a need for critical history, that is, history which sits in judgment and passes judgment. From the thoughtless transplanting of plants stem many ills: the critical man without need, the antiquarian without reverence, and the student of greatness without the ability for greatness are the sort who are receptive to weeds estranged from their natural mother earth and therefore to degenerate growths.

...
You can interpret the past only on the basis of the highest power of the present. Only in the strongest tension of your noblest characteristics will you surmise what from the past is great and worth knowing and preserving. Like by like! Otherwise you reduce the past down to your level. Do not believe a piece of historical writing if it does not spring out of the head of the rarest of spirits.
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And here I recognize the mission of that youth, that first generation of fighters and dragon slayers, which brings forth a more fortunate and more beautiful culture and humanity, without having more of this future happiness and beauty still to come than a promise-filled premonition. These youth will suffer from the evil and the counter-measures simultaneously, and nevertheless they believe they may boast of a more powerful health and in general a more natural nature than their previous generations, the educated “Men” and “Old Men” of the present. However, their mission is to shake the ideas which this present holds about “health” and “culture” and to develop contempt and hatred against such hybrid monstrous ideas. The guaranteed mark of their own stronger health is to be precisely the fact that they, I mean these young people, themselves can use no idea, no party slogan, from the presently circulating currency of words and ideas as a designation of their being, but are convinced only by a power acting in it, a power which fights, eliminates, and cuts into pieces, and by an always heightened sense of life in every good hour. People may dispute the fact that these youth already have culture, but for what young person would this be a reproach? People may speak against their crudeness and immoderation, but they are not yet old and wise enough to be content; above all, they do not need to feign any ready-made culture to defend and enjoy all the comforts and rights of youth, especially the privilege of a braver spontaneous honesty and the energizing consolation of hope.

(Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Use and Abuse of History for Life)