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Atlantic Ocean, March 1967
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"... une
erreur entrée dans le domaine public n'en
sort jamais; les opinions se transmettent,
héréditairement, comme des
terrains—on y bâtit—cela finit par
faire une ville: cela finit par faire l'Histoire."
[1] [Rémy de Gourmont
1858-1915, Epilogues]
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Ein Kentaur
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Tell me, Friedrich, why are you going into
philosophy, now that you've finished your studies
of Spanish? Wouldn't it be better to go along with
the Zeitgeist, and apply yourself to
electronics, engineering, economy, or politics? For
this is no season for philosophers, unless you
planned to change the concepts of philosophy into
political ones ...
And when I think about it, I wouldn't be
surprised if you, like so many young men and women
nowadays, were under the spell inspired by the fame
of the existencialisme of Sartre and Simone
de Beauvoir, which you'll have to admit is due more
to social affairs than to philosophy. Otherwise the
masses, which no variety of philosophical
contemplation could ever captivate, would not be so
delighted ... You should beware of all 'isms', and
exhort Sartre to take the 'Gourmont antidote'
Voici la saison des
pommes,
Allons au verger, Simone,
Allons au verger. [2]
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Jean-Paul Sartre
1905-1980
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Simone de Beauvoir
1908-1986
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Rémy de
Gourmont
1858-1915
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... in the hope that the couple's sound
retirement in the verger might yield better
philosophical results than their
sitting—always available to
press-photographers—in the cafés of any
polis, with a halo about their heads more
coloured than the one we witnessed round the
moon on the night we
left Rio de Janeiro behind.
Naturally, these halos appear when the
atmosphere is cloudy or vapoury; or else by the
eyes' deceit, as happened to Descartes when he sat,
like us, in a ship, and discovered a
vividly-coloured halo round the light. Of course,
the latter was of a different kind: it was an
optical delusion or an unsubstantial phantom, as
when the same Descartes imagined that he could
build an entire new philosophy from scratch, as if
no one had philosophized before him. But concerning
the different kinds of halos, you'll be able to
distinguish one instance from the other simply by
covering the light source with your finger, just
like Sartre does with essence, and Simone
with that individualisme that she claims to
have vanquished.
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René Descartes
1596-1650
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Jacob Burckhardt
1818-1897
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Arthur Schopenhauer
1788-1860
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Friedrich Schelling
1775-1854
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Centaur
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But, to return to your plans, you should be
aware that our Schopenhauer loyally advised the
young not to waste their time studying philosophy
in any official institution, where the noble
discipline has been turned into history of
philosophy, or else into that hybrid which our
Burckhardt described, when he said
Die Philosophie des
Geschichte ist ein Kentaur [3]
For, as he explained, philosophy is unhistorical
and history unphilosophical ... And then again, the
gods know if philosophy could still make your
bliss; for as our Friedrich Schelling admitted
Not only the
poet but also the philosopher has his
ecstasies
... and that's all that matters, Friedrich, all
that matters ...
In any case, whatever you become—either a
philosopher or anything else—, keep your
concepts clean. For when we were yesterday at
dinner conversing with that charming Chilean girl,
I noticed that you'd got the historians' Stone,
Bronze and Iron ages mixed up with the Four Ages of
Man, either because you were distracted by the
upper-thigh level of her skirt, or else because you
haven't realized that the similarity between both
sets of ages is, as they say in the movies, 'purely
coincidental' ... And once you've stopped giggling,
I'll tell you what this is all about ...
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"As the generation
of leaves, so also is that of men." [Homer,
Iliad 6.146]
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Delineation of the Four Ages
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As you already know, the Four Ages of Man are
poetically called Golden, Silver, Bronze, and Iron.
They are related to the rizómata (or
roots) that Empedocles put at the basis of his
description of the world. But for the purposes that
now concern us, these names refer to the principle
that steers periodicity by means of the typical
four-fold structure seen in all cycles. The
different ages reflect in turn the alternations of
another principle, the description of which I'll
omit, since it would take us too far away from our
subject.
This will not strain your brains, for the four
ages are none others than the seasons of Birth,
Growth, Completion, and Decay. Both the individual
and society—provided none of them dies
prematurely—must go through all four phases.
Thus, when meditating on a single person, you may
refer to them either using the names of the metals,
or else prosaically: Childhood, Youth, Prime, and
Old Age. And again, when contemplating society, you
might use the poetical names, or others which, for
the sake of convenience, I'll call Mythical
(Golden), Archaic (Silver), Classical (Bronze), and
Imperial (Iron). You may observe the same four-fold
structure repeating many times, though not ad
infinitum, in both smaller and larger scales.
Keep the scales in mind! for when Calderón
in his Ni siempre lo peor es cierto tells us
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Que éstas
son las cuatro edades
de cualquier amor; pues vemos
que en brazo del desdén nace,
crece en poder del deseo,
vive en casa del favor,
y muere en la de los celos. [4]
... he refers to the four ages of Infatuation,
and not to the whole cycle of matrimony. And do not
derive from the fact that both man and society are
subject to a cycle, that the latter is a biological
organism, as some have rushed to conclude.
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Pedro Calderón de
la Barca
1600-1681
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It is often mentioned in this context, that the
holy quadruple was also known by Pythagoras, who
counted up to four, believing that neither
stability nor return to unity can be attained,
unless the fourth degree of progression is entered.
