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2023 reading list

[This page is best viewed with https://github.com/ludios/expand-everything, which will load all the comnents below.]

Wherein I try to prioritize reading for the limited amount of time I have this year, and to remind myself to read more than just comments on the Internet. Because of problems of time and shifting interests, I will consider this a success if I read a third of the list. I'll reflect on the reading and deviations from the plan in Jan 2024.

{+} = added after initial planning






  • Albert Camus - The Fall/ audio
  • {+} John Kennedy Toole - A Confederacy of Dunces/ audio, go to 6m44s to skip past the introduction spoilers
  • {+} pirate aba - The Wandering Inn/ audio
  • William Olaf Stapledon - Star Maker/ audio, go to 12m35s to skip past the introduction spoilers

  • Tae Kim - A Guide to Japanese Grammar
  • Noboru Akuzawa - Japanese Sentence Patterns Training Book for JLPT N5
  • Noboru Akuzawa - Japanese Sentence Patterns Training Book for JLPT N4
  • Jay Rubin - Making Sense of Japanese: What the Textbooks Don't Tell You/ the romaji is miserable; may have useful grammar insights
  • struggle through Japanese Wikipedia for some topics I know about
  • Daniele Minnone - A learning handbook for Joyo Kanji/ the first third, pg. 1 - 98

(my initial source for learning Japanese is https://cijapanese.com/ and not any of the reading.)


Lectures


maybe in 2024? not sure

  • {+} Paul Bourke - Fractals, Chaos, Self-Similarity
  • {+} Alex Komoroske - The Compendium / after I convert the Firebase export in code/websites/compendium-cards-data/db.json to a single HTML page
  • {+} James Betker - Non_Interactive
  • {+} Denny Britz’s Blog
  • {+} Robert Root-Bernstein - Discovering: Inventing and Solving Problems at the Frontiers of Scientific Knowledge
  • {+} Steven H. Strogatz - Infinite Powers: How Calculus Reveals the Secrets of the Universe
  • {+} Lexi Mattick & Hack Club - Putting the “You” in CPU
  • Lou Keep - The Uruk Series
  • Knut Schmidt-Nielsen - How Animals Work (via)
  • Edward O. Wilson - The Diversity of Life
  • James L. Gould, Carol Grant Gould - The Animal Mind (via)
  • Symbols and mental programs: a hypothesis about human singularity/ printed
  • Robert Yarham - How to Read the Landscape
  • Richard Powers - The Overstory/ audio
  • Rigdzin Shikpo - Openness Clarity Sensitivity/ printed
  • Michael R. Canfield (editor) - Field Notes on Science & Nature (via)
  • Sabine Hossenfelder - Existential Physics
  • George Soros - The Alchemy of Finance/ printed
  • Eric Gill - An Essay on Typography/ printed; I know he's bad
  • {+} Richard Hamming - The Art of Doing Science and Engineering

unplanned cool things read


unplanned and abandoned

  • Chuck Klosterman - The Nineties/ audio
  • Rick Rubin - The Creative Act/ audio
  • Mike Rinder - A Billion Years: My Escape From a Life in the Highest Ranks of Scientology/ audio
  • Sarah Steel - Do As I Say: How Cults Control, Why We Join Them, and What They Teach Us About Bullying, Abuse and Coercion/ audio
  • Benjamín Labatut - When We Cease to Understand the World/ audio
  • Kathryn Petras, Ross Petras - Awkword Moments: A Lively Guide to the 100 Terms Smart People Should Know/ audio
  • Adam Galinsky, Maurice Schweitzer - Friend & Foe: When to Cooperate, When to Compete, and How to Succeed at Both/ audio
  • Han Kang - The White Book/ audio
  • Niccolò Machiavelli - The Prince/ audio
  • Anthony Bourdain - Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly/ audio
  • Kristie Macrakis - Espionage/ audio
  • Christopher Winn - Legal Daisy Spacing (via)
  • Justin E. H. Smith - The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is/ audio
  • Alice Schroeder - The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life/ audio (~77% in)
  • Morgan Housel - Same as Ever/ audio
  • Amanda Montell - Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism/ audio
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ivan commented Dec 31, 2023

my 2024 intent: to be stupidly brave

https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/1741058281517490357

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ivan commented Dec 31, 2023

Living in India is high cognitive load on the system.

It’s just too much people management

https://twitter.com/cubanheat/status/1740954153315422344

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ivan commented Dec 31, 2023

don't let me catch you having opinions about Wittgenstein before you hit $50M ARR

[...]

do not confuse academic curiosity in successful founders as anything other than a cute affectation.

https://twitter.com/zhayitong/status/1740593401052193118

it's not what people want to hear, but if you want to create a generational company, have to put most hobbies away, which makes you temporarily uninteresting

https://twitter.com/lsukernik/status/1740708565957152816

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ivan commented Dec 31, 2023

do you get a distinct sense when someone is "managing" you?

what's it like? what gives it away?

surface-level attentiveness to my concerns while consistently being unable to/refusing to pass my ITT and integrate my POV into the shared POV we use together

https://twitter.com/quotidiania/status/1740798348876234941

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ivan commented Dec 31, 2023

Did anybody else like to lean on the window of the bus as a kid and let the vibrations violently shake your skull and brain?

https://twitter.com/saltydkdan/status/1739831825701171605

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ivan commented Dec 31, 2023

Personally, I suspect he likes the idea of radical change because he's an intensely intelligent man who is easily bored by the everyday world. He finds it impossible to believe that it makes sense to continue, as human beings, in our exact same form. "Do we really want more of what we have now?" he asks, sounding incredulous. "More millennia of the same old human soap opera? Surely we have played out most of the interesting scenarios already in terms of human relationships in a trivial framework. What I'm talking about transcends all that. There'll be far more interesting stories. And what is life but a set of stories?"

https://www.wired.com/1995/10/moravec/#extinction
via https://twitter.com/gwern/status/1700958056228483404

