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The martyrdom of the philosopher, his “sacrifice for the sake of truth,” forces into the light whatever of the agitator and actor lurks in him;
Every choice human being strives instinctively for a citadel and a secrecy where he is saved from the crowd, the many, the great majority—where he may forget “men who are the rule,” being their exception-—excepting only the one case in which he is pushed straight to such men by a still stronger instinct, as a seeker after knowledge in the great and exceptional sense.
Cynicism is the only form in which base souls approach honesty; and the higher man must listen closely to every coarse or subtle cynicism, and congratulate himself when a clown without shame or a scientific satyr speaks out precisely in front of him.
And no one lies as much as the indignant do.
How could even Plato have endured life—a Greek life he repudiated-—without an Aristophanes?
morals past religion ?
Independence is for the very few; it is a privilege of the strong. And whoever attempts it even with the best right but without inner constraint proves that he is probably not only strong, but also daring to the point of recklessness.
the exoteric approach comes from outside and sees, estimates, measures, and judges from the outside, not the inside: what is much more essential is that the exoteric approach sees things from below, the esoteric looks down from above.
top down and bottom up thinking
What serves the higher type of men as nourishment or delectation must almost be poison for a very different and inferior type. The virtues of the common man might perhaps signify vices and weaknesses in a philosopher.
The wrathful and reverent attitudes characteristic of youth do not seem to permit themselves any rest until they have forged men and things in such a way that these attitudes may be vented on them—after all, youth in itself has something of forgery and deception. Later, when the young soul, tortured by all kinds of disappointments, finally turns suspiciously against itself, still hot and wild, even in its suspicion and pangs of conscience—how wroth it is with itself now! how it tears itself to pieces, impatiently! how it takes revenge for its long self-delusion, just as if it had been a
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one has reached the point, step by step, in a few large regions on the earth, where it is no longer the consequences but the origin of an action that one allows to decide its value. On the whole this is a great event which involves a considerable refinement of vision and standards;
scientific process
It involves the first attempt at self-knowledge. Instead of the consequences,
written history ro aide us
We believe that morality in the traditional sense, the morality of intentions, was a prejudice, precipitate and perhaps provisional —something on the order of astrology and alchemy—but in any case something that must be overcome.
That they please—those who have them and those who enjoy their fruits, and also the mere spectator—this does not yet constitute an argument in their favor but rather invites caution. So let us be cautious.
—whoever takes this world, along with space, time, form, movement, to be falsely inferred—anyone like that would at least have ample reason to learn to be suspicious at long last of all thinking.
no foundation with this paranoia .
I keep in reserve at least a couple of jostles for the blind rage with which the philosophers resist being deceived. Why not? It is no more than a moral prejudice that truth is worth more than mere appearance; it is even the worst proved assumption there is in the world.
is an essential opposition of “true” and “false”? Is it not sufficient to assume degrees of apparentness
namely, of the will to power,
Nobody is very likely to consider a doctrine true merely because it makes people happy or virtuous—except perhaps the lovely “idealists” who become effusive about the good, the true,
that the evil and unhappy are more favored when it comes to the discovery of certain parts of truth,
Some know how to muddle and abuse their own memory in order to have their revenge at least against this only witness: shame is inventive.
Every profound spirit needs a mask: even more, around every profound spirit a mask is growing continually, owing to the constantly false, namely shallow, interpretation of every word, every step, every sign of life he gives.
Not to remain stuck to one’s own detachment, to that voluptuous remoteness and strangeness of the bird who flees ever higher to see ever more below him—the danger of the flier. Not to remain stuck to our own virtues and become as a whole the victim of some detail in us, such as our hospitality, which is the danger of dangers for superior and rich souls who spend themselves lavishly, almost indifferently, and exaggerate the virtue of generosity into a vice.
namely, insofar as we are born, sworn, jealous friends of solitude, of our own most profound, most midnightly, most middaily solitude: that is the type of man we are, we free spirits!
thoroughly and bitterly, how helpers and hounds for all the things that excite his curiosity cannot be found.
precisely where the “great hunt,” but also the great danger, begins: precisely there they lose their keen eye and nose.
the dangers of going down new paths has dangers but is needed for advancement .
the love of truth has its reward in heaven and even on earth.—
It is much closer to the faith of Pascal, which resembles in a gruesome manner a continual suicide of reason—a tough, long-lived, wormlike reason that cannot be killed all at once and with a single stroke.
