More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
the strong and independent who are prepared and predestined to command and in whom the reason and art of a governing race become incarnate, religion is one more means for overcoming resistances, for the ability to rule—as a bond that unites rulers and subjects and betrays and delivers the consciences of the latter, that which is most concealed and intimate and would like to elude obedience, to the former.
religion can even be used as a means for obtaining peace from the noise and exertion of cruder forms of government, and purity from the necessary dirt of all politics. That is how the Brahmins, for example, understood things:
religion also gives to some of the ruled the instruction and opportunity to prepare themselves for future ruling and obeying:
Religion has the same effect which an Epicurean philosophy has on sufferers of a higher rank: it is refreshing, refining, makes, as it were, the most of suffering,
nothing in Christianity or Buddhism is as venerable as their art of teaching even the lowliest how to place themselves through piety in an illusory higher order of things and thus to maintain their contentment with the real order, in which their life is hard enough—and precisely this hardness is necessary,
preserve all that was sick and that suffered—which means, in fact and in truth, to worsen the European race?
religion. thankfully this view is out of fashion
Men, not high and hard enough to have any right to try to form man as artists; men, not strong and far-sighted enough to let the foreground law of thousandfold failure and ruin prevail, though it cost them sublime self-conquest; men, not noble enough to see the abysmally different order of rank, chasm of rank, between man and man—such men have so far held sway over the fate of Europe, with their “equal before God,” until finally a smaller, almost ridiculous type, a herd animal, something eager to please, sickly, and mediocre has been bred, the European of today—
One seeks a midwife for his thoughts, another someone whom he can help: origin of a good conversation.
In revenge and in love woman is more barbarous than man.
Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.
Madness is rare in individuals—but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule.
Talking much about oneself can also be a means to conceal oneself.
Perhaps nobody yet has been truthful enough about what “truthfulness” is.
It is inhuman to bless where one is cursed.
the real problems of morality; for these emerge only when we compare many moralities. In all “science of morals” so far one thing was lacking, strange as it may sound: the problem of morality itself; what was lacking was any suspicion that there was something problematic here.
see the holes through what other's have done improperly.
“a rational foundation for morality” and tried to supply was, seen in the right light, merely a scholarly variation of the common faith
the new religion .
“The principle,” he says (p. 136 of Grundprobleme der Moral),1 “the fundamental proposition on whose contents all moral philosophers are really2 agreed—neminem laede, immo omnes, quantum potes, juva3— that is really the proposition for which all moralists endeavor to find the rational foundation
pessimist, one who denies God and the world but comes to a stop before morality—who affirms morality and plays the flute—the
what?
it? There are moralities which are meant to justify their creator before others. Other moralities are meant to calm him and lead him to be satisfied with himself. With yet others he wants to crucify himself and humiliate himself. With others he wants to wreak revenge, with others conceal himself, with others transfigure himself and place himself way up, at a distance.
moralities are also merely a sign language of the affects.
Every morality is, as opposed to laisser aller,4 a bit of tyranny against
“nature”; also against “reason”
every morality is that it constitutes a long compulsion: to understand Stoicism or Port-Royal or Puritanism, one should recall the compulsion under which every language so far has achieved strength and freedom—
Every artist knows how far from any feeling of letting himself go his “most natural” state is—the free ordering, placing, disposing, giving form in the moment of “inspiration”
“You shall obey—someone and for a long time: else you will perish and lose the last respect for yourself”—this appears to me to be the moral imperative of nature which,
Socratism for which he was really too noble, “Nobody wants to do harm to himself, therefore all that is bad is done involuntarily. For the bad do harm to themselves: this they would not do if they knew that the bad is bad. Hence the bad are bad only because of an error; if one removes the error, one necessarily makes them—good.”
the question whether regarding the valuation of things instinct deserves more authority than rationality, which wants us to evaluate and act in accordance with reasons, with a “why?”—in
regarding the valuation of things instinct deserves more authority than rationality, which wants us to evaluate and act in accordance with reasons, with a “why?”—
one must follow the instincts but persuade reason to assist them with good reasons.
