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@ Free-floating Intelligence
2024-11-28 07:34:42“Around the next corner, a new road may be waiting for us, or a secret portal.” - J. R. R. Tolkien
“Speaking and acting, we intervene in the human world that existed before we were born into it, and this intervention is like a second birth (...)” - Hannah Arendt, Vita activa
Prologue: This text marks the beginning of a new section in this blog and thus a caesura. We all know it, at least since Nietzsche: If you look into the abyss, the abyss will eventually look back. A wise woman once said to me: “Where focus goes, energy flows.” As important as it may be to deal with the present, to analyze and understand it: Energetically, it is quite a waste. You are tipping life energy into a cesspit. If you have followed my work over the last few years, it probably comes as little shock in this world. The challenge, however, is how. How should it continue? You don't fight the dark by describing it, but by providing a counterpoint. Just because you know it's dark doesn't make it any brighter. In contrast, even the smallest source of light, the faintest flickering sparkle, breaks through the darkness. With the new “Lichtblicke” column, I am opening a new chapter in my journalistic work: I want to focus on the new, the enlightening, encouraging, constructive and often unknown, in all areas, whether personal development, health, nutrition, technology, science and spirituality. On the tools and options that give us hope, that expand our minds and overcome old certainties. Tools that enable us to shape the future and not remain mere consumers of the present. When institutions wobble, patterns we thought were safe become fragile and principles are turned upside down, a vacuum is created. The communist theorist Antonio Gramsci called this “the time of monsters”. The old has not yet died, the new has not yet been born. However, we will only become midwives of the new if we are “up to” the present; if we deal with the tools that grow in the direction of the new. Are you ready to grow? Then I would like to invite you on a journey together. If you have ideas and suggestions for topics, phenomena, tools etc. that go in this direction, or if you would like to tell me your opinion on the new section, please feel free to write to me. For me, too, it is a journey of learning and growing: kontakt@idw-europe.org
Paris, 1894. A young Czech artist “accidentally” drops by a print shop just before Christmas, which was to change his life. Like many aspiring artists, he had come to Paris to make his breakthrough. His patron's scholarship in his home country was coming to an end. He never really found his feet, his future is uncertain. He has talent, but many have that, and yet they live on lattes and love, as Charles Aznavour sang in “La Bohème”.
But the young man also has ideas that lie dormant inside him, just waiting to be discovered. He learns that the famous actress Sarah Bernhardt urgently needs theater posters. The young man recognizes his opportunity, offers himself and delivers promptly. Two weeks later, Paris is plastered with his posters. For Alfons Mucha, the young man's name, it was his breakthrough as an artist. It was also the birth of Art Nouveau, a new art movement and at the same time a turning point in decorative art. Mucha becomes the most sought-after painter in the world, companies clamour for his motifs, he takes advertising and art to a whole new level, he travels to America and even illustrates stamps and banknotes in his home country.
The eternal battle of Chronos and Kairos
What brought about this lucky coincidence for Alfons Mucha? What forces were at work here? And are there ways of influencing the frequency and frequency of these fateful encounters? Why did Nikola Tesla have not just one or two good ideas, which alone would have been life-filling, but hundreds? Why do some people have one fateful encounter after the next, while for others, life just plods along on its usual course? The Greeks had two levels of time and two gods of time. The first god is Chronos (Saturn for the Romans), who symbolizes time, which is measured and inexorably runs out. With and thanks to Chronos, order and continuity are created, but also repetition of the same thing over and over again. He is symbolized by the grandfather with the beard and hourglass, he stands for objective time, which is always the same for everyone and is measured in seconds, minutes and hours.
The second god is Kairos, the son of Zeus and rebellious grandson of Chronos. Kairos is already a “punk” on the outside, in illustrations he wears a partial shave cut with a striking curl. It is precisely this curl that he needs to be grabbed by. Kairos stands for subjective time, the time that offers opportunities and breakthroughs. He stands for the possibility of change, insight and upheaval; he is depicted as a young, strong and muscular god. Kairos stands for a rare atmospheric and cosmological condensation. Those who recognize and seize the right moment become the heroes of their time and ride the dragon of chance. The sense of time is suspended. We all know this: an hour alone in the waiting room of a cold provincial train station passes slowly and sluggishly. An hour in bed with an exciting woman, on the other hand, flies by.