It is asserted that from the number
four—called 'perennial
nature's spring' by his school—all
things flow, travelling over the 9 sacred steps of
his Tetraktys, a figure that he obtained by
arranging ten knucklebones or pebbles in four rows,
with one pebble in the first and four in the last.
The resulting figure is called 'T4' or 'Triangle
4', alluding at the number of rows; and, as I said,
the number of pebbles of T4 is 10. You may find the
value of 'T5' or any other triangle number by using
the formula: Tn = n(n + 1)/2.
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Tetraktys
'Mondrian'
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Now, those who attempt to explain the spirit
through its manifold externalization, invariably
find themselves submerged in the same manifoldness
that they wish to overcome, which resembles a sea
of disassociated concepts, at the bottom of which
rests an indefinite number of pebbles. These are
sometimes gathered and sorted, not by imagination
but in the manner of Mondrian, that is, in separate
boxes representing some supposedly primary
properties of theirs. I'll show you later that
these manipulations, like most forms of microscopic
knowledge, are of no avail.
But concerning the names of the ages and those
of their subdivisions, call them as you wish as
long as you keep their qualities in mind, and the
scale they refer to. They are just denominations,
subject to change whenever you find others that
better describe your object.
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"... it seems all the more
necessary to me to recall the nature of all that
happens, how everything begins in darkness ..."
[Friedrich von Schelling 1775-1854, The
Ages of the World]
"In
Arkadien geboren sind wir alle ..." [5] [Arthur Schopenhauer 1788-1860]
"Shall we, then, begin
with Hestia, according to custom?"
[Socrates. Plato,
Cratylus
401b]
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The Mythical Age
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The first era then, is the Golden or Mythical
Age, the time when the gods have intercourse with
mortals. This period is known by scholars as the
'Dark Ages', due to the circumstance that any
Mythical Age is necessarily dark in the face of
posterity. What is meant by 'Dark' is not so much
the age's particular shade, but that nothing or
very little is known about it, since there are no
records whatsoever. You may call this era 'the
beginning', only that this beginning occurs in the
hearth of Hestia: the place and moment in which
life, after having perished in its own flames,
rejuvenates itself from the ashes. During
rejuvenation, all forms and ideas appear before
man, being provided by divine presence, which also
determines their number, measure, and limit. It is
now that man obtains his knowledge of the
world—not by discursive reasoning, but through
direct mental sight or immediate grasp—,
noticing as well that divine presence, besides
keeping all beings and things tightly interlaced,
permeates everything he does.
Here you may ask: "Why do the gods approach man
and care about him?" But since this question, being
vast, would carry us far from our subject, let us
be content, in a provisional manner, with what our
Friedrich Hölderlin said in his Der
Archipelagus:
... es ruhn die Himmlischen gern am
fühlenden Herzen ... [6]
Now, the pristine warmth of divine presence,
along with its beauty and significance, causes a
state of permanent wonder that leaves no occasion
for keeping a diary. This is one reason why no
records from this age are preserved; another is
that creation and destruction, like life and death,
are not kept in separate departments as in
subsequent ages, but advance together in frenzy,
keeping each other close company or being one and
the same. In this manner, whatever is fashioned is
soon destroyed, or turned into something else by
metamorphosis. The pace of change, which in later
ages is slow, is now vertiginous; this is why
ancient man, inhabiting an enchanted or bewitched
world, learns to love tranquillity, whereas the man
of later ages, inhabiting a disenchanted and static
world, attempts to change everything as frequently
as he can.
Possessed by divine presence, man becomes aware
of beauty and significance, acquiring art in its
primeval forms: Speech, Music and Gesture. These
extraordinary acquisitions immerse him in a state
of tremendous excitement; and as he continually
falls into ecstasy, so does the world, for the two
are not divorced yet. Accordingly, a pandemonium
develops that, revealing the heights and depths of
the world, casts him between sublime rapture and
unutterable terror. And nature, being suddenly
released, shouts out its power and plunges
everything into turbulence:
Chasms open; rocks and water streams come to
life; a man becomes a bird; a woman a tree; water
turns into milk; blood into wine ... Fill the list
yourself! For in this age mind prevails over
the external, making real whatever it conceives.
Even time and space behave as if they were but a
dream. In the course of later ages, however, the
opposite is the case: the external world commands
and the mind obeys; and since the latter resembles
a dream compared to the former, man resorts to
logic and causality in order to cope with the
world. But during the first age, when nature
re-creates itself in paradox, these have no
validity, since all phenomena are mainly internal,
not external.
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The representational arts, which require a sober
world and a sober mind, do not exist yet, or rather
we should say that their only available works are
nature and man. For these reasons, the Mythical Age
may be called that of Inspiration and Insight
or—if you wish to think that everything takes
place in the mind (which makes no
difference)—that of Imagination. But whichever
you choose, there is neither premeditation, nor
analyses, nor ulterior motives; for this is the age
that enjoys the wisdom of Innocence, to which our
Friedrich Hölderlin sang
Heilige Unschuld,
du der Menschen und der
Götter liebste vertrauteste! du magst im
Hauße oder draußen ihnen zu
Füßen Sizen, del Alten,
Immerzufriedner Weisheit voll; [7]
In any case, man, being solely confronted with
the soul—either the world's, or his own, or
both—, must rejoice in the pure forms of
beauty and significance that divine presence
reveals through unbridled freedom and sacred
absurdity.
