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April 4 - April 5, 2022
The point is to assimilate the past, to use it in the making of our own life and culture. History is a dead weight on the present.
If we are to produce a vital authentic culture, we will need to be less educated (in the traditional sense).
Indeed, “All great periods of culture have been periods of political decline.” The energy required for politics on a large scale, or in economy, or in universal commerce, or in parliamentarism, or in military interest, usually reduces the level of culture of a people.
we place the greatest treasures of our art and knowledge with our message to the future: if there is value in the life of humans, it lies here in the greatest of cultural works – the rare products of genius.
“There is no pre-established harmony between the furtherance of truth and the well-being of mankind.”
“That which we now call the world is the result of a host of errors and fantasies which have gradually arisen in the course of the total evolution of organic nature, have become entwined with one another and are now inherited by us as the accumulated treasure of the entire past.”
“Q. Why do you write? A. I have found no other way of getting rid of my thoughts.”
“Women have intelligence; men have character and passion.” “Stupidity in a woman is unfeminine.”
“There are no moral phenomena at all, only a moral interpretation of phenomena …”
“If you possess a virtue … you are its victim!” Thus, we praise virtue in others because we derive advantages from it.
Moral beliefs, then, are always group beliefs, and the group is greater than any dissenting individual. “With morality, the individual can only ascribe value to himself as a function of the herd.”
The pursuit of knowledge for its own sake makes as little sense as the pursuit of goodness for its own sake, and can be just as harmful. If we ask “goodness for what purpose?”, so we must also insist on knowledge for what purpose? The scientist too often behaves as the servant of knowledge; instead, let knowledge be the servant of man.
“The polite term for mediocre is the word ‘liberal’.”
“The doctrine of free will is an invention of the ruling classes.”
Nietzsche concludes: “The type of perfection in politics is, of course, Machiavellianism.” But only if we must have politics at all. “The man with the furor philosophicus in him will no longer have time for the furor politicus, and will wisely keep from reading the newspapers or serving a party.”
Too much information causes indigestion of the spirit. If we travel far down this road, we shall “choke on our own reason”. It is the road to nihilism. True knowledge must be useful for the projects of human action.
The belief of “the virtuous” is a form of hypocrisy. When people say “virtue is necessary”, they are really saying “the police is necessary”, for what they crave is a quiet, orderly and safe society, where they will be well looked after. Even worse, they expect a reward from their God for being virtuous. Is this a love of virtue?
This modern fear of pain and of suffering shows only that we have not suffered enough.
Any creature that deliberately risks its life for any reason is denying the “will to live”. In such a situation, that creature shows something more fundamental still – the Will to Power.
If we stay closer to Nietzsche and ask why he wants to deny “moral phenomena” any factual status, we are reminded of his insistence that any moral system has a practical aim – to control human behaviour.
In such cultures, there exists no idea of good/evil, but rather noble/ignoble. These terms are applied to people, not actions.
We may regard conscience as a peculiarly human characteristic, but The Genealogy of Morals suggests that it is a comparatively recent development in the history of human psychology. It coincides with the beginnings of social structure and law-making, which in turn depend on the repression of instinct and the development of rationality.
we find our newly acquired “moral sense” a burden which impedes our former freedom of action.
Nietzsche deeply admired the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–81). “Here you have a psychologist with whom I am in agreement”, he wrote to Peter Gast in 1880. He refers in another letter (7 March 1887) to Dostoyevsky’s novella, Notes from the Underground (1864), a confession of astounding and frightful insights. The unnamed anti-hero of this story plumbs the depths of misery and paralysis which comes from the illness of self-consciousness: “I am a sick man. I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased …”
DOSTOYEVKY SHOWS UP WHEREVER I GO.
Nietzsche was trying to uproot the last traces of Christianity; while Dostoyevsky, at heart a secret unbeliever, was passionately seeking for a Christian acceptance of life. Both share in a quest for the sense of being human at the extreme limit, and as such they are both pioneers of Existentialism.
The attempt to “become an insect” turns into a nightmare reality in the story Metamorphosis (1912) by Franz Kafka (1883–1924).
The origins of the “Good” must lie in another direction which requires a historical awareness of our moral development.
The ascetic priest is a comforter of human suffering. He offers an explanation for that suffering, making the sickness easier to bear; he gives meaning to it.
before he paid the price of complete mental breakdown, he saw himself as the Anti-Christ – or the anti-Christian saviour.
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Politicians, as Nietzsche had observed, are more concerned with expedience than truth, and Hitler himself unashamedly agreed with this in his book, Mein Kampf (My Struggle, 1925-6).
Both Marx and Freud have in common with Nietzsche the “method of suspicion”. Their analyses of culture and consciousness present a history of false-consciousness.
“Human nature” is indeterminate until it is realized by acts of free choice. Thus, the first fact we encounter is that of our existence, from which follows a “terrible freedom” in which we are condemned to make choices at every moment of our life.