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ivan commented Dec 31, 2023

YouTube Shorts is freaking scary. Apparently I do not have the self control to handle Shorts and every 30 days I tell YouTube to hide them. If that feature goes away I think I just need to cancel my YouTube Premium subscription and block the site.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38783195

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ivan commented Dec 31, 2023

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ivan commented Dec 31, 2023

tempo is the most important thing when you’re building something new & big

https://twitter.com/fkasummer/status/1739013538385957370

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ivan commented Dec 31, 2023

tfw ur decades-long incredibly fascinating career of early post-Cartesian embodied AI research and novel synthesis of minor householder tantra with critique of rationalism is completely overshadowed by your discovery that 600W of LED light on your face feels nice in the winter

https://twitter.com/meekaale/status/1739027086042345681

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ivan commented Jan 1, 2024

[Duolingo] figured out how to deliver just the right amount of dopamine to keep users on paid subscriptions while slowing the actual pace of learning to an absolute crawl

if users learn their target language quickly, duolingo makes less money.

https://twitter.com/AlexBerish/status/1738381781320028515

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ivan commented Jan 1, 2024

Underrated quality of HIIT classes is they force you to tolerate significant pain and suffering.

When we're almost never made to do so in any other aspect of cushy modern life.

Feels like a worthwhile thing to be exposed to 1-2x a week. A little reminder of struggle.

https://twitter.com/Mappletons/status/1738523523696439633

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ivan commented Jan 1, 2024

its important to set aside some time every day for looking at distant objects

https://twitter.com/chromalisque/status/1057038258721513474

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ivan commented Jan 1, 2024

That’s why I think charnel vision is a healthy thing. A world that desperately celebrates optimism and medicates pessimism is a world that is not truly willing to look at itself and contemplate the death and decay that must necessarily accompany life and growth.

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2023/12/21/charnel-vision/

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ivan commented Jan 1, 2024

FINDING A FUTURE: SELF-NARRATIVE AND SELF-TRUST

The facility for viewing one’s life as a narrative may be what’s missing in addiction. And the loss of an accessible self-narrative corresponds with clues that the dorsolateral PFC becomes partially disconnected from the motivational core, both in episodes of now appeal and over the long-term course of addiction. My focus on the left dorsolateral PFC, although partly speculative, can help make sense of what goes wrong when people seem unable to quit. Not only are memories and ambitions difficult to access, but the sense of time as a linear dimension, connecting now to later, is replaced by a sense of time as cyclical—the right hemisphere’s proclivity. Instead of a future stretching out ahead, addicts can only imagine the reiteration of the present. If this is an accurate picture, then reconnecting the left dorsolateral PFC with the motivational core would allow desire and perspective to work together, and that might be the best way, in fact the only way, to build a road from the present to the future.

Addicts experience something breathtaking when they can stretch their vision of themselves from the immediate present back to the past that shaped them and forward to a future that’s attainable and satisfying. It feels like shifting from momentary blobs of experience to the coherence of being a whole person. It feels like being the author and advocate of one’s own life. It feels like being real.

Now imagine what that means for the capacity to trust one’s own judgements, values, instincts, and attainments. From making choices that are obviously self-destructive, there is a shift to making choices that are self-enhancing and self-sustaining. The value of this transformation cannot be overstated. Addicts can live for years without experiencing a kernel of self-trust. Why trust that you will actually be different when the evidence suggests that you’ll go on being the same? Why believe that you can pursue what’s beneficial rather than what’s immediately available, when you’ve bypassed that junction a thousand times?

To experience a sense of continuity between me now, me then, and me in the future is precious. But when it’s been missing for a while, perhaps for one’s whole life, it’s not easy to find. It requires a perspective that can only be obtained by addressing the future in the context of the past. And it requires one other thing, one fundamental resource: desire itself. There’s no way to reach forward with determination and hope unless you want badly to get there.

Marc Lewis - The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction is Not a Disease

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ivan commented Jan 1, 2024

do you ever think about how for a decade or so we could just make weird little animations and games and things in flash with almost no prior knowledge, like you could just have a bad idea and work on it that same day and share it online. and now we don't have that at all

https://twitter.com/innesmck/status/1736866727634616532

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ivan commented Jan 1, 2024

My own theory with "Right Way Guys" is that some people have been able to find a lot of success by leveraging the knowledge that's stored in the hivemind of society. They don't really know what they're doing when you consider what's going on inside their skull. But they have successfully copied success up till now. The plus side is that they're able to inherit successful methodologies that have survived over time without having to do all the hard work themselves. The down side is that they literally don't understand when they're in a scenario where it will lead to failure.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38709586

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ivan commented Jan 1, 2024

Balmer took 8% equity [in Microsoft] to cancel the profit share

Most of that came from Gates’s end

Then Balmer just never sold

https://twitter.com/patrick_oshag/status/1737233878429966666

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ivan commented Jan 1, 2024

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ivan commented Jan 1, 2024

I've talked about this before as has @therobotjames - your positions should always be driven by the exposures you want to have, not primarily driven by what the market gives you. Even if your conviction doesn't change, you sometimes need to adjust your exposures in response to the market to avoid taking outsized risk in a small number of names - particularly important in a volatile market (like crypto ... but also single-name equities!)

https://twitter.com/macrocephalopod/status/1741826679310303519

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ivan commented Jan 1, 2024

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ivan commented Jan 1, 2024

What separates the top 3-5 firms from the tier 2 firms after them?" - a thread by my colleague

I've carried out a lot of #quant research interviews & ran a fund. I've noticed that junior candidates tend to obsess over vanity metrics like alpha, latency, AUM, Sharpe, etc. These are important, but here's 3 things that are probably more predictive of a firm's success.

When you look at tier 1 and 2 firms in any niche, they all have strong QRs and engineers, pedigree, similar tech, capital, shared knowledge of microstructure tricks. So you can't explain what sets them apart by simple vanity metrics—maybe you could have prior to 2012—but not now.

