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PAINPANG.COM: REBIRTH OF TRAGEDY

man sings to super man super man sings to god

god sings to man

kill me before

i kill m all

nuke m

all

Years ago in New York City, in the 1980s, reading an article in Popular Science about the U.S.S.R.'s (Russia) nuclear "suitcase bombs" and the U.S.'s nuclear "backpack bombs" ; I realized in an instant that this was the future:

Unless some monstrously totalitarian society could completely control the actions of every individual human being and/or the technology it created, there will always be the ever growing possibility, probability and reality that there will be that one individual who, for whatever reason or lack of reason, has both the willingness and the ability to kill everyone... nearly everyone... more than anyone cares to really imagine. I would easily hasten to guess that this deadly willingness already exists... and always has. But modern man's actual ability to carry out this dark desire is new.

Totalitarian or not; the Complete Control of technology, let alone human beings, is a pipe dream. While the far more rapidly growing dangers of developing technologies' Unintended Consequences is the reality.

—Painpang.com

FROM THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY BY FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE:

"While the evil slumbering in the heart of theoretical culture gradually begins to disquiet modern man, while he anxiously ransacks the stores of his experience for means to avert the danger, though he has no great faith in these means; while he, therefore, begins to divine the consequences of his position: great, universally gifted natures have contrived, with an incredible amount of thought, to make use of the paraphernalia of science itself, in order to point out the limits and the relativity of knowledge generally, and thus definitely to deny the claim of science to universal validity and universal aims: with which demonstration the illusory notion was for the first time recognized as such, which pretends, with the aid of causality, to be able to fathom the innermost essence of things. The extraordinary courage and wisdom of Kant and Schopenhauer have succeeded in gaining the most difficult victory, the victory over the optimism hidden in the essence of logic, which optimism in turn is the basis of our culture. While this optimism, resting on apparently unobjectionable æternæ veritates, had believed in the intelligibility and solvability of all the riddles of the universe, and had treated space, time, and causality as totally unconditioned laws of the most universal validity, Kant, on the other hand, showed that in reality these served only to elevate the mere phenomenon, the work of Mâyâ, to the position of the sole and highest reality, putting it in place of the innermost and true essence of things, and thus making impossible any knowledge of this essence or, in Schopenhauer's words, lulling the dreamer still more soundly asleep. With this knowledge a culture is inaugurated which I venture to call a tragic culture; the most important characteristic of which is that wisdom takes the place of science as the highest end, wisdom, which, uninfluenced by the seductive distractions of the sciences, turns with unmoved eye to a comprehensive view of the world, and seeks to conceive therein, with sympathetic feelings of love, the eternal suffering as its own. Let us imagine a rising generation with this bold vision, this heroic desire for the magnificent, let us imagine the valiant step of these dragon-slayers, the proud daring with which they turn their backs on all the effeminate doctrines of optimism that they may "live resolutely," wholly, and fully: would it not be necessary for the tragic man of this culture, with his self-discipline of seriousness and terror, to desire a new art, the art of metaphysical comfort —namely, tragedy— to claim it as Helen, and exclaim with Faust:

"Und sollt' ich nicht, sehnsüchtigster Gewalt,

Ins Leben ziehn die einzigste Gestalt?"

(And shall not I, by mightiest desire, In living shape that sole fair form acquire? —Faust, Swanwick's translation)

"But now that the Socratic culture can only hold the scepter of its infallibility with trembling hands; now that it has been shaken from two directions — once by the fear of its own conclusions which it at length begins to surmise, and again, because it no longer has its former naïve confidence in the eternal validity of its foundation — it is a sad spectacle to see how the dance of its thought rushes longingly on ever-new forms, to embrace them, and then, shuddering, lets them go suddenly as Mephistopheles does the seductive Lamiæ. It is certainly the sign of the "breach" which all are wont to speak of as the fundamental tragedy of modern culture that the theoretical man, alarmed and dissatisfied at his own conclusions, no longer dares entrust himself to the terrible ice-stream of existence: he runs timidly up and down the bank. So thoroughly has he been spoiled by his optimistic views that he no longer wants to have anything whole, with all of nature's cruelty attaching to it. Besides, he feels that a culture based on the principles of science must be destroyed when it begins to grow illogical, that is, to retreat before its own conclusions."

"... Kant and Schopenhauer made it possible for the spirit of German philosophy, streaming from similar sources (as German music from Bach to Beethoven, from Beethoven to Wagner), to destroy scientific Socratism's complacent delight in existence by establishing its boundaries; how through this delimitation was introduced an infinitely profounder and more serious view of ethical problems and of art, which we may unhesitantly designate as Dionysian wisdom comprised in concepts."

—Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy

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