Elephant and rider scenario.
Descartes should be excepted, as the father of rationalism (and hence the grandfather of the Revolution) who conceded authority to reason alone: but reason is merely an instrument, and Descartes was superficial.
Our eye finds it more comfortable to respond to a given stimulus by reproducing once more an image that it has produced many times before, instead of registering what is different and new in an impression.
Beginner's mind is key
When we hear another language we try involuntarily to form the sounds we hear into words that sound more familiar and more like home to us:
We want stuff in our comfort zones but also we build structures that we can't simply destroy when we see a new and different structure.
Even in the midst of the strangest experiences we still do the same: we make up the major part of the experience and can scarcely be forced not to contemplate some event as its “inventors.” All this means: basically and from time immemorial we are—accustomed to lying. Or to put it more virtuously and hypocritically, in short, more pleasantly: one is much more of an artist than one knows.
Rationalize experiences even if it's not facing what is 100% true in the situation.
What we experience in dreams—assuming that we experience it often—belongs in the end just as much to the over-all economy of our soul as anything experienced “actually”:
Nietzsche seems to believe in dreams. I'm not a guy to value this too much. Real world experience is different than in the brain experience. Same goes for media we consume.
Of those who are “moral”? Who are mediocre?—This for the chapter “Morality as Timidity.”
fear of consequences of actions is a major impact on people's moral framework.
nothing has been exercised and cultivated better and longer among men so far than obedience
They know no other way to protect themselves against their bad conscience than to pose as the executors of more ancient or higher commands
Appealing to another authority.
The history of Napoleon’s reception is almost the history of the higher happiness attained by this whole century in its most valuable human beings and moments.
In an age of disintegration that mixes races indiscriminately, human beings have in their bodies the heritage of multiple origins, that is, opposite, and often not merely opposite, drives and value standards that fight each other and rarely permit each other any rest. Such human beings of late cultures and refracted lights will on the average be weaker human beings: their most profound desire is that the war they are should come to an end. Happiness appears to them, in agreement with a tranquilizing (for example, Epicurean or Christian) medicine and way of thought, pre-eminently as the
...more
About the dumbest thing he he said.
As long as the utility reigning in moral value judgments is solely the utility of the herd, as long as one considers only the preservation of the community, and immorality is sought exactly and exclusively in what seems dangerous to the survival of the community—there can be no morality of “neighbor love.”
Sounds like Nietzsche is not an utilitarian.
After the structure of society is fixed on the whole and seems secure against external dangers, it is this fear of the neighbor that again creates new perspectives of moral valuation.
A cycle of life where humanity is never happy.
Supposing that one could altogether abolish danger, the reason for fear, this morality would be abolished, too, eo ipso: it would no longer be needed, it would no longer consider itself necessary.
This is how the cycle of life keeps going. Humanity is never fully happy although maybe enough happiness is there if sought out. The problem is the instinct is to see the negative.
ears resist such truths—our truths. We know well enough how insulting it sounds when anybody counts man, unadorned and without metaphor, among the animals; but it will be charged against us as almost a guilt that precisely for the men of “modern ideas” we constantly employ such expressions as “herd,” “herd instincts,
Morality in Europe today is herd animal morality
we have reached the point where we find even in political and social institutions an ever more visible expression of this morality: the democratic movement is the heir of the Christian movement
They are at one in their involuntary plunge into gloom and unmanly tenderness under whose spell Europe seems threatened by a new Buddhism.
They are at one in their faith in the morality of shared pity, as if that were morality in itself, being the height, the attained height of man, the sole hope of the future, the consolation of present man, the great absolution from all former guilt. They are at one, the lot of them, in their faith in the community as the savior, in short, in the herd, in “themselves”—
We have a different faith; to us the democratic movement is not only a form of the decay of political organization but a form of the decay, namely the diminution, of man, making him mediocre and lowering his value.
Totally disagree but Nietzsche has a thing against groups it seems.
It is the image of such leaders that we envisage: may I say this out loud, you free spirits?
Democracy isn't free enough in Nietzsche mind it seems.
“What occurred in the light, goes on in the dark.”