Instead, most of the differentiation is explained by 3 things:

1. Production cycle. How often do they miss the market open after a major change like a protocol update? What happens between code review and deployment for a new feature/strategy/signal?

How fast is it to port over a strategy inspired at an old job? From Python scripts and notebooks to production? What's the marginal work to add the next symbol? The next market? The next data center? The next asset class?

2. Operational efficiency. Asymptotically, a trading firm is like a glorified recruiting business. A lot of success is explained by how you incentivize employees, attract talent, ensure smooth succession, set compensation.

The top firms are very good at making you want to stay on just another year because the bonus was just good enough to retain you. Also, are they at the pareto frontier for buy-vs-build?

How concentrated is the firm on key persons for the final go-ahead on a strategy or deployment? Good resource sharing between teams? How efficient is the colo/data procurement process in supporting the sequence of new market rollout?

3. Scale. Market access, fees, connectivity, regulatory capture. People to do the less glorious grunt work like data preprocessing, CI/CD, BOD/EOD pipelines, exchange relationship management, config management, etc. Do they have a good market simulator?

There's a selection bias for these 3 things. Meaning, it's tempting to chalk this up to competence ex post of a firm's success. But there's a surprising amount of luck involved. e.g. Hiring 1-2 right persons at the right time. Chancing upon the right infrastructure decisions.

So if you're interviewing with a firm that's trying to break into tier 1, these are things I would ask about.

https://twitter.com/christinaqi/status/1736791355232596316

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ivan commented Jan 1, 2024

One thing I really love about seedy anime websites and YouTube mp3 converters is like. They actually do what they say they’re doing. But they WILL try to trick you into downloading a virus. Like it’s almost just a greeting at this point. I try to extract a song from a YouTube video and it says free VPN installer tonight perhaps? Free VPN installer tonight queen? And I say YouTube-mp3 converter you sly dog, you know what I’m here for. Show me the goods. And YouTube-mp3 converter says ahhh you got me, no getting one over on you. Thought it was worth a try tho. Here you go king x

https://boykisses.tumblr.com/post/736546102329950208/one-thing-i-really-love-about-seedy-anime-websites (via)

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ivan commented Jan 1, 2024

there's a lot of money in being dumb enough to not understand the externalities of your behavior until you've harvested the fruits

https://twitter.com/alicemazzy/status/1736587660091646034

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ivan commented Jan 2, 2024

if i might be so boring, i think websites should look like websites, not posters or billboards

https://twitter.com/joodalooped/status/1741511560374222863

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ivan commented Jan 2, 2024

my most elitist opinion is that design by non-technical people is often a mistake

if you do not know the true constraints, you will make up your own

https://twitter.com/joodalooped/status/1740299413170618511

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ivan commented Jan 2, 2024

To make sure I understand the situation, and so I can do more of it, what exactly makes me weird?

https://twitter.com/bryan_johnson/status/1739415803697435082

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ivan commented Jan 2, 2024

Do you need to read all of these [books]? Only if you want to know the things inside, I guess.

https://nick-black.com/dankwiki/index.php/Book_list_for_streetfighting_computer_scientists

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ivan commented Jan 7, 2024

Rather than being a case of mass narcissism, the concern with one’s self-image and profile reflects first and foremost the social proliferation of second-order observation. It has taken hold in all social systems, including the “intimacy system” of personal relations. To perceive that one is seen, and how one is seen, is only rational in a society where second-order observation prevails. In fact, it represents an advanced mode of perception that is more complex, more socially attuned, and therefore more mature than clinging to the problematic notion of some authentic appearance, or personal identity, which is supposed to exist independently of being seen.

[...]

Second-order observers are highly critical. Once we realize that we do not watch the world directly but as it is presented to us, we are in a position to question how and why it is presented in the way it is being presented. This is not really possible in the mode of first-order observation where the world appears as a matter of fact. In second-order observation, facts are replaced by presentations of facts. This difference is crucial. In second-order observation we are aware, for instance, that a photo has been staged, edited, and displayed for a specific purpose. We learn to judge if this presentation is accurate, or in accordance with expectations or norms.

[...]

Negatively speaking, second-order observation fractures the world and makes it impossible to reduce it to one binding perspective, or rationality, or type of reason. Every second-order observation establishes its own rationales, but it does so in relation and in response to other perspectives.

[...]

Under conditions of profilicity, the criteria of validity for serving as a peer change rather drastically. When the point is no longer to be seen but rather to be seen as being seen, then the actual presence of a peer becomes less important. It is taken for granted that my immediate peers see me anyway. My public profiles are not really addressed to them, so they do not really count as relevant observers.

[...]

In a discussion on the news website Axios, Sean Parker, the first president of Facebook, revealed the “thought process” behind the construction of this major social media platform. Parker said that he and the other creators of Facebook were trying to find a way to “consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible.” In other words, they wanted to construct a medium that would get people addicted—at least this is what Parker suggested when he continued to explain: “And that means that we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while.” The addictiveness should be as widespread and mainstream as possible, and not be built on something illicit or morally questionable such as pornography or gambling. As Parker candidly stresses, the idea was about finding and “exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.” Parker, however, is not a social scientist or philosopher, and it is therefore unsurprising that he fails to mention other important dimensions of his pursuit. More appropriately, he should have said that he and his colleagues were looking to exploit not only a psychological but also a sociological and existential vulnerability. Ultimately, the “vulnerability” they homed in on was the human need to build identity—and to do so under postsincere and postauthentic conditions. This is what Facebook set out to do: provide a global online forum for everyone in the world to perform their profilic identity work.

[...]

This is why the addiction is so strong, and far more than merely physiological. It is possible to continue to be oneself without the next nicotine, alcohol, or even heroin fix. Indeed, one may even seem to be more oneself without these. But it is much harder to continue being oneself without validation of one’s identity, especially since we continuously form our identities precisely through such validation.

[...]