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Friedrich
Hölderlin
1770-1843
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In the Golden Age, man is not divorced from
knowledge as in later ages, but is one with it. His
vision is his knowledge, and through it he
experiences all the manifold processes that the
high simplicity of divine presence gives birth to.
During the last ages, however, man and knowledge
are torn apart; a heart-breaking experience from
which derives his growing need of searching for the
lost knowledge and researching the external world.
But compared to the knowledge of mythical man, that
of later ages is piecework, being artificially
produced by fragmentation and gradation. Moreover,
in the process of obtaining this knowledge, man
loses the ability to concentrate his powers
inwardly, and as he dissipates them outwardly in
myriads of details, these increase their
importance, which in turn leads to yet more
dissipation. But as the world looks, so does the
mind of man; for they mirror each other.
Accordingly, when one of them appears pulverized,
you can be sure that the other is so too.
Now, although the Mythical Age is not
essentially timeless, it appears as such. For in
the same way as mythical man does not rigidly
separate creation from destruction, he does not
distinguish either the segments of time that
gradually are identified as 'present', 'past', and
'future'. Similarly, he does not divorce divinity
from humanness, nor human from beast, nor beast
from plant, nor plant from stone. All are equally
sacred, since the metamorphoses he witnesses unify
the world in his mind and heart. In this age, there
is no past, and therefore neither pride nor guilt;
no future, and consequently neither hope nor
anxiety
Such is the world of mythical man. Naturally, he
needs neither philosophy nor religion to perceive
that the gods have made it, or that he is but a
mortal. Consequently, he not only throbs with
delight while he lives, but also pricks up his
ears, for as the Archaic poet Homer puts it
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The man who
listens to the gods is listened to by them
Mythical man is not religious; for religion is a
device of later times conceived to invoke the
divine presence that has been lost, or rather
turned into divine absence. This is why there are
neither myths nor religion in this age: man lives
in the presence of the gods, and knows the meaning
of life. It is the task of the subsequent Archaic
Age to sum up that experience in the accounts
called 'myths'. These constitute the memory of
divine presence: the Archaic Age evokes
(though not retrospectively but creatively). Later,
as memory fades, religious belief and worship
become important, and the Classical Age
invokes. Finally, when oblivion prevails and
everything is denied, the Imperial Age
revokes.
"Which are the actual dates of the Mythical
Age?" you may wonder. Well ... in Greece, history
would have to date it beyond 1100 BC. But from the
point of view of historical chronology, the
Mythical Age is like a 'singularity', lacking both
time and space, and therefore irretrievable. For
men of subsequent ages, it comes and passes too
fast, looking like a void. Posterity cannot
directly touch the Mythical Age, but must know it
from the remains left by the Archaic, and to a
lesser extent by the Classical. The Mythical Age
does not leave physical evidence behind because, as
I said, it is primordially a spiritual age. In such
times, the weight of practical life is drastically
minimized by Simplicity and Trust, and it is
through these that man, overcoming fear, lives in
abundance and freedom. Leaving matter in peace, he
never lacks material goods, and has a large amount
of time at his disposal. These conditions can no
longer be understood, or even conceived, when this
age is over.
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Homer
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"... but they hold
different offices and each has its own character;
and in turn they come to power as time revolves."
[Empedocles, Physics B17]
"The life of the Greeks
shines bright only when the ray of myth falls on
it; otherwise it is gloomy." [Friedrich
Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, 261]
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The Archaic Age
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During the Mythical Age then, man lives with the
gods, who provide the animating impulse, the spark,
the spiritual force that replenishes him. Towards
the end of this age, however, the divinities leave,
and their withdrawal causes man to suffer a most
traumatic experience. He feels that without the
gods, the world is cold and hostile, and life not
worth living. He would perish if he could, but as
perishing is just a vain dream, he can't. So either
he lives as he was taught by example and
experience, or else he lives in bottomless Chaos,
but live he must!
Chaos is soon discarded, since man has learned
to live. But being alone, he must reconcile himself
with existence; and for being defenceless, he must
himself harness the turbulence and wonder of the
preceding age. Hence his cherishing of the wonder
derived from divine presence—the Golden
Age—, which he evokes through the accounts
known as 'myths'. Hence his need, now that the gods
have departed, to understand with his intellect and
see with his eyes the same beauty and significance
that he before perceived with his soul.
In this manner, logic and symmetry make their
appearance, both in hexameters and in vases. And
since the gods have made their abode in the remote
realm of imagination, man must emphasize the
rational principles of harmony and proportion,
which are the luminous synthesis of clearly defined
parts, the solidity and elegance of which
ceaselessly evoke the dynamic qualities that divine
presence provided during the Mythical Age. Now, the
soul of man receives its nourishment from the gods.
As they withdraw, his vitality diminishes, and he
no longer finds pleasure in his soul alone or in
immaterial arts such as music, speech and gesture.
To compensate the void created by the gods'
departure, he then turns to his senses and starts
representing in external objects the beauty and
significance he previously experienced. Thus the
representational arts and also literacy develop,
and while they do so, music and speech
proportionally decay.
