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 ...

"It is certain, that the easy and obvious philosophy will always, with the generality of mankind, have the preference above the accurate and abstruse; and by many will be recommended, not only as more agreeable, but more useful than the other. It enters more into common life; moulds the heart and affections; and, by touching those principles which actuate men, reforms their conduct, and brings them nearer to that model of perfection which it describes. On the contrary, the abstruse philosophy, being founded on a turn of mind, which cannot enter into business and action, vanishes when the philosopher leaves the shade, and comes into open day; nor can its principles easily retain any influence over our conduct and behaviour. The feelings of our heart, the agitation of our passions, the vehemence of our affections, dissipate all its conclusions, and reduce the profound philosopher to a mere plebeian."

Let us study the relation of technology to quite another field, the organization of schools and universities. As the technician enters this field, he converts all institutions of learning to his interest; that is, he promotes technical training, which as he claims, is the only up-to-date, useful, practical knowledge. The significance of reforms in this direction must not be underestimated. They constitute a direct attack against the idea of a "rounded education" (encyclios disciplina) that prevailed in classical and medieval times. The consequences of this attack do not, obviously, consist alone in the decline of the role of grammar in education, in the retreat of astronomy and music, in the disappearance of dialects and rhetoric. This slashing, whereby of the seven classical "free arts" only arithmetic and geometry have survived, is by no means all. The technical science which comes to a position of supremacy is both empirical and causal. Its inroads into education...

"The Dionysian trajectory of Hölderlin's poem now becomes stronger and stronger, its architecture changes, the dithyrambic comes to the fore. The firm, presumptuous construction of ancient verses is no longer sufficient, the hymn formed in free rhythms takes its place. The language in "Patmos", the pictures, the landscapes are Dionysian. The longing, pulling and tugging begins, the wanderings begin, which, unlike in the elegy "Der Wanderer", lead after the mouth of the Danube, to Greece, the Caucasus, Asia Minor, the islands, all the way to India, into the realms of the triumphant Dionysian festival and triumphal procession. Dionysus is not mentioned in "Patmos", but he is always present, most palpably in the "Mysteries of the Vine", where Christ and his disciples sit together. The mystery of the vine is a Dionysian mystery. If this Dionysian vine remains unharmed by Christianity, then we can say: it is good. Under it one can rest; in th...

"One of the least pleasing effects of modern refinement is the havoc it has made among the hearty old holiday customs. It has completely taken off the sharp touchings and spirited reliefs of these embellishments of life, and has worn down society into a more smooth and polished, but certainly a less characteristic surface. Many of the games and ceremonials of Christmas have entirely disappeared, and like the sherris sack of old Falstaff, are become matters of speculation and dispute among commentators.They flourished in times full of spirit and lustihood, when men enjoyed life roughly, but heartily and vigorously; times wild and picturesque, which have furnished poetry with its richest materials, and the drama with its most attractive variety of characters and manners. The world has become more worldly. There is more of dissipation, and less of enjoyment. Pleasure has expanded into a broader, but a shallower stream, and has forsaken many of those deep and quiet channels where it f...

 SELF-DECEPTION BY PHOTOGRAPHY In a world of pure being, that is, in a world in which there can be no change, propaganda could not exist, no more than a difference between being and appearance, truth and falsehood. No deception could enter such a world – there would be no openings, no crevices to admit it. There could not even be such shadows as Plato believed to be cast by thought, shadows which came between the things and the ideas of things. Wherever the ideas formed in the human mind begin to predominate, there a process of separation sets in: the prototypes vanish while the images we are forming of them multiply. Without this process of ideation no science could have developed. For only as we begin to form ideas of things, does our reason demand to have these things explained. Without this separation between things and ideas, there would be no explanations forthcoming from the human mind. In mythology, for instance, the myth has no need to explain itself. It is only in the lat...

"Our thinking is not mythical thinking, but thinking about the myth. We do not think as the Greeks thought, but we think about what they thought. The question is what coincidence Greek thinking has for our own. The reader may find an answer to this question in this account. We are so familiar with the historical view of the world that we are hardly able to perceive the one-sided and also absurdity it contains. The material of the world does not seem representable to us if it is not dissolved, in movement of concepts, thought as development. The mythologist, who makes special history, is confronted with a thinking that knows nothing about the historicization of consciousness, with which he can therefore only unite in so far as he is able to subject it to historical methods. Hence all the research on the influences, on the origin of myths, on the wanderings that the gods, or rather the ideas about them, have taken, in short, the ethnographic, geographical, physical, chronological. T...

I just noticed that Will R. Bird has never been mentioned here. Of the highest interest will be his war memoir, And We Go On, as it holds some similarity to Junger's memoir. Graphic in its detail, and written based on his notes, it is unapologetic and in parts coldly removed from the events, although perhaps more as a peasant character or in the literary tradition of the fool rather than the nobility of Junger. It is also very Canadian, so there are some notable differences, Bird had little education, he was of a simple farming background, he lost his father when he was young and his brother in the war, and he was a simple soldier of common rank. He had to fight just to join the war. Like Junger, he lost one of his own sons in WWII. Much of the Canadian character is revealed in the struggles with the brass, involving vengeance or pranks of some kind. There is a rough and democratised sense of authority, which is of interest for its contrast and the specific character that Junger sa...