"The perils in the way of the evolution of the philosopher are in truth so manifold today one may well doubt whether this fruit can still ripen at all. The compass and tower-building of the sciences has grown enormous, and therewith the probability has also grown enormous that the philosopher will become weary while still no more than a learner, or that he will let himself be stopped somewhere and `specialize': so that he will never reach his proper height, the height from which he can survey, look around and look down. Or that he will reach this height too late, when his best time is past and his best strength spent; or damaged, coarsened, degenerate, so that his view, his total value judgement, no longer means much. Perhaps it is the very refinement of his intellectual conscience which makes him linger on the way and arrive late; he fears he may be seduced into dilettantism, into becoming an insect with a thousand feet and a thousand antennae, he knows too well that one who has lost respect for himself can no longer command, can no longer lead as a man of knowledge either, unless he wants to become a great actor, a philosophical Cagliostro and pied piper of the spirit, in short a mis-leader."

"This is ultimately a question of taste even if it were not a question of conscience. In addition to this, so as to redouble his difficulties, there is the fact that the philosopher demands of himself a judgement, a Yes or No, not in regard to the sciences but in regard to life and the value of life - that he is reluctant to believe he has a right, to say nothing of a duty, to come to such a judgement, and has to find his way to this right and this faith only through the widest-perhaps most disturbing and shattering - experiences, and often hesitating, doubting, and being struck dumb. Indeed, the mob has long confounded and confused the philosopher with someone else, whether with the man of science or with the religiously exalted, dead to the senses, `dead to the world' fanatic and drunkard of God; and today if one hears anyone commended for living `wisely' or `like a philosopher', it means hardly more than `prudently and apart'. Wisdom: that seems to the rabble to be a kind of flight, an artifice and means for getting oneself out of a dangerous game; but the genuine philosopher - as he seems to us, my friends? - lives `unphilosophically' and `unwisely', above all imprudently, and bears the burden and duty of a hundred attempts and temptations of life - he risks himself constantly, he plays the dangerous game . . ."

(Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil)

"What is the best way to follow the great philosophers? Is it to repeat what they said or to do what they did, that is, create concepts for problems that necessarily change?"

"For this reason philosophers have very little time for discussion. Every philosopher runs away when he or she hears someone say, 'Let's discuss this.' Discussions are fine for roundtable talks, but philosophy throws its numbered dice on another table. The best one can say about discussions is that they take things no farther, since the participants never talk about the same thing. Of what concern is it to philosophy that someone has such a view, and thinks this or that, if the problems at stake are not stated? And when they are stated, it is no longer a matter of discussing but rather one of creating concepts for the undiscussible problem posed. Communication always comes to early or to late, and when it comes to creating, conversation is always superfluous. Sometimes philosophy is turned into the idea of a perpetual discussion, as 'communicative rationality,' or as 'universal democratic conversation.' Nothing is less exact, and when philosophers criticize each other it is on the basis of problems and on a plane that is different from theirs and that melt down the old concepts in the way a cannon can be melted down to make new weapons. It never takes place on the same plane. To criticize is only to establish that a concept vanishes when it is thrust into a new milieu, losing some of its components, or acquiring others that transform it. But those who criticize without creating, those who are content to defend the vanished concept without being able to give it the forces it needs to return to life, are the plague of philosophy. All these debaters and communicators are inspired by ressentiment. They speak only of themselves when they set empty generalizations against one another. Philosophy has a horror of discussions. It always has something else to do. Debate is unbearable to it, but not because it is to sure of itself. On the contrary, it is its uncertainties that take it down other more solitary paths. But in Socrates was philosophy not a free discussion among friends? Is it not, as the conversation of free men, the summit of Greek sociability? In fact, Socrates constantly made all discussion impossible, both in the short form of the contest of questions and answers and in the long form of a rivalry between discourses. He turned the friend into the friend of the single concept, and the concept into the pitiless monologue that eliminates the rivals one by one."

(Gilles Deleuze, What is Philosophy?)