The products of the Archaic Age, as mere
reflections, are pale compared to the original,
like the myths are pale compared to the gods
themselves. But they are glorious considering the
size of the task, which was to describe the
indescribable, to utter the unutterable, to convey
both sublime form and inexplicable substance. It is
at such a moment that Hellenic culture broke
through the living carcass of Mycenaean
civilization (which was so fond of Gold for being
so immersed in Iron). Nowadays the latter is also
called 'Greek' since the deciphering of 'Linear B'
about a decade ago; but that civilization was ruled
by another Zeitgeist...
Seeing that the collapse of Mycenaean
civilization plunged the whole of Hellas in
recession and disorder, some ask: "How could an era
of poverty and dispersed population, and also
suffering the so called 'Dorian invasions', be able
to produce the basic features of what was to become
one of the greatest achievements of mankind?" But
others could as well ask: "When did any large
agglomeration, any rich era devoted to luxury,
produce anything essential, except perhaps the very
conditions of its own collapse?"
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"But those creatures which
belong to the period of the last combat between
dissociation and unification ... we see wander
about in a state similar to drunkenness."
[Friedrich von Schelling 1775-1854, The
Ages of the World]
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Chaos and Revolution
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Now you'll notice, Friedrich, that mechanical
factors cannot provide any essential explanation,
and that such questions cannot be thoroughly
answered without contemplating the inexplicable
nature of Chaos, which the perishing and nascent
ages perceive differently. In fact, there is no
agreement concerning the nature of Chaos, but as
this matter could take us too far away from our
subject, I'll just mention that for the typical
Mycenaean man the world has become a meaningless
void, and life itself a quest lacking any visible
purpose: exhaustion reigns in his heart and mind.
He has returned, as our Friedrich (I refer to
Schelling) says
... to the
position of willing nothing.
... although not because of having satisfied his
essential desires, but rather for having lost all
hope of satisfying them and for being indifferent
towards satisfaction itself. Meanwhile, for the man
of the 'Dark Age', the world appears dazzling in
appearance, plethoric of significance, and full of
new phenomena. What Mycenaean man calls 'madness',
mythical man calls 'the gods'; what the former
endures as annoyance or boredom, the latter enjoys
as freedom.
At first sight, this looks like a simple
'revolution', but mythical man is not a
revolutionary and has no intention of confronting
any earthly powers, since he lives in another
world. But for this very reason, he is seen by
Mycenaean eyes as absent, inaccessible,
unmanageable, or intractable. And you'll notice
that, when the causes of the collapse of imperial
formations are closely examined, one invariably
meets with that 'absence' caused by trance, which
the sober of the day diagnoses as apathy, laziness,
disobedience, irresponsibility, indifference,
revelling, and the like. The moral importance of
this phenomenon was divined by Étienne de La
Boétie, who declared
Soyez
résolus de ne plus servir le Pouvoir et vous
voilà libres! Je ne veux pas que vous le
poussiez ou l'esbranliez, mais seulement ne le
soutenir plus et vous le verrez comme un grand
colosse à qui on a dérobé la
base, de son poids même fondre en bas et se
rompre. [8]
But such a revolution only occurs when the cycle
of the four ages is completed and a new one begins,
and not by virtue of human resolution. Political
man, and particularly 'revolutionary man',
naturally rejects this fact, for being prey of the
illusion that he can control Change. He refuses to
understand that political revolutions are but the
infarcts caused by the sclerosis of the Classical
and Imperial eras, specially of the latter. It is
true that they must inevitably occur, since the
mentioned ages are those of hateful
servitude—a condition that causes
unease—, but they are just a symptom, not a
remedy.
Political revolutions (as other forms of war)
provide the illusion of change in a changeless
world, which, as the popular saying goes, 'the more
it changes the more it remains the same', since
(among many other factors) those who revolt do not
intend to destroy Power, but to usurp it. But as
time goes by, these upheavals increase their
annoying frequency to such an extent that finally
Power finds it convenient to proclaim itself
'revolutionary' and pose as a glorious Champion of
Change—a contradiction that the mentality of
servitude prevailing in the last age cannot detect.
But neither the changes patronized by Power nor
political revolutions can substantially transform
such a sclerotic structure. Change belongs to the
two first ages, and only then has any validity. In
the course of time, Change is naturally arrested,
and society finds herself trapped in the forms that
her genius has managed to achieve. This is the
reason why the last two ages worship Change and
adore any transformation whatsoever, whereas the
first two revere immobility, making a virtue out of
Constancy.
Political revolutions represent the vain hope of
health in front of an incurable sickness, the
chimera of rejuvenation in front of Old Age. For
some, they are the aspirines of the Classical Age
and the morphine of the Imperial. For others, the
old man's young mistress. But neither the mistress
can prevent old age from following its natural
course, nor any medicine can cure death. However
violent or resolute, revolutions—being
symptoms, not medicines—can never change the
course of time and history. But being the
manifestations of an incurable disease, they
multiply and become more frequent, as the world
dilutes in the vast expanse of the Imperial
Age—the final mausoleum of society, the
pyramid of her decease.
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Fresh beginning
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Now, at death a spiritual bath takes place, and
the world is created anew, having very little in
common with the deceased age. A new imagination is
born; a new dream replaces the old one. Still some
will wish to detect continuity between, say,
Mycenaean and geometric pottery, pretending to
ignore that products of clay are physical objects,
incapable by themselves of fully expressing the
ideals of their makers. Likewise, others will
assert that Homer conceived his masterpieces by
developing the epic traditions that he found among
the bones of the aforementioned Mycenaean carcass.
