“And thus the project of self-realization is thrown back on the experience of self-loss from it springs.”Tagged: Groundless Ground, Epistemology, Getting To Know Yourself, Loss
“As dozens of sold-out editions of Sex and Character convinced them that 'being oneself' was far from an innocent matter, an even more notorious thinker was amassing evidence for the spiritual vacuity of the age.”Tagged: Sin and Intellectual Development
“We can't we dismiss the fact that unprecedented numbers of young men went mad or took their own lives in the years immediately preceding the First World War—that is, before being able to be conscripted into service.”
“For things are historical not merely by happening, but by finding a home in consciousness.”Tagged: The Art of Protrest , Streets
“Nineteen ten is the spiritual prefiguration of an unspeakably tragic fatality, heard in the tones of the audacious and the anguished, the deviant and the desperate, in the art of a youth grown precociously old, awaiting a war it had long suffered in spirit.”Tagged: Wolrd War Causes
“Here prescience can be felt in the suffering itself. To those who mistrusted all political leaders, and all practical responses to things not intellectually digested, a belligerent reaction such as war to vague fears of dissolution could only be the disease masquerading as cure.”
“So opaque are these figures of speech that whatever significance they promise retreats to the penumbras of unintelligibility.”Tagged: The Secret of Secrecy
“Expressionism seeks 'something else' within the figure's appearance—some recess in its surface. It does not believe that it has captured the essence of a face or a phenomenon unless it has also unveiled this 'something else,' this subjectivity, as it were, of an object, or this objectivity of a…”Tagged: against one world rationality, Expressionism, Beyond Science, Art History
“A third unspeakable subject, beyond ethics and aesthetics, is metaphysics: the study of why some aspect of totality of world events is not accidental.”Tagged: Languages of the Unsayable, The Secret of Secrecy
“The discoveries of 1910 establish no basis for social or intellectual progress... This is why Michelstaedter's suicide seems so coherent: a consequence of pushing contradictions to their deadly extreme.”Tagged: The End And Start of Power Politics
“It now appears that one of the things most fully understood in 1910 was misunderstanding—the vastness of its depth and promise.”