Around every corner
I smell
a new surprise
the same
an adventure
a land
a place
~
to bee
- A DEFECT OF STANDPOINT, NOT OF VISION.—We always stand a few paces too near ourselves and a few paces too far from our neighbour. Hence we judge him too much in the lump, and ourselves too much by individual, occasional, insignificant features and circumstances.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Human all too human, Miscellaneous Maxims And Opinions. Translated By Paul V. Cohn, B.A. New York The MacMillan Company 1913, Free license from Gutenberg.org
Something was on my mind the last few days. I read all these aphorisms of Nietzsche where he also writes and quotes others and that made me think: for thousands of years people, some more than others, have been thinking about what this all has to mean, or if it means something at all. First there were maybe one or to people in a village that were especially good in it and they thought about everything, from the insects to the stars and all in-between. And slowly societies got more complex and knowledge with it, till you come to today where you can spend a whole career studying the legs of a certain insect or one aspect of dwarf star you can’t see. With the study of us, people it is not much different. Nietzsche and his generation might be one of the last that still looked at people as a whole within themselves and in society and the world. After Nietzsche, you had Freud for instance, who already was more focused on a few parts of our self and he was less interested in the effects of society at large on us.
Freud is interesting in regards to Nietzsche because there is an anecdote that says that Freud stopped reading Nietzsche because he wanted to have some original ideas left over and not read it all in Nietzsche’s books. Some also say that Nietzsche was one of the first psychologists, and I agree with that.
But the thing that was on my mind was the stubborn thought that we as humanity, all of us, have all the knowledge we need to “get” us. We should by now know how we work, but if you look around, it is pretty obvious that that news has not reached every corner of the world. And I now, there is no consensus, people disagree, there are many different religions that still believe what those loners in those villages from 2000 years ago told their neighbors, it is not easy. But it would be nice to put all these different ideas on transparent paper and put them on top of each other and see where we agree and where we fill each other’s gabs and what falls far from the center.
Maybe we should be more like the bee’s and hop around from one sort of flower to the other for no other reason… I mean it…for no other reason…
Nochrisis 