Problems and Solutions

"We are wrong to believe that the true and the false can only be brought to bear on solutions, that they only begin with solutions. This prejudice is social (for society, and the language that transmits its order-words, 'set up' ready-made problems, as if they were drawn out of the city's administrative filing cabinets, and force us to 'solve' them, leaving us only a thin margin of freedom). Moreover this prejudice goes back to childhood, to the classroom: It is the school teacher who 'poses' the problems; the pupils task is to discover the solutions. In a way we are kept in a kind of slavery. True freedom lies in a power to decide, to constitute problems themselves. And this "semi-divine" power entails the disappearance of false problems as much as the creative upsurge of true ones. 'The truth is that in philosophy and even elsewhere it is a question of finding the problem and consequently of positing it, even more than solving it. For a speculative problem is solved as soon as it is properly stated. By that I mean that its solution exists then, although it may remain hidden and, so to speak, covered up: The only thing left to do is uncover it. But stating the problem is not simply uncovering, it is inventing. Discovery, or uncovering, has to do with what already exists, actually or virtually; it was therefore certain to happen sooner or later. Invention gives being to what did not exist; it might never have happened. Already in mathematics and still more in metaphysics, the effort of invention consists most often in raising the problem, in creating the terms in which it will be stated. The stating and solving of the problem are here very close to being equivalent: The truly great problems are set forth only when they are solved.'

"It is not just the whole history of mathematics that supports Bergson. We might compare that last sentence of this extract from Bergson with Marx's formulation, which is valid for practice itself: 'Humanity only sets itself problems that it is capable of solving.' In neither example is it a case of saying that problems are like the shadow of pre-existing solutions (the whole context suggests the contrary). Nor is it a case of saying that only the problems count. On the contrary, it is the solution that counts, but the problem always has the solution it deserves, in terms of the way in which it is stated (i.e., the conditions under which it is determined as problem), and of the means and terms at our disposal for stating it. In this sense, the history of man, from a theoretical as much as from the practical point of view is that of the construction of problems. It is here that humanity makes its own history, and the becoming conscious of that activity is like the conquest of freedom. (It is true that, in Bergson, the very notion of problem has its roots beyond history, in life itself or in the vital impetus: Life is essentially determined in the act of avoiding obstacles, stating and solving a problem. The construction of the organism is both the stating of a problem and a solution.)"

(Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism)

 "It always bothered me that according to the laws as we understand them today, it takes a computing machine an infinite number of logical operations to figure out what goes on in no matter how tiny a region of space and no matter how tiny a region of time. How can all that be going on it that tiny space? Why should it take an infinite amount of logic to figure out what one tiny piece of space/time is going to do? So I have often made the hypothesis that ultimately physics will not require a mathematical statement, that in the end the machinery will be revealed and the laws will turn out to be simple like a checkerboard with all its apparent complexities."

(Richard Feynman, Character of a Physical Law)

"Something happened in the twenties. For no good reason physicists stumbled upon an essentially correct description of the world--because the theory of quantum mechanics is in some sense essentially correct. It tells you how you can take dirt and make computers from it. Its the way we've leaned to manipulate our universe. It's the way chemicals are made and plastics, and what not. One knows how to compute with it. It's an extravagantly good theory--except at some level it doesn't make good sense.

"Some part of the imagery is missing. If you ask what the equations mean and whats the description of the world according to this theory, it's not a description that entails your intuitions of the world. You can't think of a particle moving as though it has a trajectory. You're not allowed to visualize it that way. If you start asking subtle questions--what does this theory tells you the world looks like?--in the end its so far out of your normal way of picturing things that you run into all sorts of conflicts. Now maybe that's the way the world really is. But you don't really know that there isn't another way of assembling all this information that doesn't demand so radical a departure from the way you intuit things.

"There's a fundamental presumption in physics that the way you understand the world is that you keep isolating its ingredients until you understand the stuff you think is truly fundamental. Then you presume that the other things you don't understand are the details. The assumption is that you can discern by looking at things in their pure state--this is the true analytic notion--and then somehow you put these together in more complicated ways when you want to solve more dirty problems. If you can!

