“We say it is “explanation”; but it is only in “description” that we are in advance of the older stages of knowledge and science. We describe better, we explain just as little as our predecessors. We have discovered a manifold succession where the naive man and investigator of older cultures saw only two things, “cause” and “effect,” as it was said; we have perfected the conception of becoming, but have not got a knowledge of what is above and behind the conception. The series of “causes” stands before us much more complete in every case; we conclude that this and that must first precede in order that that other may follow but we have not grasped anything thereby. The peculiarity, for example, in every chemical process seems a “miracle,” the same as before, just like all locomotion; nobody has “explained” impulse. How could we ever explain! We operate only with things which do not exist, with lines, surfaces, bodies, atoms, divisible times, divisible spaces - how can explanation ever be possible when we first make everything a conception, our conception! It is sufficient to regard science as the exactest humanising of things that is possible; we always learn to describe ourselves more accurately by describing things and their successions. Cause and effect: there is probably never any such duality; in fact there is a continuum before us, from which we isolate a few portions; just as we always observe a motion as isolated points, and therefore do not properly see it, but infer it. The abruptness with which many effects take place leads us into error; it is however only an abruptness for us. There is an infinite multitude of processes in that abrupt moment which escape us. An intellect which could see cause and effect as a continuum, which could see the flux of events not according to our mode of perception, as things arbitrarily separated and broken would throw aside the conception of cause and effect, and would deny all conditionality.”
Friedrich Nietzsche
(via tomasorban)
“The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.”
Friedrich Nietzsche (via dostevsky)
A tribute to Mariano Fortuny by Sarah Moon
Palazzo Fortuny, Venice
“The reader laid down ‘The House of the Dead’ enraptured, elevated, filled with tender emotion, ready to struggle against evil, et cetera — exactly as the aesthetics of the time demanded. And, by the way, in his elevated mood and his readiness, he considered Dostoevsky just as good and kind a person as himself. Yet, with a modicum of attention and a bit less enthusiasm, you can find pearls, even in 'The House of the Dead’, such as you will never find in the underground — for example, the concluding words of the novel: “How much youth was needlessly buried within these walls, what mighty powers were wasted there to no purpose! After all, the whole truth must be told; those men were exceptional men. They were perhaps the most talented, the strongest representatives of all our people. But their mighty strength went to waste, it went to waste abnormally, unjustly, and irretrievably.”
Is there a Russian who does not know these lines by heart? And moreover, isn’t it partly due to them that the novel owes its fame? Consequently, Dostoevsky did know how to embellish this hideous and disgusting idea. How? By saying that the best Russians were in penal colonies! That the most talented, the most remarkable, the strongest people were murderers, thieves, arsonists, and bandits. And who said this? A man living at the time of Belinsky, Nekrassov, Turgenev, Grigorovich, at the time of all those people who have thus far been considered the pride and joy of Russia! And to prefer the stigmatized inhabitants of the House of the Dead to them! Why, that is downright madness. Yet two generations of readers have seen in this judgment an expression of Dostoevsky’s great humanity. They thought that in his humility, in his love for his neighbor, he was singing praises in a new way to the humblest man. For propriety’s sake, they did not even notice that, in his eagerness, the singer had indeed gone too far this time. Only recently did they notice (and, as a matter of fact, even this was fortuitous) the absurdity of such humility. But still, they did not venture to reproach Dostoevsky openly — so much had his reputation for sanctity grown because of the passage quoted above. They merely tried to reduce its importance by means of an appropriate interpretation. They began to point out that in Dostoevsky’s time, convicts were not, strictly speaking, criminals in the true sense of the word, but merely objectors — for the most part, people who had rebelled against the outrageous practices of serfdom.
This explanation, although belated, was, of course, necessary. Unfortunately, it is completely without foundation. Dostoevsky was not particularly fond of the objectors in the penal colony; he merely tolerated them. Recall how he spoke of the political prisoners. His enthusiasm was for the real convicts, for those about whom his fellow prisoner, the Pole M…tsky, always said: “Je hais ces brigands” — and it was only for them. In them, he found strength, talent, and singularity; he ranked them higher than Belinsky, Turgenev, and Nekrassov. Nothing is left to us but to be outraged by this judgment, to ridicule it, to curse it, to do whatever we please, but Dostoevsky meant precisely this and ONLY this.”
Lev Shestov, Dostoevsky and Nietzsche: The Philosophy of Tragedy
Peculiare di Samorì è il gesto artistico finale: “Ho sollevato col bulino un singolo filamento di colore, circuendo la testa ridipinta di nero per raggiungere la stretta di indice e pollice che in un’immagine antica reggevano un anello. Il ritratto si è fatto cerchio”. Nicola Samorì, In principio era la fine. Olio su tavola, 40x30 cm, 2016.
“And do you know what “the world” is to me? Shall I show it to you in my mirror? This world: a monster of energy, without beginning or end; a firm magnitude of force that does not get bigger or smaller, that does not expend itself but only transforms itself; a whole, of unalterable size, a household without expenses or losses, but likewise without increase or income; enclosed by “nothingness” as a boundary; not something blurry or wasted, not something endlessly extended, but set in a definite space as a definite force, and not a space that might be “empty” here or there; a sea of forces flowing and rushing together, eternally changing, eternally flooding back, with tremendous years of recurrence, with an ebb of flow of its forms; out of the simplest forms striving towards the most complex, out of the stillest, moors rigid, coldest forms towards the hottest, most turbulent, most self-contradictory, and then again returning home to the simple out of this abundance, out of the play of contradictions back to the joy of concord, still affirming itself in this uniformity of its courses and its years, blessing itself as that which must return eternally, as a becoming that knows no satiety, no disgust, no weariness: this, my Dionysian world of the eternally self-creating, the eternally self-destroying, this mystery world of the twofold voluptuous delight, my “beyond good and evil,” without goal, unless the joy of the circle is itself a goal; without will, unless a ring feels good will towards itself – do you want a name for this world? A solution for all its riddles? A light for you, too, you best-concealed, strongest, most intrepid, most midnightly men? – This world is the will to power – and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this will to power – and nothing besides!”
