Now I remember what was the problem with hailing the power of a rising momentum, especially among those who would be astonished by the tarot cards of history, where not the least of these offenses consists in the delusion that the blind passions ushered in by historical forces will function in the capacity of a coming cavalry rather than, as Nietzsche recognized, a power marked for its “brute truth and incorrigible stupidity.”

Nietzsche blamed Hegel for “implanting in the youth” an “admiration for the ‘power of history’ which in practice transforms every moment into a naked admiration for success and leads to an idolatry of the factual” (“On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life”). How can living imagination be but overtaken by these latter, passively gotten forces? What place could there be for art and religion as faculties of mind or spiritual powers in their own right?

The objection asserts an important difference between place and space in the sense Roberto Maggi distinguishes them in his work on information architecture: “The term place, as a linguistic first, usually indicates a limited area that stands in opposition to the wide unlimited area that is space” (“Toward a Semiotics of Digital Places”).

The distinction maps fairly well onto Nietzsche’s call for a similar delimitation: “Mindful of this situation in which youth finds itself I cry Land! Land! Enough and more than enough of the wild and erring voyage over strange dark seas!”

The easy fit, even if likely no accident, is permitted insofar as it supports the aim of giving some ground to “extremely subjective” ways of interpretation, as Maggi puts it. One is not blindly pushed into following orders or wholly constrained by power interests that work against them or by intentionality of design. Neither is he absolved by pointing to the fact of cue cards, but rather is included, not to say implicated, on the basis of the “specific navigational needs” he tries to accomplish.

This doesn’t need to amount to a groping in the dark, necessarily. And it doesn’t necessitate the whole nation hold hands in agreement over this point, as The Onion once satirized with the idyllic image of a very long tandem bicycle in the park. Of course, there’s a measure of risk in placing extreme subjectivity of interpretation in the hands of everyone, but this doesn’t justify proscriptions against ideas for their power.

On the other hand, and to return to the question of modern convention in thought, if there is an objection to the greater weight given to fact, such that the use of subjective interpretation is considered superfluous where objective fact already obtains, or at least where there is ‘an unlikelihood of something to be disproved,’ to use Richard Dawkins’ way of putting things, wouldn’t this begin with a reconsideration of the equal measures Nietzsche accorded to living historically and unhistorically? Are poetical and symbolic interpretations to be conceived as something that takes place outside of history? To my mind, retaining this binary only serves to call into place Nietzsche’s objection to an overly “sober and pragmatic” “modern curiosity.”

An example of this is where modern physics sets out to prove once and for all Einstein wrong in his dismissal of the reality of quantum entanglement. Just as we can’t be sure whether some animals know how to dissimulate in the concealment of nothing, even though someone once said this, how do we know “spooky action at a distance” doesn’t belong rather in an extremely subjective place that the best kind of scientific thinking passes through as distinct from empirically verifiable fact? I’m not saying this boils down to the tendency to dismiss the use of poiesis in scientific method on the basis of proof of outcome. It could be very much about this tendency. Only that the question of attributing some final belief or unbelief to another mind, in this case Einstein’s, is in itself a “crudely simplistic point,” as Dawkins worded it in his (unrelated, but related) critique of religious dogma.

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