ceiling, penknife jabbed into his leg, Su Qin had learned in those long, effortful years of study? What secret had he penetrated? What sort of education had he finally received at the end of his humiliations and breakthroughs? He had mastered the energy of his age - and the exact right sensibility to use it. Might we, Nan seemed to be asking, do the same?
7.
Faced with the mad unsettling of his world during the Industrial Revolution of the mid 19 century, the German philosopher Friederich Nietzsche once mused that survival and greatness would depend on having what he called a “Sixth Sense”, by which he meant a feeling for history. Surely, he felt, an instinct for ancient balances and truths would provide a guide rail of sorts as the world lurched into a new age, along an uncharted road.? If you could say “This has happened before” or “This is how we got to where we are,” Nietzsche believed, it was the first step towards knowing where to go next. Nan and Kissinger knew the need for something else for our age as well, for a different instinct. It wasn’t just about knowing your history or feeling the real possibility of human progress or tragedy. Rather it was about feeling out the roots of the present in a certain way. All of our ideas - from how we love to what we think of politics - are taken from the feedback and experience of our lives, from what we've seen and done and felt and learned. We are the sum total of our experiences, in this sense. But what to do if changes happen at some deeper, insensible level where the old ideas and instincts, where the tools of sight and smell, of feel and taste and hearing don’t fully answer? What to do when we are confronted with what we've never experienced before? Never even dreamed of, perhaps?
This book is the story of a completely fresh way of feeling our world. By this I mean a sensation that is as newborn as the lively sense of connection, of freedom, of electric uncertainty and hope that come with the knowledge that we are unboxing a new age. If Nietzsche’s era demanded a feeling for history, our own age insists ona
3 Surely, he felt: Nietzche describes the “Sixth Sense” in Beyond Good and Evil in the following way: “The historical sense (or the capacity for divining quickly the order of rank of the evaluations according to which a people, a society, a human being has lived, the ‘divinatory instinct’ for the relationships of these evaluations, for the relation of the authority of values to the authority of effective forces): this historical sense, to which we Europeans lay claim as our specialty, has come to us in the wake of the mad and fascinating semi-barbarism into which Europe has been plunged through the democratic mingling of classes and races—only the nineteenth century knows this sense, as its sixth sense. The past of every form and mode of life, of cultures that formerly lay close beside or on top of one another, streams into us “modern souls” thanks to this mingling, our instincts now run back in all directions, we ourselves are a kind of chaos. In the end, as I said before, ‘the spirit’ perceives its advantage in all this.” See Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche and Rolf Horstmann. Beyond Good and Evil Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 224.
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