« June 2012 | Main | September 2012 »
July 16, 2012
in naive terms, 'understanding' just means: being able to express something new in the language of something old, familiar
e.g., 'I am unwell' - a judgement like this presupposes a great and late-attained neutrality on the part of the observer: the naive man always says 'This or that makes me unwell' - his being unwell only becomes clear to him once he sees a reason for being unwell...
Nietzsche - Writings from the Late Notebooks
Posted by amin at 5:40 PM
The only means of refuting priests and religions is always this: showing that their errors have ceased to be beneficial - that they rather do harm; in short, that their own 'proof of their force' no longer holds...
Nietzsche - Writings from the Late Notebooks
Posted by amin at 5:37 PM
On the asceticism of the strong
The task of this asceticism, which is only a transitional training and not a goal: to free oneself from the old emotional impulses of traditional values. To learn, step by step, how to follow one's path to the 'beyond good and evil'.
First stage:
To endure atrocities
To commit atrocities
Second, more difficult, stage:
To endure basenesses
To commit basenesses: including, as a preliminary exercise: to become ludicrous, make oneself ludicrous.
- To provoke contempt and nevertheless sustain distance by means of an (unfathomable) smile from the above
- To take upon oneself a number of degrading crimes, e.g., stealing money, so as to test one's sense of balance
- For a while not to do, speak, strive for anything that doesn't arouse fear or contempt, that doesn't force the decent and virtuous into war - that doesn't shut one out...
to represent the opposite of what one is (better still, not the exact opposite but simply something different: this is more difficult)
- To walk every tightrope, to dance on every possibility: to get one's genius into one's feet
- For stretches of time, to deny - even slander - one's ends with one's means
- Once and for all to represent a character which hides the fact that one has five or six others
- Not to be afraid of the five bad things: cowardice, ill repute, vice, lying, woman -
Nietzsche - Writings from the Late Notebooks
Posted by amin at 5:25 PM
July 14, 2012
Meaning of 'knowledge': here, as with 'good' or 'beautiful', the concept is to be taken in a strict and narrowly anthropocentric and biological sense. For a particular species to survive - and grow in power - its conception of reality must be able to encompass enough of what's calculable and constant to construct on this basis a schema for its behavior. Usefulness for preservation, and not some abstract and theoretical need not to be deceived, is what motivates the development of the organs of knowledge...they develop in such a way that their capacity to observe suffices for our preservation. In other words: the measure of the will to know depends on the measure of the growth in the species' will to power: a species seizes that much reality in order to become master of it, to take it into service.
Nietzsche - Writings from the Late Notebooks
Posted by amin at 2:30 PM
July 7, 2012
My 'compassion'. - This is a feeling for which no name satisfies me: I experience it when I see a waste of precious capacities, for example at the sight of Luther - what force, and what insipid provincial problems (at a time when in France, the bold and cheerful scepticism of a Montaigne had already become possible!). Or when I see a man falling behind what he could have become, due to some stupid chance. Or worse, when thinking about mankind's lot - as when, with fear and contempt, I happen to observe the European politics of today, which is certainly also helping to weave the fabric of all mankind's future. Yes, what might man 'become' if - -! This is my kind of 'compassion'; even if there is no one suffering whose suffering I would share.
Nietzsche - Writings from the Late Notebooks
Posted by amin at 12:41 PM
Becoming, felt and interpreted from within, would be continual creating by someone dissatisfied, over-wealthy, endlessly tense and endlessly under pressure, by a god whose only means of overcoming the torment of being is constant transformation and exchange - illusion as the temporary redemption achieved every moment; the world as the succession of divine visions and redemptions as illusions.
Nietzsche - Writings from the Late Notebooks
Posted by amin at 12:37 PM
Our four cardinal virtues: courage, compassion, insight, and solitude - they would be unbearable to themselves if they hadn't forged an alliance with a cheerful and mischievous vice called ' courtesy'.
Nietzsche - Notes from the Late Notebooks
Posted by amin at 12:20 PM
That the world's value lies in our interpretation (- that somewhere else other interpretations than merely human ones may be possible -); that previous interpretations have been perspectival appraisals by means of which we preserve ourselves in life, that is, in the will to power and to the growth of power; that every heightening of man brings with it an overcoming of narrower interpretations; that every increase in strength and expansion of power opens up new perspectives and demands a belief in new horizons - this runs through my writings. The world which matters to us is false, i.e., is nor a fact but a fictional elaborations and filling out of a meagre store of observations; it is 'in flux', as something becoming, as a constantly shifting falsity that never gets any nearer to truth, for - there is no 'truth'.