But if the Mycenaean Götterwelt and
that of the Archaic Age were the same, then we had
witnessed, not the birth of Hellenic culture, but a
further development of the Mycenaean. The
importance of the Götterwelt is seldom
acknowledged by posterity; for men of later ages
the Götterwelt is but an arbitrary
invention, except for a few among them, like our
Friedrich (I mean Schelling again):
To create a
mythology ... is something which goes beyond the
power of any individual to accomplish.
Now, these concepts, Friedrich, are indefinitely
pushed around because we, in approaching such
issues, cannot but set Knowlegde against Life, and
Causality against Fate. Likewise, we are bound to
apply Analysis to Imagination, regard Nature as if
it were History, consider Time as a dimension of
Space, manipulate Chronology as if it were
Mathematics, and guess Form from Substance. And if
that were not enough, there is yet another
difficulty preventing the mutual understanding
between different periods: namely that each age
belongs to a different segment of Time. The
Mythical Age is, as I said before, virtually
timeless; that is why it resembles eternity. During
this short age, prototypes are created and
destroyed ...
(By the way, if you had succeeded in
meeting Américo Spósito in
Montevideo, you could have heard a couple of things
about the importance of prototypes. Ironically
enough, he is now in Paris, as you sadly learned
... This painter admits that art depends on the
ability to find the prototypes, but then he argues
that the Egyptians found them, not the Greeks ... I
could not disagree more, but his conversation was
in any case fascinating, and his arguments
challenging ... A pity you missed him ... Now that
I talk about it, why don't you disembark in
Barcelona instead of Genova, and take the train to
Paris?)
... but the Mythical Age is brief only when
watched from another age.
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The Ages and Time
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Time does not run homogeneously: When the world
is young, when it is but a child, time runs slowly,
no matter how short it may seem from the outside.
Even the briefest moment is long for being close to
the beginning. The first day of life is equal to
the totality of all time lived. It represents the
whole lifetime, and that is why it is always long.
The second day, however, is only half of all time
lived. Accordingly, time runs twice as fast on the
second day, its length being dynamically related to
the amount and quality of experience. Both these
and time are reduced by 1/2 on the second day, by
1/3 on the third day, by 1/4 on the fourth, and so
on for as long as one lives. Consequently, the
value of the experience you might gain, say, on
your 30000th day, is practically negligible, as
will be the length of that day.
In the course of the Mythical Age, a short and a
long period at the same time, all other eras are
rehearsed in rapid succession, initiating man in
the secrets of fate. Now, the Archaic Age, coming
out of timelessness and immersing itself in the
present, develops the prototypes of the preceding
age without any conscious pride of its
achievements. But 'Prototypes' or 'Myths'—as I
said before—are only terms by which the
Archaic Age denotes divine presence. In this
period, the past is not yet experienced as such;
that is why there is no pride. And the future does
not deserve any attention.
In the next period—the Classical
Age—egotism appears for the first time, as the
past is posited with both pride and reverence. With
reverence because the men of this era understood
that their ancestors were closer to the gods than
themselves, as demonstrated by their achievements;
and with pride because they were the heirs of such
a glorious race. The imitation of the latter pushes
the Classical Age forward, and her new awareness of
time ('I am, I was, and will be') makes her bring
everything to completion. But later, as the last
age comes about, yet another awareness of time
makes its appearance.
During the Imperial Age, the whole past is boxed
as a possession, as if the verb 'to be' were
conjugated with the declensions of 'to have' ('I am
better off now'). The longer the past, the better;
for the Imperial Age is the heir of all times past.
Thereby she denies the present. As for the glorious
past, whose heir, administrator, interpreter and
master the Imperial Age itself is, it is sadly
discovered as unfortunately deceased—a
terrifying verification ... At this moment,
admiration turns into arrogance as the question
arises:
"If they had such a genius, why did they perish?
What can we do to avoid the same fate? 'Fate', a
terrible word! A word of another age; but fate is
not verifiable, is it? A society is not an
organism, is it? We are not aging, are we?" No
comforting answer is heard, since no one knows for
sure ... "But a 'miracle', or rather an
'exception'—a 'historical exception' (that's
the term!)—could be conceived, couldn't it?"
This is how the Imperial Age lives in the
future, or rather fears it, thus denying the
present a second time. Consequently, this age can
neither understand men who in the past lived in the
present, nor the very idea of timelessness: an
unverifiable condition, a mere hypothesis, a
phenomenon taking place at best in far away worlds,
perhaps in other stars. Naturally, the Imperial Age
reveres the creations of previous ages, but it does
so goaded by the wealth and power they might
represent: she conjugates 'to be' as 'to have'. The
spirit is now corporeal, and her sobriety cannot
understand how men of any age could have been so
utterly frenzied to waste their lives in such
time-consuming activities as are the arts of the
past. She is grateful for all the riches
bequeathed, even more when she, having no present,
has no time whatsoever, except for the necessities
of life, which she reproduces en masse. In
fact, Necessity is the goddess steering the
Imperial Age, the richest and yet the poorest of
all ages.
