July 16, 2012
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 July 16, 2012 5:25 PM