de-composition: December 2008

Benjamin & Eliot

Mankind which in Homer's time was an object of contemplation for the Olympic Gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. Walter Benjamin

The more highly industrialised the country, the more easily a materialistic philosophy will flourish in it, and the more deadly that philosophy will be . . . And the tendency of unlimited industrialism is to create bodies of men and women - of all classes - detached from tradition, alienated from relegion and susceptible to mass suggestion: in other words, a mob. And a mob will be no less a mob if it is well fed, well clothed, well housed, and well disciplined.
T. S. Eliot

from: Wyndham Lewis

Absence of responsibility, an automatic and stereotyped rhythm, is what men most desire for themselves. All struggle has for its end relief or repose. A rhythmic movement is restful: but consciousness and possession of the self is not compatible with a set rhythm. All the libertarian cries of a century ago were based on unreal premises, and impulses that are not natural to, and cannot be sustained by, the majority of men. Luxury and repose are what most men undeniably desire. They would like to be as much at rest as if they were dead, and as active and 'alive' as passivity will allow. When action is required of them they prefer that it should be 'exciting' and sensational, or else that it should have a strongly defined, easily grasped, mechanical rhythm. The essential fatigue and poorness of most organisms, and the minds that serve them, is displayed in nothing so much as in this"sensationalism". Every low-grade animal is to some extent born sadic, for that is the only way he can "feel". Sensationalism and sadism are twins. The only effort that is acceptable to many people is violent, excessive, and spasmodic action.

from: E.M. Cioran

"And the people?" It will be asked. The thinker or the historian who employs the word without irony disqualifies himself. It is all too clear what "the people" are destined for: to suffer events and rulers' whims, lending themselves to the schemes that weaken and overwhelm them. Every political experiment, however "advanced", is performed at the people's expense, is carried out against the people: the people bear the stigmata of slavery by divine or diabolic decree. No use wasting your pity: the people's cause admits of no recourse. Nations and empires are formed by the people's indulgence of iniquities of which they are the object. No head of state, no conqueror fails to scorn the people; but the people accept this scorn and live on it. Were they to cease being weak or victimized, were they to disappoint destiny, society would collapse and with it history itself. Let us not be over optimistic: nothing in the people permits us to envision such a splendid eventuality. As they are, the people represent an invitation to despotism. The people endure their ordeals, sometimes solicit them, and rebel against them only to rush into new ones, more horrible than the old. Revolution being their one luxury, they fling them-selves into it, not so much to derive certain benefits from it or to improve their lot, as to acquire for themselves, too, the right to insolence, an advantage which consoles them for their habitual setbacks, but which they immediately lose once the privileges of chaos are abolished. Since no regime assures their salvation, the people adapt them-selves to all and to none. And from the Flood to the Last Judgment, all they can claim is to fulfill their mission honestly: to be vanquished.

from: Remy de Gourmont

"The true interest of life comes from its obscurity; it is incomprehensible, illogical and uncertain, and that is why the most fastidious love it with a gloomy passion. If the solution of the enigma was whispered in our ear at the age of reason, should we be able to go on living? Having no more uncertainty, we should have no more hope. The philosophers' phrase, "I live out of curiosity", is applicable to all lives. Certainty is a stae of annihilation. The notion of paradise is so near to that of Nirvana that Christian hapiness and Hindoo hapiness can be defined philosophically by the same word; both contain the idea of repose. All activity has uncertainty for its principle. Happiness itself, if it is presented under inevitable conditions, ceases to be desired with sufficient force to be happiness. We no longer desire the inevitable; we await it. Can happiness be seperated from the ferment, desire? Yet all men ardently desire certainty; they desire it to a mad extent; they forget all the enjoyment, all the shades, all the charms of the present to hold out their arms and their foreheads towards a cold idol with an empty belly. Perhaps, if the time is favourable, they can thrust their hands into the hole bored out by the multiple contact of blind wills; and then what? Is it certitude to touch a stone, wood, or a wound? Without submitting to views of finality, we may suppose that if certainty is a state of inaction, the mania for certitude on the contrary is a principle of action. Truth is only a statue of shadow, but to reach it man takes a thousand troubles one of which perhaps is fertile. This is only a risky hypothesis, for few human creatures are fitted to utilise an abstract principle as a lever, and that is very fortunate. Every time abstraction has become the guide of humanity, civilization has deviated, has sunk, has despised life to exalt a celestial glow, to adore a star, an idea, a nothing."