'The singular problem for modernity, as Nietzsche understood it, Strong contends, is that we have lost the human capacity for accepting justification, that is, the ability to recognize in oneself the validity of another’s judgment. Thus Strong roots the heart of this problem, the status and standing of authority in the modern world, in the human. For it is precisely this human capacity for engaging in human relationships that establish authority that modernity first erodes, and finally destroys. The immediate consequence of modernity’s achievement is that no longer can anything stand authoritatively for us. Of far greater consequence, however, is that absent the establishment of authority through relations between and among selves and others, no form of life can be grounded legitimately, that is, authoritatively. Such an authoritative grounding roots a form of life so deeply in human being as to place it beyond question. Indeed, Strong weights this depth dimension of the grounding of a form of life by saying that “were we able to question it we would literally be another being,” that is, other than human being. Essentially and most importantly, then, by destroying the capacity for judgment and justification modernity spoils the possibility to craft a common authority in common, and to live a common form of life.

Aesthetics, Strong argues, could in Nietzsche’s view lead the way to a recovery of common authority by restoring the capacity for judgment, but only if we could first imagine an aesthetic that ceased to equate art with its representational orientation toward the world. Art must be conceived as an activity that constructs, rather than imitates or represents, the very world to which it refers. Tragedy, in particular, can be so conceived, Nietzsche proposes in The Birth of Tragedy, because it “establishes the authority of a human sense before the audience in a manner that this sense can be experienced both as something external and found in oneself.” Through tragedy, in other words, one is taught to interpret the experience that one has with another as authoritative and thus learns to recognize and to acknowledge judgment and justification. The aesthetics of tragedy accomplishes what Strong refers to as the “Emersonian moment of transfiguration.” Emerson had considered the only legitimate authority to be that which can be found inside the self. Tragedy allows us to take that necessary preliminary step, in effect to undergo a transfiguration, which makes it possible to discover authority inside the self and thus to form relations of authority with others. By renewing the capacity for judgment and justification in this way, tragedy lays the groundwork for a reconstitution of individual and social identity and for a new form of life. The aesthetic mode thus provides Nietzsche with a world that is human. Moreover, it is a world that is securely grounded in that it does not point nor seek to point beyond itself for authority, that is, beyond the forms of life that a restored human capacity for judgment has made possible.'

'He had not been drawn to art casually. He had pledged his life to it.'

'T. W. Adorno has a precise formulation for the kind of shift I am suggesting here when he speaks in an essay on Bach of 'the emancipation of the subject to objectivity in a coherent whole of which subjectivity itself was the origin.' The subject is liberated from an impotent privacy into a world of material beings through the objectified form of the artwork. For the reader, such 'emancipation' derives not from some identification with the poet's feeling, but from the syntax of the work, from a particular arrangement of words which, like the conjunction of planes in a painting, produces a sense of materiality resistant to conventional grammars of thought and design. And, rather like the relation of abstract art to representational art, a language of 'objectification' amounts to a reconfiguring of the semantic field so as to accent particular items in a non-discursive way. Prominent features are inverted word order, indeterminacy or ambiguity attaching to pronouns, the emphatic use of prepositions to substitute for usual narrative markers, heightened attention to 'minor' parts of speech such as conjunctions, and a resulting disfigurement of anticipated speech-patterns. Such devices assure us that we are dealing not with a 'performance, a speech by the poet' but rather with 'the poet's self among things' and a 'thinking with the things as they exist'.'

'In comedy the defeated characters are primarily ridiculous, and we have to inquire what, in this connection, the essence of the ridiculous is. It seems to be, from the general experience of comedy, the being confined to a certain type of behaviour, conditioned to act a single part.'

'As if America could banish history, could make of the condition of immigrancy not something to escape from but something to aspire to, as to the native human condition.'

A song, a problem.

'… reading is one way to escape solipsism, which is a form of spiritual death.'

Mi tarro de café instantáneo me trata de usted, pero sin usa la palabra usted.

In search of reading material for Spanish practice, I stumble upon the thought of reading Epictetus, er, Epicteto. I find an edition that pairs the Manual nicely with a translation of an essay by Hadot.

In Spanish it has the same knotty, logical texture as always. The Enchiridion was about the only text I spent any time in grad school learning to read in Greek with my advisor the historian of ancient philosophy, so I feel a glimmer more of insight in this case into what translators have to confront to discover opportunities for colloquial constructions in a text so dense with the reversals and negations typical of opposition to non-philosophical, ordinary, ways of life. My Spanish is only a couple few months old. It thrives best in contexts with predictable connections asserted between (in Austin’s phrase) ‘medium sized dry goods’. Even though I know this text fairly well, well enough to ‘know what is supposed to be said’ at most points even when I’m unsure how the Spanish translator is saying it, the philosophical abstractness of the language is astringent enough, in words of such otherwise ubiquitous function, to shift everything into defamiliarized confusion. My tenuous hold on grammar is revealed, betrayed. But textual structure, pattern, prevails: when a phrase known to be important out of proportion to its casual introduction appears, like ‘reserve clause’, that alone is enough to lock the context back in place:

Sírvete únicamente del impulso que te lleva a la acción y de la rienda que permite la inacción, pero con suavidad, con moderación y con una cláusula de reserva.