In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

346 CODES
necessity of adapting to Reality, have not completely given up the dream
of achieving truth. One of these voices is Adolf Hitler's. He is driven by
the double desire to claim for himself the role of truth-bearing genius
and prophet, and also to make sure that, if he fails to be accepted as a
genius and prophet, he can still assume that nothing beats the pragmatic
attitude of a successful politician: "Amid the monotony of everyday life,
even important people often seem unimportant and hardly stand out
against the average elements in their surroundings. But as soon as they
face a situation in which others would despair or go wrong, out of the
plain average child the ingenious nature grows visibly. Not infrequently,
this occurs to the astonishment of all those who have had the opportunity
to observe the child as he has grown up in the narrow confines of
bourgeois life. As a result of this process, the prophet is rarely honored
in his own country" (Hitler, 321). Others reserve the pursuit of truth for
science. But if science, as Jose Ortega y Gasset suggests, is allowed to
concern itself only with truth, then it becomes an institution that risks
becoming detached from aspects of practical usefulness: "From the enormous
block of knowledge that constitutes modern science, only a tiny
part yields something useful. Applied science-technology-is simply an
appendix to the enormous volume represented by pure science, the science
that believes itself to be without purposes or utilitarian results.
Intelligence, then, is a mainly useless function, a marvelous luxury of the
organism, an inexplicable superfluity ... It appears to us ... as an
activity that is primarily a pastime and only secondarily utilitarian"
(Ortega y Gasset, 122-123).
The Brazilian journalist Antonio de Alcantara Machado associates
such scientific research, free of any practical value or application, with
the United States, since both seem futuristic to him. [see Present vs. Past,
Center vs. Periphery] He engages in a familiar psychological tradeoff:
seeing the United States as ridiculous because then one can repress one's
admiration for it. "The European newspapers are still worried about a
telegram that they received from California. It was a truly horrifying
telegram, revealing that an American astronomer has discovered a new
universe. It's true: a new universe, with stars, planets, galaxies-everything
a respectable universe needs. Discovering planets has become trivial
for American scientists. They now go further than that ... Amazing!
You'll agree that their discovery is sensational. Compared to it, everything
that the American imagination has invented so far seems small. The