Return to Saussure

gnōthi seautón. AI image Introduction Isaiah Berlin’s essay The Hedgehog and the Fox (1953) opens with a fragment by Archilochus: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” From this simple line, Berlin constructs a taxonomy of intellectual temperaments. The hedgehog organizes the world through a single unifying vision; the fox thrives amid diversity, pursuing many unrelated aims. “For there exists a great chasm,” Berlin writes, “between those who relate everything to a single central vision, and those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory” ( The Hedgehog and the Fox , p. 3). This opposition—visionary unity versus analytical plurality—offers a striking lens through which to reread the foundations of Western philosophy. Plato’s Socrates, who knew only that he did not know, exemplifies the hedgehog’s single-mindedness. Aristotle, who multiplied the branches of knowledge and coined the names of its disciplines, embodies the fox’s expansi...

dunamis  and energeia. AI image   Introduction “Man is something that shall be overcome,” declares Zarathustra ( Prologue , §3). In another passage Nietzsche writes: “Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Übermensch—a rope over an abyss.” ( The Will to Power , §868). These two lines, brief yet immense, contain the essence of Nietzsche’s anthropology: humanity is not an accomplished being but a transition. Man is not an endpoint, but a bridge, a perilous crossing suspended between what he was and what he could become. To explore what this means, it is helpful to borrow the vocabulary of Aristotle’s Metaphysics : potentiality ( dunamis ) and actuality ( energeia ). In these terms, man appears as a potentiality—a being capable of transformation—whose realization may proceed in radically different directions. Nietzsche offers two possible outcomes: the last man , who renounces the struggle of becoming, and the Übermensch , who embraces the creative task of self-...

The abyss. AI image   Introduction: Nietzsche and the Digital Horizon What would Nietzsche make of a world governed by intelligent machines, where information flows seamlessly and every desire can be satisfied with a click? The philosopher who announced the “death of God” and the coming of nihilism might see in our digital civilization both the fulfillment of his prophecy and the confirmation of his deepest fears. The modern ideal of comfort without effort—an existence of frictionless consumption—resembles what Nietzsche, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra , called der letzte Mensch , “the last man.” This figure embodies the exhaustion of human aspiration, the triumph of mediocrity disguised as progress. Yet Nietzsche also envisioned another possibility: the Übermensch or “overman,” a being capable of creating new values and affirming life beyond the ruins of metaphysics. Between these two figures—the complacent last man and the creative overman—our technological age finds itself suspe...

The Shapeshifter. AI image     Introduction: The Alien as Deconstructive Figure Few images express the logic of deconstruction as vividly as the alien double, the being that looks human but is not. In countless science-fiction narratives, from Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) to more contemporary reworkings, the tension between resemblance and difference becomes the stage on which identity collapses. Derrida once remarked that deconstruction is “neither an analysis nor a critique, but a way of tracing what is already inscribed within” ( Positions , 1972). Likewise, the alien parasite does not destroy humanity from without; it exposes the fractures already latent within what we call the human. The smallest discrepancy — an absent emotion, a missing gesture, an imperceptible mark — becomes the point where the entire edifice of recognition unravels. What seemed marginal becomes central, and what appeared essential is shown to depend on its supplement. The Alien as Paras...