Social media users’ identity work consists in a feedback loop of posting, liking, commenting, or “whatever,” to paraphrase Parker. It is simultaneously work on one’s self-image and work for the general peer. By commenting on someone else’s profile, we contribute both to the validation of that profile and to the projection of our own. Every comment can draw further comments. On social media, every “user” (interestingly enough, the term “user” is also a reference for drug addicts) is both a profilic self-presenter and a constituent of the general peer. This makes social media strikingly different from traditional mass media like books, TV, or movies. There, the roles of presenter and audience are separate. Social media, to the contrary, is “interactive.” It achieves a higher level of personal involvement and provides a more intense forum for identity work.

[...]

It is crucial to stress: information, in this sense, does not simply indicate an item of “meaning.” I can look at the same picture of a cat again and it still makes sense in the same way, but it has lost its information value because I have seen it before. Precisely because of this split between “sense value” and “information value,” mass media and social media work unlike many other systems, such as law or academia. This is also what makes them so hungry. Information immediately destructs itself and needs to be replaced by new information. And so many websites are now feeds.

[...]

Our profilic self-portraits demand more intense attention than ever before. In sincerity and authenticity, identity needs to be maintained and developed, but it is not subjected to the same feeding frenzy as in profilicity. Profilic identity, on and off the web, is to a large extent constituted by information, not simply by meaning. It needs to be constantly updated. A publication list that has no recent publications is worthless. A résumé that is blank for the past year will not get you a job. A new trip, a new activity, a new feeling are crucial to maintaining an active and presentable personal profile.

[...]

Formilan and Stark use a highly pertinent word to describe the kind of identity work that goes into constructing and presenting personas. Personas are “curated.” Under conditions of profilicity (Formilan and Stark call it “projected identity”), a persona is “intended as a test put out into the society and continuously revised, updated, refined. Out of this process, identity develops as a curatorship”.

[...]

Maybe, given the social and technological developments of recent decades, it no longer makes much sense to speak of human beings as “autonomous individuals”; and maybe we must realize that we exist in a highly complex society and are embedded deeply in its social networks. Therein control, especially by the single individual, is limited. How we look and what we think and feel are highly contingent upon the lifeworld we inhabit, and it seems much of these aspects of life are simply not up to us. Maybe they never were.

[...]

The functioning of surveillance society cannot really be understood if it is measured against the ideal of authenticity. Instead, the rise of surveillance society should be seen in connection with the rise of a different identity technology. For better or worse, surveillance is applied so widely and functions so efficiently today, not because it impedes authenticity but because it works so well along with profilicity.

[...]

Profilicity allows for a rather different understanding of privacy than authenticity. From an authenticity perspective, surveillance is aimed at peeping into the private sphere of an individual, or into the core self, in order to discipline or manipulate it. But algorithms are not interested in authentic individuals; they do not want to know who one really is, beneath what their actions reveal about them. They are interested in specific behavioral patterns, in preferences and performances in various areas.

[...]

Profiles are transparent. This is what they are made for. Our academic publications can be looked up anytime and anywhere on our Google Scholar profiles. These profiles make transparent how others academically see us. However, by knowing the totality of our scholarly profile, you still do not know us privately.

Profiles and profilic identity do not invade privacy; to the contrary, they establish a public identity beyond and largely detached from privacy. We identify with our public profiles and, where we can, curate them to establish and express images of ourselves, but these profiles do not, and are not meant to, represent all that we think and feel. And there is no key to unlock a “core self” within them.

[...]

Moral speech has always been highly important for achieving moral identity, but it can also rouse suspicion. Confucius already pointed this out more than two thousand years ago:

There was a time, when in my dealings with others, on hearing what they had to say, I believed they would live up to it. Nowadays in my dealings with others, on hearing what they have to say, I then watch what they do.

Under conditions of sincerity, virtuous speech was not regarded as good enough. To the contrary, on its own it tended to be seen as dubious. Others might easily doubt the sincerity of someone who continuously stressed her morality. Is this person just bragging? Moral speech and virtue signaling needed validation by moral conduct. In profilicity, this is somewhat different.

Today, people are still expected to walk the walk, not just talk the talk—but we often have no way to actually “watch what they do,” as Confucius did. Most of the people Confucius dealt with were in one way or another present to him, so he could see how they acted in daily life. Today, this is not always so. We are not in a position to judge what Taylor Swift, the person, really thinks when her profilic persona posts something on the internet. We are also unable to judge what she really does—because all that we know about her is what mass and social media tell us. We know her profile, and we know that we only know the profile.

We have no hope, no need, and perhaps no wish to get to know her privately.

[...]

This is why moral communication is so crucial today. The general peer cannot observe that we actually act virtuously, because it is not present. It sees only that our speech acts are seen as virtuous or not. Virtue is displayed to the general peer in form of virtue speech. We display our virtue by making virtuous observations, by displaying moral speech, by communicating ethics. What is now often called “virtue signaling,” or, more crudely, “political correctness,” is a form of moral communication where, by making moral observations, we exhibit ourselves for further moral observation. We inscribe our own moral profile into profilic moral validation feedback loops.

[...]

Rather recently, moral self-profiling has become part of the regular employment and promotion processes in the academic system as well. Many universities in the United States now require people applying for a job or for tenure to write a so-called diversity statement. In analogy to a “teaching statement,” it is expected to outline an academic’s views on how to professionally promote the morally charged value of diversity (regarding especially race, gender, and sexual orientation). As the office of Graduate Studies at the University of Nebraska states: “You can safely assume that any university that requests [a diversity statement] is very committed to inclusivity and supporting their diverse population so they are looking for someone who would be supportive of that mission.” This only states the obvious: academics are not expected here to question the value of diversity. They are expected, instead, to express their support of it. No candidate who is interested in getting or keeping a job at a university that demands such a statement would dare to disclose any potential disagreement with this value. Therefore the function of the statement cannot really be to find out how sincerely or authentically committed someone is to diversity.

