Behold, I show you the last man. 'What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?'—thus asks the last man, and he blinks.
The earth has become smaller, and on it hops the man who makes everything small...'We have invented happiness'—say the last men, and they blink." —Nietzsche (Quoted in Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? page 64).
"The last men blink. What does that mean? Blink is related to Middle English blenchan, which means deceive, and to blenken, blinken, which means gleam or glitter. To blink—that means to play up and set up a glittering deception [emphasis mine, jk] which is then agreed upon as true and valid—with the mutual tacit understanding not to question the setup." —Heidegger (What Is Called Thinking? page 74).
Heidegger, continued on page 82:
"We must not take it to be the same thing as the merely superficial and incidental wink by which we signal to each other on special occasions that in fact we are no longer taking seriously what is being said and proposed..."
2 comments:
That's spot on.
http://reaching-oblivion.blogspot.com/
love this jeff--this time as well as the first time i read it last week or so
btw, my word verification is radrozi
maybe that will be my new name
radrozi blinks and winks a lot
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