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Rémy de
Gourmont, 1858-1915
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"Le
citoyen est une variété de
l'homme; variété
dégénérée ou
primitive, il est à l'homme ce que
le chat de gouttière est au chat
sauvage." [9]
[Rémy de Gourmont 1858-1915,
Epilogues]
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Friedrich
Nietzsche, 1844-1900
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"... even in
dreams, we do not experience what earlier
peoples saw when awake." [Friedrich
Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human,
236]
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Pericles, c.
495-429 BC
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"... if our more
remote ancestors deserve praise, much more
do our own fathers, who added to their
inheritance the empire which we now
possess ..." [Pericles in
Thucydides' History of the
Peloponnesian War 2.36]
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The Classical Age
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The spark that the Archaic Age captured in a
flame burns ablaze during the Classical, which
brings the representational arts to their zenith.
In order to do so, she proceeds through perfect
continuity, taking advantage of all impulses that,
originating in the Mythical Age, reached her
flowing smoothly through the Archaic.
The latter had already added Reason to
Inspiration, which was required by the kind of
creative process that engaged her. This could not
be done otherwise; but as Reason advances,
Inspiration recedes, and when certain levels are
reached, we no longer find ourselves in the Archaic
Age, which kept both in balance, but in the
Classical, during which Reason grows even stronger,
as Inspiration proportionally fades. It is now
that, as love of Knowledge increases, Dissolution
sets in ... As I said, Inspiration is mythical,
Creation archaic, and Culmination is classical.
Full Dissolution is the lot of the Imperial Age,
but it does originate in Classical times, turning
this age into the most suicidal of all four, since
it is now that the realities of Possibility and the
possibilities of Reality are confronted for the
first time, and not without Angst.
The man of the Classical Age is able to bring to
completion the achievements of the preceding era
because the highly enlightened Archaic Age has
instructed him in the secrets of form, but once all
inherited possibilities have been exhausted, he
ignores what to do next. One reason for this
despondence lies in that he is an educated man: he
already knows more than he can embrace. Another is
that he can no longer recollect: he senses that he
is on his way to oblivion, being already too far
away from the first age, the source of all things.
Consequently, the gods that once were become
more and more the symbol of what is not,
since they no longer listen to invocations or
prayers, and have ceased to manifest themselves.
As a result, a terrible doubt assaults him. But
he can no longer interrogate the past, the sources
of which have either been exhausted or brought to
completion. He realises that he is richer and more
powerful than his ancestors; therefore he is proud.
But at the same time, as he notices his horizon
closing, he begins to sigh not without nostalgia:
"Lucky the Archaic Age that had a Classical Age for
its tomorrow! For our age would indeed be perfect,
if only it could give birth to a wonderful future,
worthy of ourselves."
Classical man lives still in the present, but to
a lesser extent than Archaic man. He now perceives
the past and has a presentiment of the future.
Accordingly, while a sense of loss sneaks up from
behind, hope and anxiety rush against him in
frontal attack. To calm these annoying but
justified feelings, he attempts to harness the
world by resorting to politics and economy, both of
which give Trust the kiss of death.
As you'll recall, Friedrich, Trust is
characteristic of the Mythical Age; for nothing
else could cope with the turbulence caused by
divine presence. During the Archaic Age, however,
trust is gradually replaced by self-confidence,
since this is needed to fix the myths, explain the
world, and reflect the magnificent experience in
excellent works of art. The man of the Archaic Age,
for whom only Excellence counts, is a poet, an
artist and a philosopher, still under the influence
of the upheavals of the preceding age. His mind
still recollects the times when the gods had
intercourse with mortals. But when Memory, which
belongs to the first ages, starts to fade, it is
replaced by Opinion, which makes its appearance in
the Classical Age. It is supported by Opinion that
the polis develops, making of man that
'political animal' so prone to challenge, not only
the patience of both gods and humans, but also
reason itself (since you may say that Opinion is as
far from Reason as the latter is from Inspiration;
and when this opinion becomes 'public', you may say
that you approach the end of discursive thought).
Before the arrival of the
polis—during Mythical and Early Archaic
times—, man lived in the fields, woods,
mountains, or caves. Now, this natural realm is
that of an almost unrestricted freedom. A risky
world perhaps, but not more deadly than the world
of the polis or that of the empire. In any
case, rural life allows man to exercise his freedom
in an unsurpassable degree, and it is this freedom
that enables him to meet the gods, or at least
sense the divine presence. Accordingly, the myths
survive for as long as rural life prevails. But at
the end of the Archaic Age, the villagers must
submit to the laws of men and to 'deities' such as
Opinion, Politics and Economy, after having been
confiscated and forced by centralization to join
the polis.
Now, those who love productivity, inventions and
technical prowess, letting themselves be guided by
the external performance of things, usually hate
Nature as she is, being persuaded that she must be
improved, the more the better. However, it is
precisely in this manner that human freedom is
gradually abolished, as if nature took revenge by
tying man to himself and his devices. Accordingly,
he who before lived free in the fields, is now a
virtual or a real slave (or at best a citizen full
of obligations, which practically amounts to the
same) inhabiting an artificial prison of his own
design. And since in such a world the gods can no
longer be sensed, the representational arts, now
developed by the new techniques of the
polis, build magnificent images that will
hopefully reconcile him with his new condition. And
to help him feel towards the statue like he felt
before when he sensed the deity, worship, cult, and
institutionalized religion appear to teach him a
mere reflection of what he once knew by himself and
through the myths.
