week 30 supplemental readings.pdf

8/14/2019 Week 30 Supplemental Readings.pdf

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Meaning in history: Marx and Engels asphilosophes of a second Enlightenment

"In pre-modern societies, the ends of life are given at the beginning of life:

people do things in their generation so that the same things will continueto be done in the next generation. Meaning is immanent in all the ordinary

customs and practices of existence, since these are inherited from the past,

and are therefore worth reproducing. The idea is to make the world go not

forward, only around. In modern societies, the ends of life are not given atthe beginning of life; they are thought to be created or discovered. The

reproduction of the customs and practices of the group is no longer thechief purpose of existence; the idea is not to repeat, but to change, to movethe world forward. Meaning is no longer immanent in the practices of

ordinary life, since those practices are understood by everyone to be

contingent and time-bound. This is why death, in modern societies, is thegreat taboo, an absurdity, the worst thing one can imagine. For at the close

of life people cannot look back and know that they have accomplished the

task set for them at birth. This knowledge always lies up ahead,

somewhere over history's horizon. Modern societies don't know what willcount as valuable in the conduct of life in the long run, because they have

no way of knowing what conduct the long run will find itself in a position

to respect. The only certain knowledge death comes with is the knowledgethat the values of one's own time, the values one has tried to live by, are

expunge-able. . . .

"Marxism gave a meaning to modernity. It said that, wittingly or not, theindividual performs a role in a drama that has a shape and a goal, atrajectory, and that modernity will turn out to be just one act in that drama.

Historical change is not arbitrary. It is generated by class conflict; it is


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g y g y ;

On Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life(1874)

From the Introduction by Peter Preuss (Hackett, 1980):

Man, unlike animal, is self-conscious. He is aware that he is alive and that he must die.

And because he is self-conscious he is not only aware of living, but of living well orbadly. Life is not wholly something that happens to man; it is also something he engages

in according to values he follows. Human existence is a task. . . .

Whatever a person does finally receives its meaning only so far as it is integrated intothe total task of existing. If it fails to further this task it is valueless. If it hinders this task

it is to be rejected. . . .The quest for knowledge and truth is also a part of the task of existing and, like every

human enterprise, it receives its value from being integrated into the task of which it is apart. . . .

The 19th Century had discovered history and all subsequent inquiry and education

bore the stamp of this discovery. This was not simply the discovery of a set of factsabout the past but the discovery of the historicity of man: man, unlike animal, is a

historical being. Man is not wholly the product of an alien act, either natural or divine,

but in part produces his own being. The task of existing is a task precisely because it isnot a case of acting according to a permanent nature or essence but rather of producing

that nature within the limitations of a situation. History is the record of this self-

production; it is the activity of a historical being recovering the past into the presentwhich anticipates the future. With a total absence of this activity man would fall short of

humanity: history is necessary.

But what if this activity is perverted? What if, rather than remaining the life-

promoting activity of a historical being, history is turned into the objective uncovering of

mere facts by the disinterested scholar facts to be left as they are found, to becontemplated without being assimilated into present being? According to Nietzsche, thisperversion has taken place and history, rather than promoting life, has become deadly.

This then is the dilemma Nietzsche faced: history is necessary but as it is practiced it is


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Le monde va finir. La seule raison, pour laquelle il pourraitdurer, c'est qu'il existe. . . . Car, en supposant qu'il continut

exister matriellement, serait-ce une existence digne de ce nom

et du Dictionnaire historique? Je ne dis pas que le monde sera

rduit aux expdients et au dsordre bouffon des rpubliquesdu Sud-Amrique, que peut-tre mme nous retournerons

l'tat sauvage, et que nous irons, travers les ruines herbues de

notre civilisation, chercher notre pture, un fusil la main.Non; car ces aventures supposeraient encore une certaine

nergie vitale, cho des premiers ges. Nouvel exemple et

nouvelles victimes des inexorables lois morales, nous prironspar o nous avons cru vivre. La mcanique nous aura

tellement amricaniss, le progrs aura si bien atrophi en nous

toute la partie spirituelle, que rien, parmi les rveries

sanguinaires, sacrilges ou antinaturelles des utopistes, nepourra tre compar ses rsultats positifs. . . . Mais ce n'est

pas particulirement par des institutions politiques que se

manifestera la ruine universelle, ou le progrs universel; carpeu m'importe le nom. Ce sera par l'avilissement des curs.

