An Interpretation of Nietzsche’s On the Uses and Disadvantage of History for Life
Anthony K. Jensen
Events are historical. They have pasts out of which they emerge and futures into which they pass. Their intrinsically historical character alters whatever original meanings their actors may have intended. History itself, however, is nothing in the past. It is the product of minds thinking today about the past. Those minds constitute the meanings of a past that is in-itself meaningless, a tree whose falling without observers would make no sound. Over time certain meaning-constituting interpretations become commonplace, ossified, such that their status as interpretation is forgotten. Canonical interpretations are labeled facts until the very moment when a new interpretation disrupts their hegemony. Events are the sum of their dominant interpretations.
As Paul Ricouer has pointed out, “the self is the person that we represent to ourselves as a project to be realized, one whose actions would be congruent with its existence.”And so, without history, there can be no self, and, therefore, no culture. With- out history, we enter into Nietzsche’s epoch of “the last man”—a condition in which mere survival and its whims replace freedom, autonomy, character, community, and hope.
Western civilization could be preserved from such a fate through the renewal of contemplative religion. Since the triumph of the Cartesian ego, none of the contemplative, mystical forms of religious life had been properly considered, qualified, or understood—either by the Western philosophers or by the institutional Church. Yet many of these contemplative traditions—from Christian mysticism to Sufism and Zen Buddhism—serve the contemporary need for psychological depth (sacred connection) and cultural breadth (many-sidedness).
The New Age cults, sects, religious offshoots, and Gaia movements and of course fanatical groupings have some straws clung to by the desperate. WEF
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Fabio Vighi, is professor of critical theory and Italian at Cardiff University. Fabio has published significant analyses of the relationship between the Covid phenomenon and the reliance of the financial system on debt-fuelled expansion.
Today’s financially driven economy is fuelled by global emergencies, whose primary role is to shield the system from its increasingly destructive practices. Lockdowns and related restrictions are the latest model of social engineering. Their immediate purpose is to allow Central Banks to carry out their astronomical money-printing programmes, which inflate the financial sector while also – as we are witnessing at present – causing inflation as soon as any cash is leaked into the real economy by commercial banks. COVID-19 is, essentially, a cover-up for systematic debt-leveraged monetary expansion. In capitalist terms, there is no alternative to this cynical exercise – at least until the authoritarian paradigm shift currently underway is normalised. Before it is too late, then, we must stop believing that vaccine mandates, lockdowns, and other forms of mass regimentation are health related. Rather, the ‘pandemic’ continues to work as the ideological front to a mode of social reproduction that has no way of perpetuating itself other than by imposing its despotic reshaping as necessary and even desirable.
https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/author/fabiovighi/
Needless perhaps, but the Ukraine conflict is also engineered to do catastrophic damage to the West. Pandemic, War, outcomes are Social Currency as Digital Credit and the Digital Passport proof of not being a Replicant.