Diversity statements need to be understood in the context of profilicity rather than sincerity or authenticity. The official requirement of such statements is itself an act of virtue speech. A university uses this requirement to signal very clearly—to the applicant, to itself (its employees, students, stake holders), and to the public—its moral stance on diversity. It thus feeds its moral profile. Job applicants, correspondingly, are forced to engage in a practical virtue speech exercise signaling profilic alignment with the institution they hope to join. While their sincere or authentic commitment to diversity cannot be tested, their competence in casting themselves as diversity supporters is indeed tested. Whether this fosters sincere dedication to or an authentic pursuit of diversity in the applicant or by the institution is irrelevant for the procedure. It is relevant only to see if those who write such statements are willing and able to produce virtue speech and incorporate it into their professional profiles.

[...]

“One can only become the leader if he is capable of manipulating how he is observed,” says Niklas Luhmann (2013, 119; translation modified) in explaining how politics work under conditions of second-order observation, especially in democracies where elections are political popularity contests.

[...]

In the economy, profiles make money. In politics, they grant power. In academia, they establish “truth,” or at least credibility.

High-profile academics find it easy to publish. They get invited as keynote speakers to major conferences where hundreds or thousands listen to them. Afterward, these hundreds or thousands of lower-profile scholars split up into tiny panels listening to one another’s exegeses of high-profile academics.

This is one of the major frustrations that come with profilicity: only a few can be high profile. The rest must remain low profile and find a way to cope with their situation. In sincerity, everyone can be sincere. You need only your immediate peers—your family members, for instance—to confirm your sincerity to you. In authenticity, one way of feeling especially unique is to self-identify as the genius unrecognized by the masses. One can feel content living authentically only if a few people realize authenticity; after all, everyone else is fake. These strategies don’t really work in profilicity. Your family members’ likes don’t really count, and the unseen profile is all but worthless. Just as in the capitalist economy, the profilicity lottery only increases the gap between those who are really successful and those who are not.

[...]

In tight-knit communities, social roles dominate, and one is expected to live as an onion. Where this happens, pressure to conform can become immense. Role-related beliefs about how one should behave, think, and feel are thick enough, sufficiently extensive in their reach, and held by enough of one’s peers that people can drown in a sea of external expectations—a veritable regime of sincerity. Whenever sincerity becomes such a regime, for instance, in the form of an oppressive Confucian ideology or a strict Puritan ethos, social expectations rooted in role-based standards can easily become harmful to individuals and societies. Suicides in rural China provide a contemporary example of how the demands of sincerity can become unbearable.

Until about two decades ago, China had one of the highest suicide rates in the world, and suicide was particularly common in rural areas. Along with rapid modernization, economic growth, and urbanization, the suicide rate fell spectacularly. Still, China stands out in one respect: It “is one of the few countries in the world that has a higher suicide rate by women over men.”

As empirical research suggests, both the prevalence of female over male suicide and the prevalence of rural over urban suicide can be related to a continued regime of sincerity in a pre-industrialized setting where women, given their subordinated status, suffer even more from role pressures than men. Such factors seem to outweigh mental illness as a decisive suicide trigger. Introducing an extensive collection of case studies on suicide in China, Wu Fei points out:

In [Chinese] stories of suicide, some psychological factors certainly play important roles, but we would be greatly oversimplifying them if we were to define them with current psychiatric terminologies. . . . Because people who suffer domestic injustice are likely to become depressed and commit suicide, of course psychiatry will play an important role in the control of suicide; but people do not merely want to be mentally healthy. They also want to be happy and lucky, and this is already beyond the reach of psychiatry. After a long period of fieldwork on suicide, I have come to understand suicide [in China] from the perspective of justice.

Wu’s notions of “justice” and “injustice” are directly tied to social roles and relationships, as the stories of suicide he recounts demonstrate. “Justice” indicates for Wu treatment in accordance with a role identity that enables a person to assume their proper social position and to be “happy.” Those who suffer “injustice” feel that they have been treated in a way that fundamentally undermines their role identity and prevents them from engaging in proper relationships. They cannot be “happy.”

Many of the suicide motives that Wu mentioned might astonish Western readers, but they make perfect sense in the context of a Confucianism-informed regime of sincerity: “There was no egg in his soup while everyone else had it”; “His daughter-in-law hid steamed buns from him”; “His sons mistreated him”; “Her husband blamed her for the mistreatment of her grandmother”; “His father blamed him for not carrying water”; “As a prostitute she could not marry her lover.” In each case, a person has been denied recognition of their role identity within their community. Not to receive one’s proper food is considered expulsion from the family; to be mistreated by one’s sons is considered the destruction of one’s status as father. Blame for not having fulfilled one’s role obligations (serving one’s grandmother, carrying water) is perceived as de facto ejection from one’s kinship group. The inability to marry prevents one from achieving central role-identity characteristics, and such a situation can be highly precarious, especially for those who are already at the bottom of the role hierarchy. If identity can be found only in successful role fulfillment and community relationships, then a denial of role recognition is perceived as catastrophic. Since the onion has no pit, there is no “personal core” that one can retreat to.

Under a harsh regime of sincerity, it is impossible to achieve identity if one’s role enactment is thoroughly frustrated. In such cases the only way out, it may seem, is to let the onion, that is, one’s network of relationships, crumble. Without a “pit,” proactive agency is difficult to establish on one’s own, so suicide, as a radical form of “passive aggression,” becomes an option. By killing oneself, the subject who is denied personhood within the family brings severe disrepute to that family and thereby shames and socially punishes it. If someone feels that they have “lost face”—that is, their identity—at the hands of their family, they can in turn make the whole family lose face by committing suicide. The family is publicly exposed as dysfunctional and violating proper role enactment. The act of suicide serves as an act of revenge for the injustice received—the denial of role identity—and is intended to bring the perceived perpetrators to justice by harming their reputation and status within the local community.

[...]

