§69 History Crash Course: 3 Centuries in 3 minutes
Our fast-paced present breeds intellectual impatience and experiential insatiability. Is ours not an age advanced enough for four millennia of elevated culture to find a home?
As a random sample ours is the present: where fifteen minutes of optimistic-yet-curious ‘wisdom’ is passed down to the chatting classes from a TED stage; where VOX can’t leave an hour long video with Obama alone without decorating it with a nauseating amount of animations; and where nuggets of ‘thought’ on Medium are preambled by an inanely standardized (and let’s hope not standardizing) ‘read time’ , calculated on the basis of 275 words per minute — the alleged ‘average reading speed of an adult’.* Thus ordered the technocrats…
Nietzsche — one of philosophy’s most rigorous and formidable thinkers — appears to correspond to today’s requirements for terse and succinct dissemination of knowledge. The following is an abridged excerpt from a ‘note’ from his notebooks to his unfinished Will to Power**. Nietzsche identifies three ‘sensibilities’, each respectively corresponding to the 17th, 18th and 19th century: ‘Aristocratism’, ‘Feminism’, and ‘Animalism’.
‘The seventeenth century is aristocratic, imposes order, looks down haughtily upon the animalic, is severe against the heart, not cozy, without sentiment, “un-German,” averse to what is burlesque and what is natural… The century of strong will; also of strong passion.
The eighteenth century is dominated by woman, given to enthusiasm, full of esprit, shallow, but with a spirit in the service of what is desirable, of the heart, libertine in the enjoyment of what is most spiritual, and undermines all authorities; intoxicated, cheerful, clear, humane, false before itself, much canaille au fond, sociable.
The nineteenth century is more animalic and subterranean, uglier, more realistic and vulgar, and precisely for that reason “better,” “more honest,” more submissive before every kind of “reality,” truer; but weak in will, but sad and full of dark crav- ings, but fatalistic. …’ (Nietzsche, Spring-Fall 1887; ‘The Three Centuries’, 1968, 58–61, §95, my emphases)
Nietzsche’s full note is 739 words long. According to Medium the ‘read time’ should be about 3 minutes. That seems bite size enough for con.temp.orary culture. But what is the ‘think time’?
* As a counter to the hyperactive is the development of ‘long reads’, ‘big reads’ and ‘unwinding’ — as in the tagline to 1843 (launched 2016): ‘the Economist unwinds’.
** I recommend the Kaufmann translation.
References
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. The Will to Power. Edited by Walter Kaufmann. Translated by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage Books, 1968.
Originally published at anowmedia.com on October 26, 2018.
