#koestler

dégagement #

War is a ritual, a deadly ritual, not the result of aggressive self-assertion, but of self-transcending identification. Without loyalty to tribe, church, flag or ideal, there would be no wars.

- Arthur Koestler

I’m not sure I completely agree with Koestler because there’s also something innate within us that is twisted for selfish power and dominance (our original sin), but he has a point. Few would argue that the rituals used to wage war change with the times, but students of Clausewitz are skeptical about supposed changes in what we believe to be war’s enduring nature. According to the Prussian, war’s nature does not change - only its character. The way we use these words today can seem to render such a distinction meaningless, but careful attention to semantics can reveal real problems in how we think about war, society, and the future.

The nature of war describes its unchanging essence: that is, those things that differentiate war (as a type of phenomenon) from other things. War’s nature is violent, interactive, and fundamentally political. Absent any of these elements, what you’re talking about is not war but something else.

The character of war describes the changing way that war as a phenomenon manifests in the real world. As war is a political act that takes place in and among societies, its specific character will be shaped by the politics and culture of those societies - by what Clausewitz called the “spirit of the age.”

Arthur Koestler’s own researches into this phenomenon led him to the following conclusion:

“All the biographical evidence indicates that such a radical reshuffling operation as occurs in “creative originality” requires the intervention of mental processes beneath the surface of conscious reasoning, in the twilight zone of awareness. In the decisive phase of the creative process the rational controls are relaxed and the creative person’s mind seems to regress from disciplined thinking to less specialized, more fluid ways of mentation.”

Koestler implicitly assumes the prevalent (although not unchallenged) “conscious/subconscious” model to explain “creative originality.” But if we take conscious reasoning to be thinking in which thoughts are linked together in a series, and if the “twilight zone of awareness” is a twilight zone (cf: “a dreamlike state”) because there is no sense of a self directing the mental processes, then this passage can stand as a description of nondual “prajñā-intuition,” from which the more familiar vijñāna [conceptual] processes derive. This differs from “the subconscious” in that prajñā-intuition can be experienced more consciously, although not self-consciously.

1k readathon total pages read: 16/1000

Started this one on the train station today. Not sure if I’m gonna love it, but it’s been on my TBR for ages. Also, I don’t know why my thumb looks so weird but we always appreciate an accidental matching nail-polish-and-book-cover aesthetic!

The internet is a void to pour these thoughts into, without any expectation that they will be noticed or commented upon. It is a record — lasting, but ephemeral — that can be left bobbing on the sea, bumped into and noted by the Blogspot trawlers, and then swiftly forgotten with the rest as our attentions wander. And our indifference does not nullify their existence. They have a weight that the constant conversations happening in other, more fashionable quarters of the internet don’t: They are borne not of the attempt to share information — breaking, just in, updated — that will pass almost immediately into history, but rather of an earnest attempt to do just that: exist.

Kyle Paoletta, ‘Ode to the Void’, Real Life (March 2017)

Thomas Mann says somewhere that to leave a trace behind him a writer must produce not only quality but bulk; the sheer bulk of the ouevre helps its impact on us. It is a melancholy truth; and yet this slim volume of Hillary’s seems to have a specific weight which makes it sink into the depth of one’s memory, while tons of printed bulk drift as flotsam on its surface. 

It is night still. Still no cock has crowed.

A. Koesltler, The Gladiators [1939], Londra, McMillan &Co., 1914 [Trad. dal tedesco di E. Simon. Il manoscritto originale in tedesco è stato smarrito]. Online su Archive.

“Civilization has just reached the ultimate stage of savagery…” #LeftBank #Paris

“Left Bank” by Agnes Poirier has been sitting on Mount TBR for a couple of years now; if I recall correctly, I picked it up in my local Waterstones when I had a book token, liking the sound of it. The subtitle is “Art, Passion and the Rebirth of Paris 1940–1950”, and of course with a cover featuring Sartre, Beauvoir and Camus it was always going to appeal… However, although this book is a…