Introducing Nietzsche: A Graphic Guide (Graphic Guides Book 0)

by Laurence Gane

Education gives us a lot of information about culture; its product is the so-called learned person who possesses an excess of history and cannot live an authentic life of his or her own. Education insists on accurate detail and detached “objectivity” which serve only to paralyze the individual’s project of self-realization and action in the world.

Religion, morality, science: their history is “all too human”. Their claims to truth fall short of their ambitions. Behind these individual critiques, we can begin to sense a general mistrust of human thought which tends to lack awareness of its deeper motivation and needs. Prefiguring Freud, Nietzsche is beginning to develop a psychological meta-critique of knowledge.

“The polite term for mediocre is the word ‘liberal’.”

“A profound man needs friends, unless he has a God. I have neither God nor friend.”

A daily war of attrition between instinct and morality – the “gnawing of conscience” – becomes the state of normality.

The idea of “Good” implicit in the slave ethic relies on the theory of altruism, i.e. any action which benefits others is an example of “goodness”. Here again we see the self-effacing quality of the slave who sacrifices self-interest for the common good, comparable to the behaviour of certain insect communities.

“I fear we are not getting rid of God because we still believe in grammar …” This, in a few words, sums up Jacques Derrida’s programme of deconstruction, that is, his attack on the Western tradition of “logocentrism”. Nietzsche had always criticized the illusion that the existence of a word guarantees the truth of what the word refers to.

One of the best lines I've read