Russians are as much Asiatics as European. The mistake of our policy for the past two centuries has been to make the people of Europe believe that we are true Europeans. We have served Europe too well, we have taken too great a part in her domestic quarrels (…) We have bowed ourselves like slaves before the Europeans and have only gained their hatred and contempt. It is time to turn away from ungrateful Europe. Our future is in Asia.
Dostoyevsky
In one of his accounts Solzhenitsyn wrote that Beria reported to Stalin, while Stalin himself only reported to Satan. It has occurred to me that with the same power of the air that Mephistopheles told Faust kept him “merely well informed,” that whatever demons inhabited Russian environs to sustain the lusts they feed upon, many have lately found the climate in the West to be more congenial to their constitutions, and are therefore emigres. To quote Emerson, “things are in the saddle, and they ride mankind.”
From out of the seeds of life increasingly complex organisms arise by means of the competitive interplay of its individual nutritive forces. The ‘Bildungstrieb’ does not cultivate change or alteration so much as intensification—‘Steigerung’—of what was originally there at the outset. In the healthy organism the creative forces of life must be guided, trained, and restricted, so that in place of something wild and ungainly a proper Bildungstrieb places a balanced structure which achieves its full intensification in beauty. And the same is true not just of nature, but of any science that would endeavor to be true to nature. Such a proper science is what Goethe names “morphology.” As the work of the botanist is to trace the morphology of an organism according to the intensification of its type through all its living forms, so does it fall to the proper historian to account for the great archetypes within past individuals and cultures and to attend to their intensification by means of both their immanent competitive life forces and their struggles against one another. One way that history serves this Goethean model of life is by offering a morphology of the growth of historical individuals worth studying. In fact, Nietzsche’s affirmative model of historiography will reflect precisely this Goethean ideal: history as the battle ground of competing forces for the sake of the intensification of an individual’s most healthy qualities.
François-René de Chateaubriand says "There are two consequences in history; an immediate one, which is instantly recognized, and one in the distance, which is not at first perceived. These consequences often contradict each other; ... look to the end of an accomplished fact, and you will see that it has always produced the contrary of what was expected from it." Looking then at the last 30 months medicalization of life had already been growing beyond all measure in recent decades, but it has become permanent and all-pervasive in the situation we are experiencing today. It is no longer a question of taking medicine or having a medical examination or surgery, if necessary: the whole life of human beings must become the place of an uninterrupted worship at every moment. The enemy, the virus, is invisible and always present and must be fought with no truce in every moment of one’s existence.
Max Picard writes in the 1930's: Man’s face is the image of God. And the image of God is like a call to the spectator: the whole being of the spectator is called together and held together. It is as if the image of God were being shown that man is still the whole creature that he was when God placed him upon the earth." For Max Picard, it was a technocratic civilization that arose to avert our gaze away from the human face by manufacturing only "technical surprises as if to convey: There are no more spiritual surprises, only the machine can astonish"
This abolition of the essentially human and our abdication to it's abolition signals a profound and mysterious disconnect with the direction of civilization. In Genesis 1:26, 27; 5:1; and 9:6 two terms occur, “image” and “likeness,” that seem to indicate clearly the biblical understanding of essential human nature: humans are created in the image and likeness of God. According Rabbi Akiba, the "image” of God seems to mean the unique human capacity for a spiritual relationship with him; this interpretation thus avoids any suggestion of a physical similarity between God and humans.
Things are in the saddle, and they ride mankind! A terrifying quote which makes me fall to my knees and pray for deliverance 🙏
Emerson is well worth the investment of time and energy. Thoreau, his friend, is also though not necessarily Walden alone. Faith in a Seed was quite good as well.