In Taberna

That the life of the centaurs should be a school for heroes, that they should be trained away from the human home, beneath the open sky, in the caves of the wild mountains, seems strange at first, when one considers the overall image of the centaur. There is a raw and wild side to it, corresponding to the life of primitive hunters. They do not possess the gentle powers of Hestia and Demeter, they do not shepherd nor cultivate fields. They are naked, rough, impulsive, have their own weapons and lead a wandering life as free hunters who follow their prey and need plenty of territory. The bull hunters of Thessaloniki, centaurs in human form, recede into the background, giving way to the hippocentaurs. It is out of the abundance of raw animal nature that the human form grows and rises as an attachment that cannot free itself from the heavy and powerful animal body and remains attached to it. Pindar tells us that Ixion gave birth to Hippocentaurus by means of a cloud, but Ixion has a rocky

"Since the tree demands veneration, it has its strongest effect where man, through his art, creates the free space it deserves. This cannot happen overnight. Whoever plants a tree is thinking for grandchildren and great-grandchildren. This includes a caring sense that goes beyond daily consumption and quick use, even beyond one's own life and death. It continues; we feel it in the tranquillity, the peace that makes us happy in an old park. The ancestors have thought of us. We enter into them, remove ourselves from the circles of chasing, threatening time. We feel peace, even in decay. Nuthatches and woodpeckers nest in the hollow trunks, mushrooms settle on the rotten wood, reddish-brown dust trickles from the wormholes. We stroke the bark of the old brother; he has seen tournaments and was already stately when Columbus armed the caravels. There is stronger, dreaming life, and our life itself with its temporal worries becomes a dream. What may remain of them before another cen

XX - THE DESTRUCTION OF MONEY When we study the financial and currency system of today, we enter an area where there reigns profound confusion. There can be no doubt that we are living in an era of general deterioration of currencies. This is shown by the withdrawal of precious metals from circulation and by the constant migration of gold in its flight from danger zones to zones of greater financial safety. Inflationary and deflationary movements, devaluations, and withdrawals from circulation affect all currencies, which have to be protected artificially by the most intricate regulations. Possession of precious metals or foreign banknotes, export of holdings by the owner or his agents, re-importation of currency into the country of its origin – all are put under the strictest control. Eventually, under pressure of exchange difficulties, we see the state reverting to a kind of primitive barter economy, an economy of peculiar financial and economic consequences. All these mysterious and

The tyrants of the spirit. - Only where the ray of myth falls does the life of the Greeks light up; elsewhere it is gloomy. Now the Greek philosophers rob themselves of precisely this myth: isn't it as if they wanted to remove themselves from the sunshine and go into the shadows, into the gloom? But no plant avoids the light; basically, those philosophers were only seeking a brighter sun, the myth was not clear and luminous enough for them.They found this light in their knowledge, in what every one of them called his "truth." At that time, however, knowledge still had a greater luster; it was still young and still knew little of all the difficulties and dangers of its paths;" Nietzsche -  HATH

"It is only in an individualistically disintegrated society that the aesthetically productive subject could shift the intellectual center into itself, only in a bourgeois world that isolates the individual in the domain of the intellectual, makes the individual its own point of reference, and imposes upon it the entire burden that otherwise was hierarchically distributed among different functions in a social order. In this society, it is left to the private individual to be his own priest. But not only that. Because of the central significance and consistency of the religious, it is also left to him to be his own poet, his own philosopher, his own king, and his own master builder in the cathedral of his personality. The ultimate roots of romanticism and the romantic phenomenon lie in the private priesthood. If we consider the situation from aspects such as these, then we should not always focus only on the good-natured pastoralists. On the contrary, we must also see the despair th

"From Kant on, the philosophy of the nineteenth century assumes more and more the character of a philosophy of will. In Kantian thought we find but little preoccupation with the human will, less even than in Luther's, whose essay De servo arbitrio belongs among the fundamental writings of Protestantism. But Schopenhauer declared the human will to be "the thing as such." This identification would have  been incomprehensible to Kant, for Kant declared it impossible to understand and define the nature of things, "as such." The idea of the supremacy of the human will culminates in Nietzsche's "will for power." That power was the foremost goal of the will was claimed by Nietzsche as passionately as it was denied by Schopenhauer. The manner in which Nietzsche campaigns for his will-for-power idea reminds one of Callicles in Plato's Gorgias. The philosophy of will has peculiar premises and consequences. It is obvious, first of all, that those