Systemic role incompatibilities under a regime of sincerity are the norm, not the exception—and they reveal the underlying paradox of sincerity. Typically, a sincerity ethos will claim that roles within social organizations—the family is the prime example—are not “socially constructed” but grounded in natural or divine law. The Catholic Church, for instance, maintains that marriage can mean a lifelong partnership only between one man and one woman and considers any alternative to this both unnatural and against God’s will. Similarly, Confucians will emphasize that lifelong affectionate submission to one’s parents has little to do with social conventions but is an inborn human trait as exemplified by semidivine role models. Any deviation from such submission can be considered wrong and “perverse.”

In addition to family structures, both the Christian and the Confucian traditions also justified various feudal political structures as reflecting the same natural or divine order.

The counterfactual logic of sincerity suggests that one can build a coherent personality through various social roles because they are manifestations of an overarching divine plan, a moral order, or (human) nature.

[...]

The transition from sincerity to authenticity is linked with modernization. Francis Fukuyama, in his book Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment, makes up a simple story to show how someone who grows up under the conditions of sincerity might shift to value authenticity:

Consider the situation of a young peasant, Hans, who grows up in a small village in Saxony. Hans’s life in the little village is fixed: he is living in the same house as his parents and grandparents; he is engaged to a girl whom his parents found acceptable; he was baptized by the local priest; and he plans to continue working the same plot of land as his father. It doesn’t occur to Hans to ask “Who am I?” . . . However, he hears that big opportunities are opening up in the rapidly industrializing Ruhr valley, so he travels to Düsseldorf to get a job in a steel factory there. . . . He is no longer under the thumb of his parents and local priest and finds people with different religious affiliations than those in his village. He is still committed to marrying his fiancée but tempted by some of the local women he has met, and he feels a bracing sense of freedom in his personal life. . . . For the first time in his life, Hans can make choices about how to live his life, but he wonders who he really is and what he would like to be. The question of identity, which would never have been a problem back in his village, now becomes central.

The predictability of Hans’s life in his village was so encompassing that he never thought about his own identity. In Düsseldorf everything changes. Fukuyama says that Hans “can” make choices. More accurately, Hans has to make choices. And he does not just “wonder” about who he is. The question of identity demands an answer. (Just remember your own teenage struggles to figure out who you are.) Identity as authenticity came to characterize modern life in a way previously unknown. The old sincerity has survived in certain areas of life, but its dominance is gone. Only on the fringes of society, such as among the Amish perhaps, does it still strongly pervade entire communities.

When authenticity grew out from philosophical inquiry, past religious and artistic experiences, and beyond Hans’s basic question of identity, it contributed to reshaping the political landscape, uprooting hierarchies, overturning monarchs, and developing democracies. The individual’s claim to be recognized as such gained more and more currency. Although early attempts to grant individual rights were not greatly inclusive, over time people of color, women, and homosexuals fought for and acquired many of the same rights as straight white men. In the wake of these developments, a new sociopolitical attitude became increasingly popular. More nuanced characteristics of individual personality were announced inherently important and in need of sociopolitical recognition. Identity politics was born, eventually also inspiring a revival of the sincerity ethos, but in a new form. This development left what may be called a postauthentic “political new sincerity” in its wake.

According to Fukuyama, identity politics arose out of the modern idea that there is an “authentic self buried deep inside us” and the fear that “society doesn’t give it adequate recognition.” Thus “the problem is not how do you bring the individual into compliance with society, the problem becomes how do you change the society. Society is wrong and the inner self is right” (Ezra Klein Show). This view, in turn, can foster the divisive feeling that “the authentic people in my group are the good people and everyone else is bad” (Commonwealth Club). Fukuyama suggests that the social divisions created by identity politics may be addressed by revitalizing the conception of a “national identity”—which is supposed to replace the primacy of the authentic identity paradigm.

[...]

One case in point is Francis Fukuyama’s rather striking (mis-)assessment of Donald Trump. Here profilicity is mistaken as authenticity.

Fukuyama writes: “Trump was the perfect practitioner of the ethics of authenticity that defines our age: he may be mendacious, malicious, bigoted, and unpresidential, but at least he says what he thinks.” Trump’s Twitter posts are cited as illustrative examples of his “authenticity.” They suggest, according to Fukuyama, that Trump is saying what he really thinks and feels. Unlike the tweets of George Bush or Barack Obama, which were obviously vetted for political incorrectness and intended to garner appeal, Trump is harsh, offensive, and downright nasty, but precisely therein he is judged to be authentic.

However, this so-called perfect practitioner of the ethics of authenticity is actually a self-made mass media project through and through. He is well-known for his prior successes and failures in branding, in projects ranging from steaks to hotels. And, as is widely acknowledged, his electoral victory was to a large extent due to his and his team’s social media savvy. The obviously curated nature of Trump’s public image and persona is hardly an expression of a core inner self, and thus it is difficult to consider the former host of The Apprentice a model of authenticity. Trump’s “inauthenticity” is, moreover, not masked. The president is, as Vox put it, “weirdly honest about his lying.” His account of the creation of his core electoral catchphrase “Drain the swamp” is a paradigmatic example: “Funny how that term caught on, isn’t it? I tell everyone: I hated it! Somebody said, “Drain the swamp.’ I said, ‘Oh, that’s so hokey. That is so terrible.’ I said, ‘All right. I’ll try it.’ So like a month ago, I said, ‘Drain the swamp.’ The place went crazy. I said, ‘Whoa. Watch this.’ Then I said it again. Then I started saying it like I meant it, right? And then I said it, I started loving it.” Trump represents neither the sincere statesman-like father of the nation nor the rugged individual whose every utterance reveals his authentic inner self and convictions. Instead, he embodies a political triumph of profilicity. He says what he says because it furthers his profilicity-based popularity, not because it is authentic. His audience doesn’t care that he uses phrases only to please them—they are still pleased! Many of his followers do not take him as authentic but love his staged public persona and the way he mocks his political opponents’ increasingly unconvincing attempts to be authentic. While profilicity appears from the perspective of authenticity as a “weirdly honest” lie, authenticity appears from the perspective of profilicity as a weirdly dishonest truthfulness.

[...]

