A man may
‘know what he is doing’; but he can know neither that which
does nor what does what he is
doing. The fortuitous gives him
birth, makes up his life, marries him off, gives him his thoughts, and kills
him.
C, 1:693.
Un hombre puede “saber
lo que está haciendo”; pero no puede saber qué hace ni qué hace lo que está
haciendo. Lo fortuito le da nacimiento, hace su vida, le casa, le da sus
pensamientos y le mata.
All my bits of knowledge, my reasonings, clarities, and curiosities were only
playing either a lamentable part or no part at all in the decisions or actions
that mattered most to me. … Every significant thing affects, depresses, or
suppresses thinking; and that’s even how you can tell it is significant. … Think,
think! … Thinking spoils pleasure and exacerbates pain.
MF, p.204-5
Todos mis elementos
de conocimiento, mis razonamientos, claridades y curiosidades jugaron una parte
mínima o ninguna parte en las decisiones y acciones que más me importaron…
I quite often imagine a man
who would be possessed of everything we know, in terms of accurate operations
and recipes, but who would be entirely ignorant of all notions and words that
do not provide clear pictures or give rise to uniform, repeatable acts. He
never heard of any such thing as spirit, soul, thought,
substance, liberty, will, time, space, forces, life, instincts, memory, cause,
gods, or morals, or origins; in sum he knows
everything that we know and doesn’t know everything that we don’t. But
he doesn’t even know the names. […]
There will come a time (that is, a man) – when the
words in our philosophy will appear as an odd set of antiques only scholars
will know of. Thought will not be spoken of any longer.
The word Beauty has already lost (almost) all philosophical use.
C, 1:573-74.
El pensamiento ya no se pronunciará más.
La palabra Belleza ha perdido todo uso.
One can say that such a work as I am discussing here
is a product of genius. But genius is really the last thing that could take up
the position of author in the descriptive pattern for an action. For this could
well be the most impersonal, least individual thing there is in ourselves:
C,
1:548.
Isn’t ‘genius,’ that seeming climax of
individuality, the most detached operation, nobody’s voice, the rare result of a
perfect transparency, of an extrafaithful orientation, of an equality of data and outputs?
C, 1:548.
… el
raro resultado de una transparencia perfecta, de una orientación fidedigna, de
una igualdad de datos y resultados.
Chance does nothing in this world – except get itself noticed.
H, p. 68
La oportunidad no hace nada en este mundo-excepto ser
percibida
powerlessness is characteristic of philosophy. And this is striking – in our age of dominant power.
C, 1:605
La falta de poder es característica de la filosofía. Y ello
es llamativo-en nuestra era de poder dominante.
https://books.openedition.org/cdf/2140?lang=es#ftn95
(Extractado de Jacques Bouveresse)
Lecture given as « La
philosophie d’un anti-philosophe: Paul Valéry », Zaharoff Lecture, Oxford University, 4 février 1993, and published in French
by Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1993, 32 p. – First publication in English: Critical
Inquiry, 21 (1995), p. 354-381 (translation by Christian Fournier and Sandra
Laugier). – Definitive French version in #JacquesBouveresse, Essais IV. Pourquoi pas des
philosophes?, Agone, 2004, http://books.openedition.org/agone/199
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