We are accustomed to seeing the real world as one of many possible worlds. This perception must be corrected. All possible worlds lie in the realm of the real.

Nelson Goodman, Fact, Fiction and Forecast


The past?

Never again the victim: Technical innovation leads the inventor on a new path. He should be freed from the boundaries of his individuality and the frailty of his body. This path leaves previous history behind it like a bittersweet dream and is accompanied by memories which have already begun to transfigure the temporal, that which has disappeared. The misery of the transient and its continuously collapsing surroundings are placed in an increasingly mild light that lets us forget certain inconsistencies. The utopia of perfect suspension of all conflicting positions appears in the moment we believe to have reached it, no longer before us, but already over. The new human being who sees the pictures of the conquered world can hardly believe that the forms that have become accidental, a thing of the past, were once necessary. It is his luck that he has nothing to compare it to, nothing that might disturb his illusion of realized ideals. The new human perceives the remembered as being as timeless as his own artificial present. But this simulation is ruled by a trick of nature that closes wounds perfectly so that the vulnerability of the affected appendage is forgotten, so that it may be completely at ones disposal for the next risky mission.


Texts Without Verbs, Cologne 2002, p. 177