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The kings of what is yet to come‏

Posted in Virkningshistorie on 01/12/2010| Leave a Comment »

Utdrag fra et brev Rainer Maria Rilke skrev til Alexandre Benois i 1901:

«It is always forgotten that the philosopher, just like the poet, is the carrier of futures among us, and that he may therefore not count as strongly on the support of his time. Philosophers and poets are contemporaries of the people in the far-off future, and as soon as they are done with agitating the neighbours they have no reason to reach order or draw conclusions in their development, aside from those systematic compilations that they need in order to survey their own situation but that they destroy again as quickly to advance their internal progress.

Once his achievement has been systematized and expressed in words, once students, disciples, and friends rally around it and enemies attack it, then the philosopher has lost the right to rattle the foundation of this now inhabited system and jeopardize the thousands of individuals whose livelihood now depends on it. He has impeded his own ruthless progress, which perhaps could arise only from the ruins of this order, and while only yesterday he had still

been unlimited master of thousands of developments, who could indulge every nuance of his will in a king’s fashion, he has now become the highest servant of a system that grows larger than its founder with each passing day.

Philosophers should be patient and wait and not harbour wishes to reign over an empire supported by the means of its time. They are the kings of what is yet to come, and their crowns are still one with the ore buried in the veins of our mountains.

The fact is that the most progressive individuals bestow things on the future and consequently have to be stern in their dealings with the present. They don’t have any bread to offer the hungry – no matter how often they themselves may think so. . .they have stones that their contemporaries mistake for bread and nourishment but that at bottom will lie as the foundations for future days, which they must not give away. Consider the infinite freedom of the individual who is without fame and unknown; this is the kind of freedom the philosopher must guard for himself: that every day he may be someone new, a refuter of himself».

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Would we also love them if this were not the case?

Posted in Tidløst on 01/12/2010|

Are they not similar to the infinite in that they cannot be squared, but can be found only through approaching them? And similar to the highest in that they are absolutely close to us and yet always sought – that they are absolutely understandable and yet not understood, that they are absolutely indispensable and yet are mostly dispensed with, and similar to higher beings in that they appear so childlike, so ordinary, so idle, and so playful?

Would we also love them if this were not the case? With women love came into being, and with love women—and therefore one cannot understand the one without the other. Anyone wanting to find women without love and love without women is like philosophers who looked at instinct without the object and the object without instinct—and did not see both at once in the concept of action.

– Novalis (1798), Teplitz Fragments/Teplitzer Fragmente nr. 17 & 18 –

ORIGINALVERSJONEN:

Haben sie [die Frauen] nicht die Aehnlichkeit mit dem Unendlichen, daß sie sich nicht quadriren, sondern nur durch Annäherung finden lassen? Und mit dem Höchsten, daß sie uns absolut nah sind, und doch immer gesucht – daß sie absolut verständlich sind und doch nicht verstanden, daß sie absolut unentbehrlich sind, und doch meistens entbehrt werden, und mit höhern Wesen, daß sie so kindlich, so gewöhnlich, so müßig und so spielend erscheinen?

Würden wir sie auch lieben, wenn dies nicht so wäre? Mit den Frauen ist die Liebe und mit der Liebe die Frauen entstanden, und darum versteht man keins ohne das andre. Wer die Frauen ohne Liebe, und die Liebe ohne Frauen finden will, dem geht’s wie den Philosophen, die den Trieb ohne das Objekt und das Objekt ohne den Trieb betrachteten und nicht beide im Begriff der Aktion zugleich sahen.

– Novalis (1798), Teplitzer Fragmente Nr. 17 & 18 –