Still, the desire to move back from, or beyond, authenticity and individualism is rather limited today. Jordan Peterson, whose quasi-commonsensical, anti-PC, no-bs commentary on current issues has gained even more fame than the “man-up” self-help philosophy on which it is founded, audaciously states:

The fundamental assumptions of Western civilization are valid! How about that? You think it’s an accident? Here’s how you find out, ok. Which countries do people want to move away from? Hey, not ours! Which countries do people want to move to? Ours! Guess what, they work better. And it’s not because we went around the world stealing everything we could get our hands on. It’s because we got certain fundamental assumptions right, thank God for that! After thousands and thousands of years of trying. And because of that we’ve managed to establish a set of civilizations that are shining lights in the world. . . . [We aren’t that great] but nonetheless, you know, we’re as good as it’s got. And unless we can come up with something better, we should be very careful about messing around with that. So why don’t we start with the assumption that we are doing something right? One of the things we are doing right, for example, is that we actually value the individual, right? The individual has intrinsic value in Western societies. Do you know how long it took for people to formulate that as an idea? And how unlikely that idea is that poor you, you know, useless powerless you, with all your damn faults, you’re actually worth something! You’re worth something to the point that the law has to respect you. God! We don’t want to abandon that for some half-witted collectivism, which we’re doing as rapidly as possible. Because one of the things that characterizes the radical Left types is, they don’t give a damn about you as an individual, or about individuals at all. You’re black or you’re white, you’re Latino, or you’re transsexual or you’re homosexual, whatever. You’re a group, you’re a member of a group, and the only thing that matters is the group. Well I can tell you, if the only thing that matters is the group, you bloody well don’t matter very much!

The “group” Peterson criticizes is not the premodern tribe Junger idealizes. But still, Peterson’s defense of individualism, and his general attitude in his lectures and texts, gives little credence to old-fashioned sincerity (despite his own personal life). It took thousands of years for Western societies to shed themselves of stringent collectivist, role-based identity, and Peterson hopes we never go back. Although many thinkers are less enthusiastic about this development, most share Peterson’s historical depiction of progress.

[...]

THE PARADOXES OF AUTHENTICITY

The Iranian American journalist and Catholic convert Sohrab Ahmari describes his own childhood difficulties with the inward turn of authenticity. Growing up in Iran, he was, like his parents, rebelling against institutionalized Islam. Ahmari did, however, feel a strong need for some type of guidance: “I longed for some cosmic and moral absolutes. Yet the only absolute command that my father handed down to me was: ‘Be yourself.’ It was maddening. Who was this ‘self’ dwelling inside me, to whom I owed such fidelity? My father wouldn’t say.”

More than simply difficult, however, this dictum is fundamentally paradoxical. Ahmari’s father wasn’t letting his son “be himself,” he was commanding it. Ahmari first had to learn that he should “be himself ” and then figure out, through the examples of others, what “being yourself ” meant: “Hadn’t my father urged me to be myself to cut my own path across life’s thicket of choices? Well, I would do just that. It didn’t occur to me at the time that, in the name of independence and originality, I was, in fact, adopting someone else’s persona, a prefabricated cultural type”. Idealizing comic book heroes, writers, artists, and film directors, Ahmari chronicles his early teenage attempts at “being himself.” As with anyone else, his authenticity was all about trying on other people’s costumes and seeing which ones were comfortable for a time. He could only “discover” himself by imitating models, and his models were, predictably enough, Nietzsche, then French “Existentialists,” then Marxism, and finally Christianity.

[...]

Posner tries to be unique by rejecting other people’s expectations of him. But he eventually realizes that the rejection of other people’s expectations is, paradoxically, also a reaction to their expectations—it is not doing simply one’s own thing and being authentic. Under a regime of authenticity, everyone feels obliged to be authentic. Individuality is a demand enforced by a crowd. By countering the expectations of society and trying to be special, I fulfill society’s expectation to be special. Or, as Elena Esposito puts it, “nothing is as unoriginal as the desire to be original.”

Today, the discovery of the inauthenticity of authenticity, as in Posner’s case, is a common experience. Suspicion hangs like a dark cloud over authenticity. It is increasingly railed against by those who see the promise of pure, stark, awe-inspiring, and unconquerable authenticity as not only paradoxical but ultimately unfulfillable. Before authenticity became the norm, however, in the transitional period from sincerity to authenticity, its discovery could still be perceived as a marvelous revelation, full of promises of grandeur and originality. One prime example is Jean Jacques Rousseau’s (1813/1953) autobiographical celebration of his own authenticity in the Confessions. He sees himself in opposition to convention and brazenly claims to be completely one-of-a-kind: “I know my own heart and understand my fellow man. But I am made unlike any one I have ever met; I will even venture to say that I am like no one in the whole world. I may be no better, but at least I am different. Whether Nature did well or ill in breaking the mold in which she formed me, is a question which can only be resolved after the reading of my book”.

[...]

Identity is constantly negotiated and renegotiated on both a personal and a social level. While, by definition, identity is that which is regarded as constant about us as particular subjects, it turns out to be subject to ongoing transformations. Identity is, somewhat absurdly, nonidentical to itself. It is, nevertheless, necessary.

Identity is needed: psychologically for individuals to be able to function but also politically for shaping communities and forming social organizations. Yet there is no core dimension of identity that can firmly ground it; one’s particular race or ethical commitments do not fully identify that person. Therefore technologies of identity are needed to make identity, against all odds, plausible. This is what sincerity, authenticity, and profilicity do. None of them is perfect, or necessarily better than the others; all serve the purpose of integrating various incongruent levels and dimensions of identity.

The main function of identity is to establish and uphold stability of personhood; identity merges the different aspects of a person into a whole. It promises reliability and recognizability on which trust and (self-)confidence can be built, and to which pride and value, including economic and political value, can be attached. From time to time, however, cracks between different dimensions of personhood come to the fore, and what we normally must take to be a coherent and congruent identity falls apart. Identity is a counterfactual but necessary postulate that allows us to reduce overwhelming human complexity to manage-able simplicity—so that human complexity can further evolve.