"In the end to understand you have to change gears. You have to reassemble how you conceive of the important things that are going on.

"In a way art is a theory about the way the world works to human beings. Its abundantly obvious that one doesn't know the world around us in detail. What artists have accomplished is realizing that there's only a small amount of stuff that's important and then seeing what it was. So they can do some of my research for me. When you look at early stuff of Van Gogh there are zillions of details that are put into it, there's always an immense amount of information in his paintings. It obviously occurred to him, what is the irreducible amount of this stuff you have to put in. Or you can study horizons on Dutch ink drawings from around 1600, with tiny trees and cows that look very real. If you look closely, the trees have sort of leafy boundaries, but it doesn't work if that's all there is--there are also sticking in it little pieces of twig like stuff. There's a definite interplay between the softer textures and things with more definite lines. Somehow the combination gives the correct perception. With Ruysdael and Turner, if you look at the way they construct complicated water, it is clearly done in an iterative way. There's some level of stuff, and then stuff painted on top of that, and then corrections to that. Turbulent fluids for those painters is always something with a scale idea in it.

"I truly do want to know how to describe clouds. But to say there's a piece over here with this much density--to accumulate that much detailed information, I think is wrong. It's certainly not how a human being perceives those things, and it's not how an artist perceives them. Somewhere the business of writing partial differential equations is not to have done the work on the problem.

"Somehow the wondrous promise of the universe is that there are things beautiful in it, things wondrous and alluring, and by virtue of your trade you want to understand them."

(Mitchell Feigenbaum, from Chaos: Making New Science)

Election Day...

"A Revolutionary Age is an age of action; the present age is an age of advertisement, or an age of publicity: nothing happens, but there is instant publicity about it. A revolt in the present age is the most unthinkable act of all; such a display of strength would confuse the calculating cleverness of the times. Nevertheless, some political virtuoso might achieve something nearly as great. He would write some manifesto or other which calls for a General Assembly in order to decide on a revolution, and he would write it so carefully that even the Censor himself would pass on it; and at the General Assembly he would manage to bring it about that the audience believed that it had actually rebelled, and then everyone would placidly go home—after they had spent a very nice evening out."

"Just as one might say about Revolutionary Ages that they run out of control, one can say about the Present Age that it doesn't run at all. The individual and the generation come between and stop each other; and therefore the prosecuting attorney would find it impossible to admit any fact at all, because nothing happens in this generation. From a flood of indications one might think that either something extraordinary happened or something extraordinary was just about to happen. But one will have thought wrong, for indications are the only thing the present age achieves, and its skill and virtuosity entirely consist in building magical illusions; its momentary enthusiasms which use some projected change in the forms of things as an escape for actually changing the forms of things, are the highest in the scale of cleverness and the negative use of that strength which is the passionate and creating energy during Revolutionary Ages. "

(Søren Kierkegaard, The Present Age)

The Artist / The Snob (Rising Above the Animal In The Post-Historical World)

"...as I said in the above Note, an animal that is in harmony with Nature or given 'Being' is a living being that is in no way human, To remain human, Man must remain a 'Subject opposed to the Object' even if Action negating the given and Error disappears. This means that while henceforth speaking in an adequate fashion of everything that is given to him, post-historical Man must continue to detach 'form' from 'content,' doing so no longer in order actively to transform the latter, but so that he may oppose himself as a pure 'form' to himself and to others taken as 'content' of any sort. "

"...no animal can be a snob..."

(Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel)

"An artist is someone who produces things that people don't need to have but that he - for some reason - thinks it would be a good idea to give them."

"Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art. Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art."

(Andy Warhol)

"The artist is the person who invents the means to bridge between biological inheritance and the environments created technological innovation. Without the artist man merely adapts to his technologies and become their servo-mechanism."

"Advertising is the greatest art form of the 20th century."

(Marshall McLuhan, Laws of Media)

American Communism (According to Alexandre Kojève and Andy Warhol)

"the Hegelian-Marxist end of History was not yet to come, but was already present, here and now ... in the North American extensions of Europe. One can even say that from a certain point of view, the United States has already attained the final stage of Marxist 'communism,' seeing that, practically, all the members of a "classless society" can from now on appropriate for themselves everything that seems good to them, without thereby working any more than their heart desires."

(Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel)

"What's great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coca Cola, Liz Taylor drinks Coca Cola, and just think, you can drink Coca Cola, too. A coke is a coke and no amount of money can get you a better coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the cokes are the same and all the cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it."

(Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol)

"The most difficult and the highest form which man can attain is the most seldom successful: thus the history of philosophy reveals a superabundance of bungled and unhappy cases of manhood, and its march is an extremely slow one; whole centuries intervene and suppress what has been achieved: and in this way the connecting link is always made to fail. It is an appalling history, this history of the highest men, of the sages.--What is most often damaged is precisely the recollection of great men, for the semi-successful and botched cases of mankind misunderstand them and overcome them by their "successes." Whenever an "effect" is noticeable, the masses gather in a crowd around it; to hear the inferior and the poor in spirit having their say is a terrible ear-splitting torment for him who knows and trembles at the thought, that the fate of man depends upon the success of its highest types."

(Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power Manuscripts)

The Demise of Grand Narratives?

Age of comparisons.— The less men are bound by their tradition, the greater the internal stirring of motives; the greater, accordingly, the external unrest, the whirling flow of men, the polyphony of strivings. Who today still feels a serious obligation to bind himself and his descendants to one place? Who feels that anything is seriously binding? Just as all artistic styles of the arts are imitated one next to the other, so too are all stages and kinds of morality, customs, cultures.

Such an age gets its meaning because in it the various world views, customs, cultures are compared and experienced next to one another, which was not possible earlier, when there was always a localized rule for each culture, just as all artistic styles were bound to place and time. Now, man's increased aesthetic feeling will decide definitively from among the many forms which offer themselves for comparison. It will let most of them (namely all those that it rejects) die out. Similarly, a selection is now taking place among the forms and habits of higher morality, whose goal can be none other than the downfall of baser moralities. This is the age of comparisons! That is its pride—but also by rights its sorrow. Let us not be afraid of this sorrow! Instead, we will conceive the task that this age sets us to be as great as possible. Then posterity will bless us for it—a posterity that knows it has transcended both the completed original folk cultures, as well as the culture of comparison, but that looks back on both kinds of culture as on venerable antiquities, with gratitude.

(Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human)

"The church and morality say: 'A generation, a people, are destroyed by vice and luxury.' My recovered reason says: when a people approaches destruction, when it degenerates physiologically, then vice and luxury follow from this (namely, the craving for ever stronger and more frequent stimulation, as every exhausted nature knows it)."

(Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols)

The Statement

"[Archaeology] does not attempt to evade verbal performances in order to discover behind them or below their apparent surface a hidden element, a secret meaning that lies buried within them, or what emerges through them without saying so; and yet the statement is not immediately visible; it is not given in such a manifest way as a grammatical or logical structure (even if such a structure is not entirely clear, or is very difficult to elucidate). The statement is nether visible nor hidden."

(Michel Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge)

"Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, to get the book written"

(William Faulkner)

"The public sucks. Fuck hope."

"One person can head a rebellion, but one person cannot head this leveling process, for that would make him a leader and he would avoid being leveled. Each individual can in his little circle participate in this leveling, but it is an abstract process, and leveling is abstraction conquering individuality. The leveling in modern times is the reflective equivalent of fate in the ancient times. The dialectic of ancient times tended towards leadership (the great man over the masses and the free man over the slave); the dialectic of Christianity tends, at least until now, towards representation (the majority views itself in the representative, and is liberated in the knowledge that it is represented in that representative, in a kind of self-knowledge); the dialectic of the present age tends towards equality, and its most consequent but false result is levelling, as the negative unity of the negative relationship between individuals."

"In order for leveling really to occur, first it is necessary to bring a phantom into existence, a spirit of leveling, a huge abstraction, an all-embracing something that is nothing, an illusion—the phantom of the public. . . . The public is the real Leveling-Master, rather than the leveler itself, for leveling is done by something, and the public is a huge nothing."

