The very last thing I should wish to do — I put it first, because my purposes will shortly demand it — is to write yet another text. Another of those weakly neurotic productions in which the author reproaches himself, at length, for his incapacity for system, while remaining, throughout, wholly incapable of examining the values upon which system rests. I wished to note that.
My reluctance, however, has a source other than any desire to conceal the fundamental kinship between my own person and the general run of persons around me. Of the nature of that kinship we shall speak in due course; I remark only, en passant, that its concealment has been called — by different centuries, before different courts — either experimentalism or blasphemy; which is striking chiefly because the two verdicts appear to cancel one another.
No: my objection is simpler and, I think, more damning. Texts are astonishingly inefficient. — You have read texts, dear Reader? The articles and books, reports and notebooks, blogs and posts and transcripts — you have, in fact, read them? Even with the fullest attention I am capable of bringing to bear, I absorb no more than a tenth of what passes before my eyes.
There exist, undeniably, texts in which the content is spread as thin as butter on on rationed bread under military dictatorship — texts whose entire vocation consists in passing scarcity off as abundance; but I am not speaking of those. I speak of good texts: those in which the ratio of sentences to units of meaning approaches one to one — texts in which there is butter both on the bread and in the bread, and возрастаєт дєнь ото дня процент жиров у маслі. I am aware it is unprintable, and it is, in all probability, correct. — Such texts pass off abundance as the norm. Of these I retain, on a generous estimate, a tenth. Were I to read each such text ten times over, there is no arithmetic reason to expect the figure to improve; repetition and absorption are not synonyms, and I do not believe anyone has established that they so much as correlate. I shall, however, keep my distance from this metaphor, and above all from the word consumption, which stands a few lines above like a creditor I have been avoiding.
The point stands: writing texts is a form of waste. The medium is ill-suited to inquiry — which ought to have surprised us and apparently has not. It should not astonish us, then — though it manifestly does — that in the past century and a half humanity has learned more about the world than in the preceding two and a half millennia, and proven entirely incapable of doing anything with the accumulation: incapable, that is, of absorbing it, of thinking from it rather than merely about it, of holding it in any form that permits use.
But why are we — we who live at the very end of this great accumulation, and possess so very much — condemned to perish of intellectual hunger? Ought we not to suspect that the mistake lies not in production but in distribution? Was so die Wissenschaft und Kunst nebenbei leistet, an großen und bewundernswerten Gedanken, das natürlich in Ehren, dagegen will ich nichts gesagt haben! — Quite so; and I have said nothing against it. The humanistic researcher’s attachment to text-production is not, on any reflection, inevitable; it has something rather accidental about it. But it is not the only ruinous accident capable of leaving any investigator who has had the misfortune to be assigned a serious question in the humanistic department in a state of genuine perplexity.
To state it once more plainly: the problem is emphatically not a shortage of sharp thinking and precise observation. It is, on the contrary, their surplus — and, what is worse, their frequently unreasonable, I will even risk the word irrational, distribution.
Somewhere between two hundred and three hundred years ago — or, by other calculations, closer to a thousand — it occurred to humanity that greater progress in the human sciences was to be achieved through increasing systematicity; that the introduction of linear order and something approaching military discipline into the organization of judgments about things and the world would somehow bring us nearer to understanding them. I am inclined to say that the soldierly spirit takes root in the history of mind considerably earlier than in the history of armed bands; or at any rate, the faith in the transformative power of rank-and-file organization belongs rather to the genius of Aquinas than to that of Napoleon. — But that is a separate matter.
In the history of spirit, two fundamental errors were committed. First: society decided that the human sciences ought not to be expected to yield answers — possibly having confused them with humanistic learning, which is an excusable mistake and proves very little. Second: the practitioners of the human sciences were entirely satisfied with this arrangement — possibly having confused neglect for distinction, which is a less excusable mistake and proves considerably more.
I count myself, accordingly, among the fortunate minority who have managed to avoid accepting either error. I expect concrete answers; I demand concrete resolutions; I seek tangible progress in the knowledge of things and the world. — Which is precisely, dear Reader, why the very last thing I could wish to do is to write another text — which is to say, another text devoted to the systematic investigation of a question posed in a prior systematic investigation, itself organised as a rank-and-file of yet further systematic investigations; since the underlying premise — that cognitive activity is properly arranged as a sequence of regularly repeated acts of reading and writing — is nothing more, when examined with any candour, than the sediment of a very old contempt for the human sciences. Or something worse: an internalized servitude. We may not claim knowledge; we cannot answer questions; we are not entitled to conclusions — and in the worst cases this abasement converts, by the operation as familiar to Nietzsche as it is to any honest observer of academic life, into contempt directed outward: answers and resolutions, one is given to understand, are the province of engineers. As for us — well. Quite so. And what, precisely, is our province? The question has been asked before; the answers on record are not encouraging.
I could style these paragraphs after any number of periods; but beyond my window an epoch reigns in which discourse about the cultivation of the individual is not much practised — and, it must be said, not without reason. Yet what epoch is it, exactly? The epoch wenn man muß Beefsteak essen und sich rühren. Genau so ist es. — No. Not that either. I confess I cannot yet name it; but I suspect that is rather the point.