[...]

Unlike what Knodt’s expression “hermeneutic despair” might suggest, however, the gaps between the systemic dimensions body, mind, and social persona are by no means a depressing flaw of the human condition. Quite to the contrary, these gaps open up space for evolving complexity and development. They make possible biological, mental, and social flexibility, productivity, creativity, diversity, and “freedom.” Humans are different from artificial intelligence precisely because the human body (including the brain) does not mechanically program what exactly we think and how we feel. Our thoughts and feelings take shape within a highly dynamic environment, most crucially constituted by our body and our social surroundings. Because of this systemic multiplicity, each systemic realm—mind, society, and body—can emerge in its own autopoietic way. Yes, we cannot really be sure what someone, including ourselves, really means when they say something. But precisely because of the systemic separation between communication and minds, the need for interpretation ensues, and thus we can have, for instance, psychology, philosophy, and literature. And, probably more important, precisely therefore we can also have love as we know it, namely, as a very complex and dynamic form of human interrelationship involving all kinds of social, psychological, and bodily bonds, exchanges, and interpretations. If, indeed, we would fully understand one another, like two connected computers having complete access to each other’s data, love might not make sense.

[...]

That our body does not determine our mind and social persona is by no means a terrifying insight, and particularly not so if this body happens to be female or black. Modifying Hegel’s famous dictum that freedom consists in the insight into necessity, it could be said (in line with Hegel’s intentions, as we believe) that, more precisely speaking, freedom actually consists in the insight into the contingency of what was presumed to be necessary. In other words, identity is free once we realize that there is no need to overinternalize it.

THE PROBLEM OF IDENTITY

Such freedom is a lot of work—and that this is so is another insight we can derive from Hegel. The toilsome nature of freedom also comes to the fore in identity. It certainly took a lot of effort and courage to make the once highly controversial claim that feminine identity is nothing natural. Moreover, if we do not regard identity as given by birth, then we are posed with the potentially arduous task of somehow achieving it. An advantage of premodern necessity- and congruity-based models of identity, manifesting themselves in regimes of sincerity, is that one does not have to question who one is. If this question does not arise, there is no need for a concept of “identity” in the contemporary sense to begin with.

[...]

Reflecting Kellner’s so-called anthropological folklore, Mead outlines a shift toward a more individual and complex form of identity in what he calls “civilized society.” Identity in civilized society departs from the conventionally prescribed role-identity that prevailed in “primitive society”:

In primitive society, to a far greater extent than in civilized society, individuality is constituted by the more or less perfect achievement of a given social type—a type already given, indicated, or exemplified in the organized pattern of social conduct, in the integrated relational structure of the social process of experience and behavior which the given social group exhibits and is carrying on; in civilized society individuality is constituted rather by the individual’s departure from, or modified realization of, any given social type than by his conformity, and tends to be something much more distinctive and singular and peculiar than it is in primitive human society.

[...]

Erving Goffman already explained the emergence of self and society in a similar way. His analysis of human interaction and the Zhuangzi’s understanding of identity are both conceptions of genuine pretending.

Genuine pretending is not an ideal to follow. It is not an existential model one can chose or not. It is the mode of human existence that gives rise to the formation of identity and society.

Everyone is genuinely pretending all the time. Mothers sincerely committing to their roles are genuinely pretending, just as artists when expressing their authenticity, or YouTubers when curating their profiles. There is nothing wrong with this—and there is no alternative to it. Sanity, at least from our perspective, is best maintained by realizing that personal and social identity can only be genuinely pretended—that one can be a sincere mother or an authentic artist or a profilic YouTuber while at the same time not regarding these identities as binding, essential, or ideal. Truly, they are fluid, temporary, and contingent. Identity participates in the transformation of things. Sanity is challenged when people are either unable to achieve identity at all or when they become identity fundamentalists, disregarding the transformation of identity along with everything else, and overcommitting to supposedly “true” roles, selves, or profiles.

[...]

The most significant Daoist term for social and psychological ease is you 游 (pronounced “yo”). It is used more than one hundred times in the Zhuangzi in different variations and meanings. The term is related to the words for “swimming” and “journey,” and the written character contains the radical “water,” associating it loosely with “flow.” It expresses the idea of a rather effortless, playful, and not goal-oriented motion. “Rambling around without destination” is how A. C. Graham (2001) translated the title of the first chapter of the Zhuangzi: the three-character expression xiaoyao you that ends with you. This expression alludes to the movement of children, or animals, like fish.

[...]

PRESSURES OF PROFILICITY

It is the “slave” in the blood of the vain person . . . that tries to seduce him to good opinions of himself; and it is likewise the slave who straightway kneels down before these opinions, as if he himself were not the one who had called them forth.

— Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

[...]

The affirmation of genuine pretending is, to speak with Nietzsche, the attitude of the “noble person” who finds the vanity of those who first “try to elicit a good opinion about themselves . . . and who then themselves nevertheless believe this good opinion” quite tasteless. The identity mechanism Nietzsche describes here is the same in all identity technologies. In sincerity, one may eventually believe that one is the devoted role bearer that one wanted to be praised as. In authenticity, one may eventually believe in one’s uniqueness and originality; and in profilicity, one may in fact “kneel down before” the success of one’s profile, “as if he himself were not the one who had called it forth.”

Unquestioned identity work leads to pretended genuineness, or worse. Rather than finding the identity of oneself and others, including profilic identity, good or bad, or right or wrong, the “noble person” will understand how and why identity is achieved. She will be critical, but not judgmental.

Hans-Georg Moeller, Paul J. D'Ambrosio - You and Your Profile: Identity After Authenticity

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ivan commented Jan 10, 2024

The frivolity and boredom which unsettle the established order, the vague foreboding of something unknown, these are the heralds of approaching change. The gradual crumbling that left unaltered the face of the whole is cut short by a sunburst which, in one flash, illuminates the features of the new world.

G. W. F. Hegel, A. V. Miller (translator) - Phenomenology of Spirit

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