/lit/ - Literature

>>17544045
>>17544289
Quite difficult to answer, but modern technology is essentially formless. It is a transitional and destructive creation, a means towards a new way of being. And what is destructive cannot be destroyed. Nor can the law of being be lost until it is perfected or exiled from the memory and all signs of character. And it is impossible to destroy what is not understood, apart from a great work of chance - at best the destruction is increased. This was the tragedy of the luddites, an important lesson that has been ignored by leftist movements, and which may have been inherited by the right.

In this paradox of destruction and power, of the formless which only increases the violence of law, one may also see Nietzsche's fundamental error. Our age is not at all without spirit, the systematic world may in fact deepen the spirit for specific types. And to fight blindly against this is only to increase the enemy's strength. Where Nietzsche opposed the aesthetics of beauty in the philosophy of his peers he ignored that the aesthetics of the will are only a subset of beauty, of the cursed who can never escape the shadow of Mount Helicon. It is there that maimed beings are marked by gods as a limit, a reminder that the beautiful is only a means, a boundary within a territory where laws of escape do not hold. Their blood must not spread, and so they are turned to stone which will wear away into dust. At their death they become something higher than beauty, the fruitless search for spirit is given to those who will see an eternal memory. Beauty ex negativo. Goethe and Winckelmann understood this.

To fight with a hammer is a matter of desperation and survival, but in the master's hands the tool of tools may forge the highest creations. This is the myth of Hephaestus, in which he creates something higher than beauty, the Great Shield within which the elements form of the world creation and its order of time. All technology must be seen in this sense, it is something higher than art, we see it in the roads and aqueducts of Rome, the war machines of Archimedes, the armour of fallen and anonymous heroes. Without it no festivals would ever be possible. The art of the individual, of lost beauty, is of this fall from the natural and elemental order.