Nietzsche - Notes from the Late Notebooks
Posted by amin at 12:12 PM
July 4, 2012
Let us remove the highest goodness from the concept of God: it is unworthy of a god. And let us likewise remove the highest wisdom - the vanity of the philosophers is to blame for this folly of God as a monster of wisdom: they want his to look as much as possible like themselves. No! God the highest power - that is enough! From it everything follows, from it follows - 'the world'! Symbolice, to have a mark of recognition (omnipotens). Deus omnipotens.
Nietzsche - Writings from the Late Notebooks
Posted by amin at 6:12 PM
The task of weaving onwards the whole rope of life, and in such a way that the thread becomes stronger and stronger - that is the task.
Nietzsche - Writings from the Late Notebooks
Posted by amin at 6:08 PM
Brave and creative men never see pleasure and suffering as ultimate questions of value - they are accompanying states, one must want both if one wants to achieve something.
Nietzsche - Writings from the Late Notebooks
Posted by amin at 6:04 PM
Very few people make it clear to themselves what is implied by the standpoint of desirability, by every 'It ought to be so, but it is not' or even 'It ought to have been so': a condemnation of the entire course of things. For in that course nothing is isolated, the smallest element carries the whole, upon your little injustice stands the whole edifice of the future, every criticism of the smallest part condemns the whole as well.
Nietzsche - Writings from the Late Notebooks
Posted by amin at 5:40 PM
Against the positivism which halts at phenomena - 'There are only facts' - I would say: no, facts are just what there aren't, there are only interpretations. We can not determine any fact 'in itself': perhaps it's non-sensical to want to do such a thing. 'Everything is subjective,' you say: but that itself is an interpretation, for the 'subject' is not something given but a fiction added on, tucked behind. - Is it even necessary to posit the interpreter behind the interpretation? Even that is fiction, hypothesis.
Inasmuch as the word 'knowledge' has any meaning at all, the world is knowable: but it is variously interpretable; it has no meaning behind it, but countless meanings. 'Perspectivism'.
It is our needs which interpret the world: our drives and their for and against. Every drive is a kind of lust for domination, each has its perspective, which it would like to impose as a norm on all the other drives.
Nietzsche - Writings from the late Notebooks
Posted by amin at 4:08 PM
The first question is by no means whether we are satisfied with ourselves, but whether we are satisfied with anything at all. If we say Yes to a single moment, this means we have said Yes not only to ourselves, but to all existence. For nothing stands alone, either in us ourselves or in things: and if just once our soul has quivered and resounded with happiness like a harpstring, then all eternity was needed to condition that one event - and in that one moment of our saying Yes, all eternity was welcomed, redeemed, justified and affirmed.
Nietzsche - Notes from the Late Notebooks
Posted by amin at 3:10 PM
To imprint upon becoming the character of being - that is the highest will to power.
Nietzsche - Notes from the Late Notebooks
Posted by amin at 2:29 PM
A full and powerful soul can not only cope with painful, even terrible losses, privations, dispossessions and disdain: from such hells it emerges fuller and more powerful and - the crucial thing - with a new growth in the blissfulness of love. I believe that the man who has sensed something of the deepest conditions of every growth in love will understand Dante when he wrote over the gate to his Inferno: 'I too was created by eternal love.'
Nietzsche - Notes from the Late Notebooks
Posted by amin at 2:24 PM
Danger in modesty. - To adapt too early to a milieu, to tasks, societies, orders of work and everyday life where chance has put us, at a time when neither our force nor our goal has entered our consciousness as legislator; the security of conscience, the refreshing, sociable life thus all too early gained, this premature, modest making-do that wheedles its way into our feelings as an escape from inner and outer unrest, spoils us and keeps us down in the most dangerous way; learning to feel respect after the manner of 'one's peers', as if we had no measure and right within ourselves to posit values, the endeavor to esteem like the others, against the inner voice of taste, which is also a conscience - these become dreadful, subtle fetters. If there is not finally an explosion, where all the bonds of love and morality are blown apart at once, then a spirit like this withers and becomes petty, becomes effeminate and prosaic. - The opposite is quite bad enough, but at least better than that: suffering from one's environment, its praise as well as its disparagement, wounded by it and beginning to fester without letting on; defending oneself against its love with involuntary suspicion; learning silence, perhaps veiling it with speech; creating nooks and unguessable solitudes for the moments of relief, of tears, of sublime consolation - until at last one is strong enough to say: 'What have I to do with you?' and goes one's own way.