If you allow the kairos to knock on your door again and again (albeit sometimes somewhat covertly), you open the door to wondrous encounters and magical coincidences. Flashes of thought and encounters then seem orchestrated. The psychologist C. G. Jung described this phenomenon as “synchronicities”. You often just have to pause and understand these encounters as meaningful. The sonorous beat of “Chronometer” is interrupted by the punky guitar riff of Kairos. The chronological embrace is the time track of the old, which wants to avoid every moment of kairos, because that upsets the world of those who want to rely on the cogs in its mechanics. Kairos includes ideas and inspirations, love, creative periods. For “Grandpa Chronos”, all of these are mere disruptions that jeopardize the course of things. Those who set up systems of planning, whether for themselves or for others, disrupt the new, they want to prevent any experience of the new, block and thwart the view of alternatives. Because the new is created by the kairos, and only by the kairos. The new also likes to be the “untimely”. Today, many would also describe the state of kairos as “flow” or “serendipity”. This term comes from the story of “One Thousand and One Nights”, where three Ceylonese princesses are sent on certain missions, but find completely different things than they expected, according to the motto: “Expect the unexpected!” “Serendip” was the name given to Ceylon by the Arabs, as Ernst Jünger noted on the plane on March 3, 1979 in his notes ‘Seventy Gone’.
Where has the unexpected been in my generation so far? Is it still to come or has it already been? At its core, this was also part of my generational criticism, which I have dealt with in many texts in recent years. When I started writing “Generation Chillstand” in 2016, my basic feeling was this: An entire generation is stuck in the silo of the world created by previous generations, in its structures of norms, time and work.
Get out of chronological life!
This world was touted to me as the best world ever, and looking beyond it was seen as unnecessary or even heretical. Was it just a matter of milking the old world for as long as possible before disposing of it? In that book, I wrote that at some point an entire generation will feel “lied to and deceived”, similar to the citizens of the GDR up until 1989 (who, of course, continued to be lied to like everyone else after 1990). What was a characteristic of every generation until the millennials, namely challenging the present, putting it up for discussion and thus renewing it, seemed to be suspended. The realm of Chronos had to endure. But there was nothing I wanted more, and I wanted the same for my generation, than to seize the kairos by the scruff of the neck. Because I saw the breaking points of the old open before me and the possibilities of the new appearing on the horizon. Since 2016, when I opened my mind, my life has changed fundamentally: it has become riskier and richer in opportunities, it has become more fragmented and freer, richer in options and more confusing, in short: different, more exciting, more open, more adventurous! But isn't stability in a fragile age a chimera anyway? My path of openness made me a lonely wanderer at times, took me to many places, made me a semi-nomad. If I count the last few years, I have moved around 17 times. In some places, I lived with nothing more than my hand luggage and one or two books. But my path also led me to a magical place, above Monte Verità in Locarno in the Ticino mountains. This is where the first “early hippies” met at the turn of the century, formed communes and thought beyond the present world, which consisted of war, destruction and nihilism.
Prior to this, art and its secessions made the break with the present clear in late 19th century Vienna. The Wandervogel movement set youth in motion. The Romans already had the idea of the “holy spring” (ver sacrum), a mandate for young people to leave their homeland and re-establish themselves somewhere else - and in doing so, to create something new. C. G. Jung described this psychologically as the process of individuation. People are not yet finished when they come into the world, they complete themselves (or not). All these searching people in the trials and tribulations of time have always been united by a longing for another world. This longing makes us common travelers in spirit. But the journey is only the beginning. In the end, the thoughts that become words and translate into actions are decisive. These actions are the building material of the new world. Each individual is a small builder of the new world, if they want to be. I am currently working enthusiastically on the Pareto project, on tools for uncensorable citizen journalism from below. It's time for the many small master builders to unite, isn't it? What are you building?