Is this Pascal's conversion to religion?
the Christian faith is a sacrifice: a sacrifice of all freedom, all pride, all self-confidence of the spirit; at the same time, enslavement and self-mockery, self-mutilation.
abundant concealed suffering is enraged against the noble taste that seems to deny suffering. Nor was skepticism concerning suffering, at bottom merely a pose of aristocratic morality, the least cause of the origin of the last great slave rebellion which began with the French Revolution.
three dangerous dietary demands: solitude, fasting, and sexual abstinence.
namely, the immediate succession of opposites, of states of the soul that are judged morally in opposite ways. It seemed palpable that a “bad man” was suddenly transformed into a “saint,” a good man.
seems that Catholicism is much more intimately related to the Latin races than all of Christianity in general is to us northerners—and unbelief therefore means something altogether different in Catholic and Protestant countries: among them,
What was the context here? Were the north the last hold outs on christianity in europe?
We northerners are undoubtedly descended from barbarian races, which also shows in our talent for religion: we have little talent for it. We may except the Celts, who therefore also furnished the best soil for the spread of the Christian infection to the north: in France the Christian ideal came to flourish as much as the pale sun of the north permitted it
maybe genetic notches for religious experience ? craving for more northern based religion .
religiosity of the ancient Greeks is the enormous abundance of gratitude it exudes: it is a very noble type of man that confronts nature and life in this way.
bias?
Later, when the rabble gained the upper hand in Greece, fear became rampant in religion, too—and the ground was prepared for Christianity.—
the sight of the saint awakened a suspicion in them: such an enormity of denial, of anti-nature will not have been desired for nothing, they said to and asked themselves.
the powerful of the world learned a new fear before him; they sensed a new power, a strange, as yet unconquered enemy-it was the “will to power”
Jewish “Old Testament,” the book of divine Justice, there are human beings, things, and speeches in so grand a style that Greek and Indian literature have nothing to compare with it
To have glued this New Testament, a kind of rococo of taste in every respect, to the Old Testament to make one book, as the “Bible,” as “the book par excellence”—that is perhaps the greatest audacity and “sin against the spirit” that literary Europe has on its conscience.
Byron do you have thoughts?
It seems to me that the religious instinct is indeed in the process of growing powerfully—but the theistic satisfaction it refuses with deep suspicion.
is the world in the need of new ideas to take hold?
Since Descartes—actually more despite him than because of his precedent—all the philosophers seek to assassinate the old soul concept, under the guise of a critique of the subject-and-predicate concept—which means an attempt on the life of the
three of these are the most important Once one sacrificed human beings to one’s god, perhaps precisely those whom one loved most:
during the moral epoch of mankind, one sacrificed to one’s god one’s own strongest instincts,
To sacrifice God for the nothing—this paradoxical mystery of the final cruelty was reserved for the generation that is now coming up:
we have so much personal power that we don't depend on a god
beyond good and evil and no longer, like the Buddha and Schopenhauer, under the spell and delusion of morality—may just thereby, without really meaning to do so, have opened his eyes to the opposite ideal: the ideal of the most high-spirited, alive, and world-affirming human being who has not only come to terms and learned to get along with whatever was and is, but who wants to have what was and is repeated into all eternity,
who now live in Germany at a distance from religion I find people whose “free-thinking” is of diverse types and origins, but above all a majority of those in whom industriousness has, from generation unto generation, dissolved the religious instincts,
indifferent in this way include today the great majority of German middle-class Protestants,
for religion ..
Every age has its own divine type of naïveté for whose invention other ages may envy it—and how much naïveté, venerable, childlike, and boundlessly clumsy naïveté lies in the scholar’s faith in his superiority, in the good conscience of his tolerance, in the unsuspecting simple certainty with which his instinct treats the religious man as an inferior and lower type that he has outgrown, leaving it behind, beneath him—him,
Anyone who has looked deeply into the world may guess how much wisdom lies in the superficiality of men.
To love man for God’s sake— that has so far been the noblest and most remote feeling attained among men.