Friedrich Nietzsche, Will to Power (via lightfoot4010)
“But you, you deep one, suffer too deeply even from small wounds; and even before you have healed, the same poisonous worm crawls over your hand. You are too proud to kill these greedy creatures. But beware lest it become your downfall that you suffer all their poisonous injustice.”
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (via theevergreensoul)
“Nothing is beautiful, except man alone: all aesthetics rests upon this naïveté, which is its first truth. Let us immediately add the second: nothing is ugly except the degenerating man — and with this the realm of aesthetic judgment is circumscribed. Physiologically, everything ugly weakens and saddens man. It reminds him of decay, danger, impotence; it actually deprives him of strength. One can measure the effect of the ugly with a dynamometer. Wherever man is depressed at all, he senses the proximity of something “ugly.” His feeling of power, his will to power, his courage, his pride — all fall with the ugly and rise with the beautiful. In both cases we draw an inference: the premises for it are piled up in the greatest abundance in instinct. The ugly is understood as a sign and symptom of degeneration: whatever reminds us in the least of degeneration causes in us the judgment of “ugly.” Every suggestion of exhaustion, of heaviness, of age, of weariness; every kind of lack of freedom, such as cramps, such as paralysis; and above all, the smell, the color, the form of dissolution, of decomposition — even in the ultimate attenuation into a symbol — all evoke the same reaction, the value judgment, “ugly.” A hatred is aroused — but whom does man hate then? There is no doubt: the decline of his type. Here he hates out of the deepest instinct of the species; in this hatred there is a shudder, caution, depth, farsightedness — it is the deepest hatred there is. It is because of this that art is deep.”
Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols
(via survivethejive)
“One must shed the bad taste of wanting to agree with many. “Good” is no longer good when one’s neighbor mouths it. And how should there be a “common good”! The term contradicts itself: whatever can be common always has little value. In the end it must be as it is and always has been: great things remain for the great, abysses for the profound, nuances and shudders for the refined, and, in brief, all that is rare for the rare.”
Friedrich Nietzsche
(via psychopathicneighbor)
“Anti-social behavior is a trait of intelligence in a world full of conformists.”
Nikola Tesla (via quotemadness)
“I reached the point of feeling a sort of secret, abnormal, despicable enjoyment in returning home to my corner on some disgusting Petersburg night, and being acutely conscious that that day I had again done something loathsome, that what was done could never be undone, and secretly, inwardly gnaw, gnaw at myself for it, nagging and consuming myself till at last the bitterness turned into some sort of shameful accursed sweetness, and finally into a real positive enjoyment.”
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes From The Underground (via aquietdevastation)
“The way to create art is to burn and destroy ordinary concepts and to substitute them with new truths that run down from the top of the head and out of the heart.”
Charles Bukowski (via quotemadness)
This omitted chapter [At Tikhon’s], is the culmination of Stavrogin’s tragedy and Dostoevsky’s loftiest artistic creation. The struggle for faith with disbelief, which grows through the duration of the whole novel, here attains its most extreme tension. The opposition of the two ideas is embodied in the encounter of two personalities — the atheist Stavrogin and the mystic Tikhon. The enigmatic hero’s secret is revealed, and the resolution, which we have so long awaited with anxiety and excitement, strikes us by its unexpectedness. Stavrogin irritably and mockingly tells Tikhon about his hallucinations: he, of course, does not believe in the apparitionst and realizes that it is a disease. Tikhon answers seriously: ‘Devils do exist beyond doubt, but the understanding of them can be greatly varied.” Then Stavrogin loses his self-possession and betrays himself. With diabolic pride he declares to Tikhon: ‘I will tell you seriously and insolently: I do believe in the devil, I do believe, canonically, in a personal one, not in an allegory, and I have no need to inquire of anyone, this is the whole thing.’
Yes, this is the whole thing: Stavrogin canonically believes in the devil, without believing in God; the proud and strong spirit, God-like in his grandeur, has renounced the Creator and closed himself off in selfness. He desired to be by himself — ‘to express his self-will.’ ‘If there is no God, I am God,’ said Kirillov. Stavrogin has realized this: he is God in his unlimited power and freedom. But in the experience of man-godhood the strong personality finds not triumph, but defeat. His power is purposeless, for there is no point of its application, his freedom is empty since it is the freedom of indifference. Stavrogin is a lie and slave to the ‘father of lies’ — the devil. The god-like personality is split into two countenances; there appears a double — ‘a nasty, little imp, one of those who have miscarried’; free God in necessarily replaced by faith in the devil. Stavrogin falls into demonic possession, practical satanism. It is his ‘credo‘: ‘I believe canonically in the devil.’ Opposed to it is Tikhon’s confession of faith. To the apostate’s question whether he believes in God: Tikhon answers, ‘I believe,… And let me not be ashamed of Your Cross, Lord…’
Two forces, the greatest in the world — faith and disbelief, God and the devil — have clashed. This instant of blinding luster has been prepared by the whole action of the novel; for this instant it was also written.
― Konstantin Mochulsky, Dostoevsky: His Life and Work