The Intellectuals’ Dangerous Craving [Raumnot] for Space (Descartes and Nietzsche)

The world-space thinker and the singer in his play space have carved into philosophers' sacramental formulas. Descartes has defined physical space as extended substance, subject to physical laws, Friedrich Nietzsche gave a newly appointed play space—a playground and Olympic racetrack, where the laws of physical, exterior space have no application. Only by acknowledging the doubling of spaces is it possible to understand the interpenetrability of their effect. Each of them invoked a particular kind of space. Descartes and Nietzsche both stepped up to the end of the death-space of the world, and the other in the play-space of the interior. Then they testify to the hegemony of spaces, which the living generation will have to tear themselves away from. Both are one-generational men, because they lived without being jointed to the generations before and after them. Forfeiting the spaces, he who believes in a time that is his, against space.