Introduction
”Toutes choses sont dites déjà; mais comme personne n'écoute, il faut toujours recommencer.”1 (Gide)
This Substack will serve primarily as a potpourri, a means of both curating compelling resources, providing them with additional commentary in the margins, and my private musings. These writings will take various forms, ranging from crafted essays to Gedankenflug2, flights of thought, where spontaneity compensates for the lack of rigor. Following Gide's quote, I don't claim to be original: my goal is merely to repeat ideas which were already proclaimed but lost in time. We must always start again.
The name of this blog is borrowed from Nietzsche's second set of publications, usually bundled under the title of Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen; poetically rendered in English as thoughts out of season. Reclaiming the ideas lost in time, this blog harvests them in an untimely fashion.
Many of these ideas are however timeless, not tied by their harvest nor by any epoch: they are incessantly current. History is replete with ideas transcending their time and defined by individuals who wield them as their conviction. Man's action is informed by ideas and his actions shape history fundamentally.
Significantly, although driven by them, man's actions are characterized by the applications of ideas, not their
comprehension3, which only comes secondarily and may be flawed. Once they enter the world and the consciousness of its inhabitants, ideas reappear in forms that diverge from their originators. Diffused throughout the rhythms of history, ideas procreate other forms which can be fundamentally at odds with their original conception. Their forms might change, the contents or original understanding might be lost, nevertheless, they always reappear— history is fundamentally cyclical4. What remains for the diligent student of history is separating the wheat from the chaff.
The aforementioned highlights not only the power of ideas towards man, but also its contrary: as ideas shape our actions, our understanding of ideas shape their reception5.
Likewise, history and man are tied reflexively, they aren't separated strictly through a subject-object relation: to understand history, one must understand man and to understand man, one must understand history. Viewing man as an individual leads to a myopic conception: society and the individuals constituting it are adamantine. We are all born into a society and moulded by it. For the compelled, unravelling the veil of opacity can only be attempted through writing, the paramount mean of cultivating thoughts.
As with all of our endeavors, we can only try, the rest is not our business6— success lays in the hands of our Creator.
André Gide & La Réécriture, Presses universitaires de Lyon, Pierre Masson, Clara Debard et Jean-Michel Wittman (dir.)
I was introduced to this neologism by the Austrian author Robert Musil, whose essays are published as Thought Flights, by the amazing team at Contra Mundum Press.
The Russian-British philosopher Isaiah Berlin quoted fondly Kant’s cry that “Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made”. Consider the introductory pages written by John Gray to Berlin’s The Roots of Romanticism.
The exponent of the cyclical understanding of history is Ibn Khaldun, whose Muqaddimah hasn’t gathered a speck of dust.
This inverted relationship is elaborated in wonderful prose by the Lebanese author Amin Maalouf, in his Les Identités meurtrières.
East Coker, T.S. Eliot and likewise the Turkish proverb “Gayret bizden, tevfik Allah’tan”.