In addition: it is when the representational
arts start to reach their acme in the Classical
period, that their palpability moves swiftly from
ideal concerns to material ones, such as wealth,
health, fame, physical competition, and
particularly commerce. Through the latter misery
increases (for whenever riches grow, so does
poverty in the same degree), and with it toil and
also sickness. And as simplicity and
moderation—true friends of health and
wealth—diminish for the benefit of applied
knowledge and a more complicated world, war and
other forms of violence become more frequent.
This is how the Classical Age accomplishes the
transition from Culture to Civilization. She is the
first to attempt to harness the external world (as
the Archaic had harnessed the turbulence of the
soul). Fearing freedom, she curtails it; for the
goal of the Classical Age is to prevent the world
from becoming lawless and dangerous, to preserve
it, to organize it, and educate it, and naturally,
to let it grow too, for size is paramount in all
that is external. Yet the polis is still a
world of freedom and beauty, compared to the
disproportionate 'Golden Cage' devised by the
Imperial era.
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Violeta Parra,
1917-1967
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Lo que
puede el sentimiento
no lo ha podido el saber
ni el más claro proceder
ni el más ancho pensamiento
[10] [Violeta Parra, 'Volver
a los diecisiete']
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Friedrich
Nietzsche, 1844-1900
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It is true that
we still live in the youth of science, and
tend to pursue truth like a pretty girl;
but what will happen when she has one day
turned into an elderly, scowling
woman? [Friedrich Nietzsche,
Human, All too Human, 257 (1878)]
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Homero
Expósito, 1918-1987
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In life it's not
a matter of how much you know, what's
important is how little you allow yourself
to forget. [Homero Expósito]
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The Babe
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Knowledge (for we must contemplate this 'wonder'
too) is the darling child of the Classical Age and
the master of the Imperial, as I'll explain:
It happened that this creature, while still in
its cradle, was a delightful babe with eyes shining
with curiosity. "Isn't it lovely?" everyone asked.
Of course it was, for anyone looking at the babe's
eyes got beautiful ideas. And as the wonder became
known, multitudes came to look at the babe and take
care of him. For they were very happy with the
thoughts they'd got from the babe's eyes. At first,
the nurses fed him when he needed to eat, and put
him to sleep when he needed to rest. A natural
thing to do! And that is what the nurses of the
'natural' times (the Mythical and Archaic ages)
also did. But as the natural world was curtailed by
the Classical Age, new nurses, with novel ideas
about upbringing, came to improve the babe's
growth, so that a larger amount of ideas, and more
practical ones, could be obtained from looking at
his eyes. Now, these nurses had lost every notion
about the 'natural', and so they started to feed
the babe at all hours and keep him awake from dawn
to dusk and from dusk to dawn, so as to make it
possible for everybody to watch the splendid eyes
at any moment, and then go home and do something
useful with the ideas they had got. In that manner,
they prolonged the hour of wonder, having done both
useful and useless things, but the lovely creature,
being thus mistreated, turned demented; and his
eyes, instead of shining with curiosity, started to
look like those of a beast making itself ready to
devour its tormentors.
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No one notices anything, for the metamorphoses
of the later ages do not take place suddenly, like
those of former ages, but gradually. So one day, a
creature jumps out of its cradle—no longer a
babe but rather a juvenile delinquent—,
holding terrible instruments in his hands and
threatening everybody's flesh with them. He still
has something of the babe, that is, seductive eyes
and whimsical manners, but nothing can terrorize
whole cities more than his toys.
Not even Pan causes so much panic; for fear has
little power without a guilty conscience, as Dante
knew:
Tanto vogl'io che vi sia
manifesto,
pur che mia coscïenza non mi garra,
che alla Fortuna, come vuol, son presto.
[11]
But the terror caused by the babe's insomniac
habits is guilty; for it comes from the craving of
those who deprived him of sleep, and from the
complicity of the nurses.
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Dante Alighieri
1265-1321
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In any case the nurses are gone, and learned
pedagogues have taken over. They are persuaded that
the babe will show his better sides if offered the
whole world as a playground; "for one learns
through responsibility," they reason. "Go, take
that hammer and fix the window you've broken," his
pedagogues tell him. So he does; only, before
mending the window, he hammers someone down. "But
he mended the window, as he was told," the
pedagogues remark as they raise his allowance. For
supposedly, the babe's 'cute'; and if he still
looks like a gangster, that may be because the idea
of 'cute' has not yet caught up with the babe's
genius.
This is how the babe comes to fancy that
anything is possible. Accordingly, he becomes
addictive to violence, and does not hesitate to go
against the four elements themselves, destroying
the surface of the earth, throwing dirt through the
air, poisoning water, and using fire for any
purpose, including the torture of the flesh. And in
his free time, he rapes innocence, feeds arrogance,
ruins beauty, dissects bodies, corrupts souls,
invents terrible devices, speaks every kind of
truth and every kind of falsehood, and lends
himself to any sort of conceivable barbarism.
This may sound philosophical but it isn't; there
is no philosophy in obsequious pedagogy. Natural
pedagogy comes from love, and that is why affected
pedagogy must resemble what could be mistaken for
love, for example, spoiling the babe. But this
grovelling is mainly rooted in the blind hope that
he, although ravaging the whole surface of the
earth, will be able to turn anything into gold, a
'Midas' complex' that grows stronger as time goes
by.
