In Nietzsche’s first chapter, “On the Prejudices of Philosophers” he settles scores with dead philosophers he considers having merely written “personal confessions” and “involuntary and unconscious memoir(s)” instead of philosophy. Reading it is the equivalent of ‘white-line fever’ where you’re roaring, semi-consciously, along an interstate at night, silent, darkness flowing past, the dashboard the only light aside from your headlights. Occasionally a flash of insight breaks through the drone of the tires and just as quickly is swallowed by _that_drone. But over pages, those flashes become more frequent, more sustained.
I remember that we argue with philosophers. They are putting forth a very specific vision of what life is and how it should be lived. One must bring an alert, skeptical mind to the task and pause and think before saying yes or no, and if no, why so?
Nietzsche seemed to write aphorisms as easily as others write grocery lists:
We, whose task is wakefulness itself ….
I begin by saying yes. We must not sleepwalk through our days, especially now when to do so requires merely letting go into a phone or other screens or any combination of drugs regularly advertised or romanticized.
… being conscious is not in any decisive sense the opposite of what is instinctive ….
Agreed. Urges, delights, oppressions, fears, all sometimes rise up within, without any evident cause. We think, immersed in the flow, and instinct accompanies that flow, an underground stream that rises and combines with more frequency than we believe until we pause to listen to what currents reside within that flow of thought. But I prefer the word intuition instead of instinct – a learned sixth sense of the world as contrasted with a genetically based knowledge. The word “instinct” has led to all kinds of brutal justifications.
To recognize untruth as a condition of life – that certainly means resisting accustomed value feelings in a dangerous way; and a philosophy that risks this would by that token alone place itself beyond good and evil.
Have I ever lived in a time more replete with untruth? I do not think so. In my lifetime, have I ever heard more public, unashamed calls for brutality than today, a brutality clothed in lies? No, but that does not mean we should search for a way of thinking and being that is “beyond” good and evil. What would that look like? Perhaps like this:
Independence is for the very few; it is a privilege of the strong.
The Übermensch vs the Untermensch. The use and threat of violence is the shadow meaning of “privilege.”
There are heights of the soul from which even tragedy ceases to look tragic.
From a position “beyond good and evil”, yes, I understand. I am reminded of Harry Limes on the Ferris Wheel with Holly Martins:
“Would you feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you £20,000 for every dot that stopped – would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money? Or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare? Free of income tax, old man……free of income tax. It’s the only way to save money nowadays.”
… the stupidity of moral indignation ….
Moral indignation can be performative, overbearing, insincere, and a martyr’s refuge, but it can also be selfless and produce goodness. Context is everything.
Physiologists should think before putting down the instinct of self-preservation as the cardinal instinct of an organic being. A living thing seeks above all to discharge its strength – life itself is will to power; self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent results.
This makes sense to me. It appeals both to my sense of logic and intuition. It seems true. The crucial question is what is it that one should “will”?
… in every act of will there is a ruling thought ….
That which is termed freedom of the will is essentially the effect of superiority in relation to him who must obey.
Übermensch and Untermensch. That way lies slavery and mass murder.
Books for all the world are always foul-smelling books: the smell of small people clings to them. Where the people eat and drink, even where they venerate, it usually stinks. One should not go to church if one wants to breathe pure air.
“… the small of small people” – humility is Nietzsche’s cardinal sin, and faith the most grievous error.
Nihilism [is] the sign of a despairing, mortally weary soul.
Yes, true, I think, but what then is the state of the soul of one who embraces the idea that some part of the human race is inherently ‘god-like’ intellectually, morally and spiritually?
… the desire to bear the entire and ultimate responsibility for one’s actions oneself, and to absolve God, the world, ancestors, chance, and society involves nothing less this causa sui, … to pull oneself up into existence by the hair, out of the swamps of nothingness.
A justified critique of a certain school of existential thought.
If, however, a person should regard even the effects of hatred, envy, covetousness, and the lust to rule as conditions of life, … as factors which … must be present in the general economy of life and must therefore be further enhanced if life is to be further enhanced, he will suffer from such a view of things as from seasickness. …. there are a hundred good reasons why everyone should keep away from it who can.
Nietzsche will sometimes circle back on himself as if he seems unconscious of what he had previously written. He does that here when he rejects four vices he sees as possibilities, as choices that one might take. He seems to imply that the Übermensch must somehow be of pure character, one who rejects “hatred, envy, covetousness and a lust for power.” He who rejects faith and God imagines saints whose “will to power” will only be motivated by goodness. This makes no sense. Who has ever met such a man or woman?
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 ….
Yes, I agree. Who doesn’t imagine a refuge? Who isn’t sometimes enamored of an Olympus? Who, sometimes, does not believe him or herself to be “choice?” But that is also a trap. I have seen the end result of egoism to be blindness and arrogance.
Cynicism is the only form in which base souls approach honesty ….
Nietzsche is not a cynic. That is why his ideas are so provocative.
It is no more than a moral prejudice that truth is worth more than mere appearance. …. Indeed, what forces us at all to suppose that there is an essential opposition of “true” and false”?”
Whatever is profound loves masks …. Every profound spirit needs a mask ….
… that is the type of man we are, we are free spirits.
One comes away from the first chapters with a feeling that Nietzsche is a trickster or a shock artist or both, that he seeks to unmoor the reader from traditional ideas and modes of thought and do so flamboyantly and aggressively, so as to push us out of what he regards as stale and merely accepted ways of thinking about morality. However, his reference to masks makes one wonder about his real, foundational beliefs — what is solid vs what is only meant to draw forth outrage?
He published this book piecemeal from 1883-1886, long before the vile twin wars of German aggression but deep within the reality of German colonial rule and only 20 years before the Herero genocide where the belief in Übermensch and Untermensch produced a 75% death rate for one population of human beings.
I am left thinking about our own responsibility for our words and for the worlds that they may help create.