The world is drawing to an end. Only forlonger: just because it happens to exist. .

continue materially, would that be an exis

name and the historical dictionary? I do n

will be reduced to expedients and the bufthe republics of South America, that perh

return to a savage state, and that we will g

ruins of our civilization, to seek our grazihand. No: because such adventures woul

certain vital energy, echo of first ages. W

example of the inexorability of the spirituand shall be their victims: we shall perish

which we fancy that we live. Technocrac

us; progress will starve our spirituality so

the bloodthirsty, sacrilegious, or unnaturautopists will be comparable to such positi

Universal ruin will manifest itself not sol

political institutions or general progress obe a proper name for it; it will be seen, ab

baseness of hearts.

-- Charles Baudelaire, Fu


4/11

TO POSTERITY

Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956)

1.

Indeed I live in the dark ages!

A guileless word is an absurdity. A smooth forehead betokensA hard heart. He who laughs

Has not yet heard

The terrible tidings.

Ah, what an age it is

When to speak of trees is almost a crime

For it is a kind of silence about injustice!

And he who walks calmly across the street,

Is he not out of reach of his friends

In trouble?

It is true: I earn my living

But, believe me, it is only an accident.

Nothing that I do entitles me to eat my fill.

By chance I was spared. (If my luck leaves me

I am lost.)

They tell me: eat and drink. Be glad you have it!

But how can I eat and drink

When my food is snatched from the hungryAnd my glass of water belongs to the thirsty?

And yet I eat and drink.

I would gladly be wise.

The old books tell us what wisdom is:

Avoid the strife of the world

Live out your little time

Fearing no one

Using no violence

Returning good for evil --

Not fulfillment of desire but forgetfulness

Passes for wisdom.

I can do none of this:

I came among men in a time of uprising

And I revolted with them.

So the time passed away

Which on earth was given me.

I ate my food between massacres.

The shadow of murder lay upon my sleep.

And when I loved, I loved with indifference.

I looked upon nature with impatience.



In my time streets led to the quicksand.

Speech betrayed me to the slaughterer.There was little I could do. But without me

The rulers would have been more secure. This w



3.

You, who shall emerge from the flood

In which we are sinking,Think --

When you speak of our weaknesses,

Also of the dark time

That brought them forth.

For we went, changing our country more often tha

In the class war, despairing

When there was only injustice and no resistance.

For we knew only too well:

Even the hatred of squalor

Makes the brow grow stern.

Even anger against injustice

Makes the voice grow harsh Alas we


5/11

To the Planetarium

f one had to expound the teachings of antiquity with utmost brevitywhile standing on one leg, as did Hillel that of the Jews, it could only bein this sentence: They alone shall possess earth who live from thepowers of the cosmos. Nothing distinguishes the ancient from the modern man so much as the former's absorption in a cosmic experience


6/11

TO THE PL NET RIUM 59for the first time on a planetary scale-that is, in the spirit of technology.But because lust for profit of the ruling class sought satisfactionthrough it, technology betrayed man and turned the bridal bed into abloodbath. The mastery of nature (so the imperialists teach) is the purpose of all technology. But who would trust a cane wielder who proclaimed the mastery of children by adults to be the purpose of education?Is not education, above all, the indispensable ordering of the relationshipbetween generations and therefore mastery (if we are to use this term) ofthat relationship and not of children? And likewise technology is themastery of not nature but of the relation between nature and man. Menas a species completed their development thousands of years ago; butmankind as a species is just beginning his. In technology, a physis is beingorganized through which mankind s contact with the cosmos takes a newand different form from that which it had in nations and families. Oneneed recall only the experience of velocities by virtue of which mankindis now preparing to embark on incalculable journeys into the interior oftime, to encounter there rhythms from which the shall draw strengthas they did earlier on high mountains or on the shores of southern seas.The Lunaparks are a prefiguration of sanatoria. The paroxysm of genuine cosmic experience is not tied to that tiny fragment of nature that we


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week 30 supplemental readings.pdf

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