Nietzsche - Notes from the Late Notebooks
Posted by amin at 1:51 PM
Contemplating the world religiously: critique of the religious man. He is not necessarily the moral man but the man of high peaks and deep depressions, who interprets the former with gratitude and suspicion and does not consider them to have issued from himself ( - the same for the later - ). Essentially the man who feels 'unfree', who sublimates his states, his instincts of subjection.
Nietzsche - Notes from the Late Notebooks
Posted by amin at 1:46 PM
It matters little to me whether someone says today with the modesty of philosophical skepticism or with religious submission: 'The essence of things is unknown to me,' or whether another, bolder man, who has not yet learned enough of criticism and mistrust, says: 'The essence of things is to a large extent unknown to me.' I maintain towards both of them that they certainly still pretend to know, or imagine they know, far too much, as if the distinction they both assume were justified: the distinction between an 'essence of things' and a world of appearances.
Nietzsche - Notes form the Late Notebooks
Posted by amin at 1:41 PM
If there is no goal in the whole history of man's lot, then we must put one in: assuming, on the one hand, that we have need of a goal, and on the other that we've come to see through the illusion of an immanent goal and purpose. And the reason we have need of goals is that we have need of a will - which is the spine of us. 'Will' as the compensation for lost 'belief', i.e., for the idea that there is a divine will, one which has plans for us...
Nietzsche - Notes from the Late Notebooks
Posted by amin at 1:28 PM
Does it make sense to conceive of a God 'beyound good and evil'? Would a pantheism in this sense be possible? If we remove the idea of purpose from the process do we nevertheless affirm the process? - This would be the case if something within that process were achieved at every moment of it - and always the same thing.
Nietzsche - Notes from the late Notebooks
Posted by amin at 1:20 PM
July 2, 2012
The 'negation of life' as a goal of life, goal of development, existence as a great stupidity: such a crazed interpretation is merely the outgrowth of a measuring of life by factors of consciousness (pleasure and unpleasure, good and evil). Here the means are upheld against the end; the 'unholy', absurd, above all disagreeable means - how can it be a good end that makes use of such means! But the mistake lies in our presupposing from the outset an end that precisely excludes such means, instead of looking for the end that would explain the necessity of such means. That is to say, we take something that is desirable in respect to certain means (agreeable, rational, virtuous ones) and make it a norm, according to which we now posit what overall end is desirable...
Nietzsche - Notes from the Late Notebooks
Posted by amin at 9:38 PM
The only possibility of maintaining a meaning for the concept of 'God' would be: God not as driving force but as maximal state, as an epoch...One point in the development of the will to power, out of which both the subsequent development and what went before, the-up-to-that-point, was explicable...
Nietzsche - Notes from the Late Notebooks
Posted by amin at 9:33 PM
Out of the pressure of plentitude, out of the tension of forces that constantly grow within us and don't yet know how to discharge themselves, a state arises like that preceding a storm: nature, which we are, darkens. That too is pessimism...A doctrine which puts an end to such a state by commanding something, a revaluation of values by means of which the accumulated forces are shown a path, a direction, so that they explode in lightning and deeds - certainly doesn't have to be a doctrine of happiness: by releasing force which had been cramped and dammed to the point of agony, it brings happiness.
Nietzsche - Notes from the Late Notebooks
Posted by amin at 9:25 PM
All questions of strength: how far to assert oneself against the conditions for the preservation of society and its prejudices? - how far to let loose one's terrible qualities, which cause the downfall of most? - how far to approach truth and contemplate its most dubious aspects? - how far to go forward to meet suffering, self-contempt, pity, sickness, vice, with the question mark over whether one will master them?...(what does not kill us makes us stronger...) - finally: how far to make concessions in one's own mind to the ordinary, the mean, the petty, good, decent, the average nature, without being vulgarised by them?...The hardest test of character: not to let oneself be ruined through seduction by the good. The good as luxury, over-refinement, as vice...
Nietzsche - Notes from the Late Notebooks
Posted by amin at 12:08 PM
On the kind of men who matter to me I wish suffering, isolation, sickness, ill-treatment, degradation - I wish they may become acquainted with deep self-contempt, the torment of self-mistrust, the misery of the overcome: I have no compassion for them, because I wish them the only thing that today can prove whether a man has any value or not - his ability to stand his ground...
Nietzsche - Notes from the Late Notebooks
Posted by amin at 12:04 PM