Conatus

Robert Fludd - Utriusque Cosmi (Images of The Divine), 1617.

“The taste of the masses is characterized not by their antipathy to the excellent, but by the passivity with which they enjoy equally the good, the mediocre, and the bad. The masses do not have bad taste. They simply do not have taste.” — Nicolás Gómez Dávila

“There is an illiteracy of the soul which no diploma cures.” — Nicolás Gómez Dávila

Astronomical Geography, 1902.

Dante and Virgil, A Scene From Hell.

Plan of Dante's Paradise. Paradiso is the third and final part of Dante's Divine Comedy, following the Inferno and the Purgatorio. It is an allegory telling of Dante's journey through Heaven, guided by Beatrice, who symbolises theology. In the poem, Paradise is depicted as a series of concentric spheres surrounding the Earth, consisting of the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, the Fixed Stars, the Primum Mobile and finally, the Empyrean. It was written in the early 14th century. Allegorically, the poem represents the soul's ascent to God.

لديّ إحساسات جارفة أو لديها أنا، لم أعد أعرف أيٌّ منا يملك الآخر بعد الآن؛ لدي إحساسات جارفة وتتخثّر في ظلٍّ مسكينٍ يحتمي بفراشي من كآبة النهار، أحمل اللاطمأنينة قريبًا من توهّج شيء ما في صدري كمن يحمل كتابه المقدّس للتداوي. بيسوا الجليل، أطلب برودةً تطفئ ما يشتعل فيّ على الدوام.

‏تكمن أهمية الفن في إنه العزاء الذي لن يقدمه لك أحد، تجربة لمس شعور الفنان تشبه الوقوع، صدفةً، في صدرٍ واسع يرحِّب بالنحيب الذي كنت تخفيه عن العالم، لكنك ترعاه وتحميه كطفلٍ أنجبتَه عن طريق الخطأ.

Three Graces By Raphael.

‏كل يوم نخترع كلمات جديدة وحدودًا جديدةً، ويصغر العالم، كل يوم نجهِّز التصفيق قبل اكتمال المشهد، قبل أن تنحني اللغة بعد خيانتها الأولى، قبل أن نمهِّد للخديعة بالخديعة، كل يوم نُلصق الكلام على الشيء، ونسميهِ بغير اسمه، ونفهمه بغير فهمه، ونفرح... ها نحن الآن قد فككنا شفرة العالم.

Man is insatiable for power; he is infantile in his desires and, always discontented with what he has, loves only what he has not. People complain of the despotism of princes; they ought to complain of the despotism of man. We are all born despots, from the most absolute monarch in Asia to the infant who smothers a bird with its hand for the pleasure of seeing that there exists in the world a being weaker than itself. — Joseph De Maistre

Alexandre Cabanel (French, 1823-1889) Nymph Abducted by a Faun, 1861.

“To Goethe again we owe the profound saying: “the mathematician is only complete insofar as he feels within himself the beauty of the true.” ― Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West.

My intention here is to make it clear that not a single cell of my composition, here in regard to The Raven, is found by chance or intuition, that the composition moved towards perfection with the precision and inevitability of a mathematical equation. — Maurice Ravel

Hegel asserts that in the portrayal of individual characters Shakespeare stands "at an almost unapproachable height," making his creations "free artists of their own selves." As such, Shakespeare's tragic characters are "real, directly living, extremely varied" and possessing "a sublimity and striking power of expression." Yet – and here comes the dialectical underside of this claim – creatures like Hamlet lack any resolution and capacity for decision. They are dithering figures in the grip of a "two-fold passion which drives them from one decision or one deed to another simultaneously." In other words, as in Schmitt, they are Hamletized, vacillating characters inwardly divided against themselves. Upheld only by the force of their conflicted subjectivity, characters like Hamlet or Lear either plunge blindly onward or allow themselves to be lured to their avenging deed by external circumstances, led along, that is, by contingency. In the vast sweep of an ancient dramatic trilogy, like the Orestia, what is at stake in the agon, or dramatic conflict, is eternal justice shaped by the power of fate, which saves the subject of the ethical life of the city against individuals, like Orestes and Clytemnestra, who were becoming too independent and colliding violently with each other. Hegel insists, and we think he is right, that if a similar justice appears in modern tragedy, then it is more like criminal justice, where – as with Macbeth or with Lear's daughters – a wrong has been committed and the protagonists deserve the nasty demise that's coming to them. Tragic denouement in Shakespearean tragedy is not the rigorous working out of fate, but "purely the effect of unfortunate circumstances and external accidents which might have turned out otherwise and produced a happy ending." Hegel enjoyed a happy ending, as we shall see presently, but the point is that the modern individual must endure the contingency and fragility of "all that is mundane and must endure the fate of finitude." Here Hegel's remarks on Hamlet begin to cut much deeper – the problem is that we cannot bear this contingency. Hegel argues that: We feel a pressing demand for a necessary correspondence between the external circumstances and what the inner nature of those fine characters really is.

"cage of recurrence", James Hutton. A pen and ink drawing based on woodcut designs of the middle ages.

And do you know what “the world” is to me? Shall I show it to you in my mirror? This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end; a firm, iron magnitude of force that does not grow bigger or smaller, that does not expend itself but only transforms itself; as a whole, of unalterable size, a household without expenses or losses, but likewise without increase or income; enclosed by “nothingness” as by a boundary; not something blurry or wasted, not something endlessly extended, but set in a definite space as a definite force, and not a space that might be “empty” here or there, but rather as force throughout, as a play of forces and waves of forces, at the same time one and many, increasing here and at the same time decreasing there; a sea of forces flowing and rushing together, eternally changing, eternally flooding back, with tremendous years of recurrence, with an ebb and a flood of its forms; out of the simplest forms striving toward the most complex, out of the stillest, most rigid, coldest forms striving toward the hottest, most turbulent, most self-contradictory, and then again returning home to the simple out of this abundance, out of the play of contradictions back to the joy of concord, still affirming itself in this uniformity of its courses and its years, blessing itself as that which must return eternally, as a becoming that knows no satiety, no disgust, no weariness: this, my Dionysian world of the eternally self- creating, the eternally self-destroying, this mystery world of the twofold voluptuous delight, my “beyond good and evil,” without goal, unless the joy of the circle is itself a goal; without will, unless a ring feels good will toward itself— do you want a name for this world? A solution for all of its riddles? A light for you, too, you best-concealed, strongest, most intrepid, most midnightly men?— This world is the will to power—and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this will to power—and nothing besides! — Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will To Power