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Augustus, 63 BC -
AD 14
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"Since well I've played my
part, all clap your hands
And from the stage dismiss me with
applause." [Augustus, in Suetonius,
Lives
of the Caesars 2.99]
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The Imperial Age
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... As I was saying before, the flame lit in the
Archaic Age, and cherished in the Classical, begins
to extinguish, turning into smoke and ashes, in the
Imperial Age. Therefore, you could describe History
as the transition from spark to ashes, from
animation to skeleton. You could also say from soul
to body, since the Imperial era is the corporeal
expression that results from the generative spark
of yore; but it is rather its own image, as if
you—a young man—looked at yourself in the
mirror and saw and old man staring back at you. So,
whereas the Mythical Age is that of Childhood, the
Archaic that of Youth, and the Classical that of
Maturity, that of the Imperial is Old Age. And
being decrepit, the Imperial Age admires Youth,
since that is what she lacks, whereas during the
first eras, when the world was young, Old Age was
revered, since that was missing.
The Imperial is the first age that, not being
able to add anything new, adds more
of everything. She suffers from an unquenchable
thirst for novelties in all aspects of life, but as
nothing new can be introduced, due to the
circumstance that all qualities have been
developed, completed and exhausted during the
previous eras, the Imperial Age concentrates on the
realm of Quantity.
Infinity is invented in this age, and as if to
imitate its limitless nature, everything is either
divided (to get a larger amount), or augmented (to
get larger things). All things tend to be
translated into numbers even if they do not
represent quantities: for example, vitality is
turned into longevity, or greatness into hugeness.
But in general you could say that it is a matter of
increasing size or amount: the small becomes big,
the big colossal, the few many, and the many
infinite. Consequently, man adopts counting and
measuring as his most interesting pastimes, and
learns to see the world through numerical
notations.
Big libraries appear in this age, and a huge
amount of volumes are seen filling their shelves;
for now Knowledge is even more external than it was
during the preceding age, and man no longer knows
anything unless he finds it written in his volumes.
And in these he trusts as if they were living
evidences. Also the armies become larger and more
powerful, since the riches that must be protected
are now immense. And these are no longer
accumulated in order to spend them, but to increase
them, count them, and compare them. Finally, there
are huge quantities of everything, including
misery, for many people enjoy, as the song by
Gershwin goes, "plenty o' nottin". Yet, whether
these quantities represent vices or virtues is not
known, since it is no longer relevant nor possible
to distinguish among them.
In this quantitative world, man himself begins
to lose the qualities of his own uniqueness. He who
once was a villager, and later a citizen, is now
but an insignificant member of a uniform mass,
entranced by the pseudomyth called 'Equality'.
Whether this mass is formed by men called by
jurisprudence 'free', or 'slaves', is irrelevant,
for they have lost their 'time' and with it their
life and freedom.
Whoever does
not have two-thirds of his day for himself, is a
slave, whatever he may be: a statesman, a
businessman, an official, or a scholar.
That is what our Friedrich (that is, Nietzsche)
thought about it ... The centralized power that
enslaves them, which they themselves have built,
annihilates diversity in the name of that same
equality, and forces everyone to act according to a
preestablished pattern, down to minute details (as
when Tiberius forbade general kissing, as a
hygienic and a moral measure). And whether the
devotees of this pseudomyth call themselves
Christians, Democrats, or Socialists, or with other
denominations, is not important either. For what is
common to all of them, is the utopian delirium that
transfers, by senile hallucination, the Golden Age
to the future.
Equality is a pseudomyth also in the sense that
it cannot be implemented. He who is in power
remains more powerful and wealthier than the rest
even if he also adheres to this religio
laici. But only quantities separate him from
his contemporaries, not qualities. And since he
neither ackowledges ideal values nor lets himself
be governed by them, he soon loses the spiritual
attributes, which, elevating him morally, could
have justified the power and wealth he enjoys. And
as these lack justification, he grows dependent on
the sympathy and benevolence of his environment.
Consequently, he adulates the masses, imitating
their habits and manners, and hopes that they,
regarding him like an 'equal', may better suffer
his power and wealth.
The masses themselves consist of individuals
that tend to be less different from each other, as
time goes by. However, when a man feels that he has
lost his unique individual qualities, being
regarded as a number or as an anonymous entity, he
reacts by becoming an 'individualist', that is,
someone for whom the world begins and ends with
himself. He feels that he cannot exert any
influence, and therefore would not allow any of his
'equals' to influence him. In consequence, he and
everyone else are confined within their own
solitude. Everyone praises equality, no doubt, but
no one is sincere in his praise; for each one
wishes for himself, more than ever, to defeat
anonimity and rise above his 'equals', through the
'identity' that fame, wealth, or power appear to
provide.
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This is how the pseudomyth of equality runs into
unbridled individualism, eroding social cohesion
through practical and moral rivalry. And I would be
acting like an individualist myself, if I pretended
to be telling you anything new, in this or any
other matter. As I said, the time of novelties is
gone long ago; or as our Johann Heinrich Voß
puts it:
Dein redseliges Buch lehrt
mancherlei Neues und Wahres,
Wäre das Wahre nur neu, wäre das Neue nur
wahr! [12]
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