Monday, April 30, 2012

Representative accident …

… Convergence of the Twain — The Dabbler. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)


Notice how, for Hardy, the “Immanent Will” so orders things that the ship will have, for its “mate,” the very “Shape of Ice” that will sink it. If this “will” “stirs and urges everything,” as Hardy and Schopenhauer alike say, then the iceberg, the waters out of which the iceberg crystallizes, the men who plan and build the Titanic, nay, the Titanic itself: all these things, all these apparently dissociated phenomena, are unified. Ordinary men cannot see the underlying unity. But it is there. Only “for [a] time” are the ship and its “mate” (the iceberg) “far and dissociate.” The self-executing justice that derives from the unity I speak of here—and which allows us to say, with Schopenhauer, that “the world itself is the judgment of the world”—will see to the “consummation” in due course.

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