"The public is not a people, it is not a generation, it is not a simultaneity, it is not a community, it is not a society, it is not an association, it is not those particular men over there, because all these exist because they are concrete and real; however, no single individual who belongs to the public has any real commitment; some times during the day he belongs to the public, namely, in those times in which he is nothing; in those times that he is a particular person, he does not belong to the public. Consisting of such individuals, who as individuals are nothing, the public becomes a huge something, a nothing, an abstract desert and emptiness, which is everything and nothing. . . ."

(Søren Kierkegaard, The Present Age)

"Hope, in its stronger forms, is a great deal more powerful stimulans to life than any sort of realized joy can ever be. Man must be sustained in suffering by a hope so high that no conflict with actuality can dash it -- so high, indeed, that no fulfillment can satisfy it: a hope reaching out beyond this world. (Precisely because of this power that hope has of making the suffering hold out, the Greeks regarded it as the evil of evils, as the malign of evils; it remained behind at the source of all evil [in Pandora’s box].)"

(Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist)

Hegel: You mean my whole fallacy’s wrong?

"...if the fear of falling into error sets up a mistrust of Science, which in the absence of such scruples gets on with the work itself, and actually cognizes something, it is hard to see why we should not turn round and mistrust this very mistrust. Should we not be concerned as to whether this fear of error is not just the error itself? As a matter of fact, this fear presupposes something, indeed a great deal, as truth, and supports its scruples and consequences on what should itself be examined beforehand to see whether it is truth. It starts with ideas of knowledge as an instrument, and as a medium; and presupposes a distinction of ourselves from this knowledge. More especially it takes for granted that the Absolute stands on one side, and that knowledge on the other side, by itself and cut off from the Absolute, is still something real; in other words, that knowledge, which, by being outside the Absolute, is certainly also outside truth, is nevertheless true — a position which, while calling itself fear of error, makes itself known rather as fear of the truth."

(Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit)

The Actors / "Great Men": a reflection on the U.S. Presidential Debates

Where solitude endeth, there beginneth the market-place; and where the market-place beginneth, there beginneth also the noise of the great actors, and the buzzing of the poison-flies.

In the world even the best things are worthless without those who represent them: those representers, the people call great men.

Little, do the people understand what is great -- that is to say, the creating agency. But they have a taste for all representers and actors of great things.

Around the devisers of new values revolveth the world: -- invisibly it revolveth. But around the actors revolve the people and the glory: such is the course of things.

Spirit, hath the actor, but little conscience of the spirit. He believeth always in that wherewith he maketh believe most strongly -- in himself!

Tomorrow he hath a new belief, and the day after, one still newer. Sharp perceptions hath he, like the people, and changeable humours.

To upset -- that meaneth with him to prove. To drive mad -- that meaneth with him to convince. And blood is counted by him as the best of all arguments.

A truth which only glideth into fine ears, he calleth falsehood and trumpery. Verily, he believeth only in gods that make a great noise in the world!

(Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra)

"A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another."

(Mao Tse-Tung, "Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan")

"They say revolutions turn out badly. But they're constantly confusing two different things, the way revolutions turn out historically and peo­ple's revolutionary becoming. These relate to two different sets of people. Men's only hope lies in a revolutionary becoming: the only way of casting off their shame or responding to what is intolerable."

(Gilles Deleuze, Control and Becoming)

"Whether syllogistic or Hegelian-dialectical, for some mysterious inherent reason the triad form itself eliminates ground. But when a fourth term is added to a triad, making a tetrad, the form flips into a new one -- resonant, appositional, and metamorphic."

(Marshall McLuhan, Laws of Media)

"Something that hasn't been adequately discussed about Marx's Capital is the extent to which he is fascinated by capitalists mechanisms, precisely because the system is demented, yet works very well at the same time."

(Gilles Deleuze, Capitalism: A Very Special Delirium)

"The opposite of a trivial truth is false; the opposite of a profound truth is also true."

(Niels Bohr)