The nature of stoicism
is imagined
nature is indifferent
living is the opposite
of indifference
Day 3726, Beyond Good and Evil in short 9
Daily picture, Poetry, QuotesQuotes
Day 3725, Beyond Good and Evil in short 8
Daily picture, Poetry, Quotes
Day 3724, Beyond Good and Evil in short 7
Daily picture, Poetry, Quotes
Plato sat in his cage
accused of performing
for the shadows
by a jealous onlooker
a failed teacher of freedom
Day 3723, Beyond Good and Evil in short 6
Daily picture, Poetry, Quotes
Great philosophies
start at birth
and your family
they drive
toward their own goal
not truth
only your cousin
the scientists
may still be interested in
truth
Day 3722, Beyond Good and Evil in short 5
Daily picture, Poetry, Quotes
The road of a philosopher to their truth
feels to them like the first
carefully orchestrated
steps
on a new beach
looking back
they see clearly their path
…
let everybody
make their reasonable first steps
in the sand
Day 3721, Beyond Good and Evil in short 4
Daily picture, Poetry, Quotes
What is true
is not necessarily life
what is moral
is not necessarily true
what is life
a fiction?
Day 3720, Beyond Good and Evil in short 3
Daily picture, Poetry, Quotes
My philosophy
wanders like the animal chooses
like birth itself
does not shape you
neither is a philosophy not shaped
by its birth
our philosophy
is not the measure of man
Day 3719, Beyond Good and Evil in short 2
Daily picture, Poetry, Quotes
The angel and devil
are not distant cousins
but brother and sister
they can live apart
but come from one
this is perhaps
the new message
Day 3718, Beyond Good and Evil in short 1
Daily picture, Poetry, Quotes
Why not rather untruth?
Is the search for truth
not a deep look in the mirror
where your-self
submits you
Day 3716, for the sake.
Daily picture, Quotes
Friedrich Nietzsche
Daybreak
Book V
485 Distant perspectives. – A: But why this solitude? – B: I am not at odds with anyone. But when I am alone I seem to see my friends in a clearer and fairer light than when I am with them; and when I loved and appreciated music the most, I lived far from it. It seems I need a distant perspective if I am to think well of things.
487 Shame. – Here stands the handsome steed and paws the ground: it snorts, longs for the gallop and loves him who usually rides him – but oh shame! his rider cannot mount up onto his back today, he is weary.- This is the shame of the wearied philosopher before his own philosophy.
489 Friends in need. – Sometimes we notice that one of our friends belongs more to another than he does to us, and that his delicacy is troubled by and his selfishness inadequate to this decision: we then have to make things easier for him and estrange him from us.- This is likewise necessary when we adopt a way of thinking which would be ruinous to him: our love for him has to drive us, through an injustice which
Day 3710, ownness.
Daily picture, Quotes
Max Stirner
The Ego and His Own
Part Second I
I Ownness, “Does not the spirit thirst for freedom?”—Alas, not my spirit alone, my body too thirsts for it hourly! When before the odorous castle-kitchen my nose tells my palate of the savory dishes that are being prepared therein, it feels a fearful pining at its dry bread; when my eyes tell the hardened back about soft down on which one may lie more delightfully than on its compressed straw, a suppressed rage seizes it; when —but let us not follow the pains further.—And you call that a longing for freedom? What do you want to become free from, then? From your hardtack and your straw bed? Then throw them away!—But that seems not to serve you: you want rather to have the freedom to enjoy delicious foods and downy beds. Are men to give you this “freedom,”—are they to permit it to you? You do not hope that from their philanthropy, because you know they all think like—you: each is the nearest to himself! How, therefore, do you mean to come to the enjoyment of those foods and beds? Evidently not otherwise than in making them your property! If you think it over rightly, you do not want the freedom to have all these fine things, for with this freedom you still do not have them; you want really to have them, to call them yours and possess them as your property. Of what use is a freedom to you, indeed, if it brings in nothing? And, if you became free from everything, you would no longer have anything; for freedom is empty of substance
Day 3701, nature.
Daily picture, Quotes
Friedrich Nietzsche
Daybreak
Book V
468 The realm of beauty is bigger. – As we go about in nature, with joy and cunning, bent on discovering and as it were catching in the act the beauty proper to everything; as we try to see how that piece of coastline, with its rocks, inlets, olive trees and pines, attains to its perfection and mastery whether in the sunshine, or when the sky is stormy, or when twilight has almost gone: so we ought to go about among men, viewing and discovering them, showing them their good and evil, so that they shall behold their own proper beauty which unfolds itself in one case in the sunlight, in another amid storms, and in a third only when night is falling and the sky is full of rain. Is it then forbidden to enjoy the evil man as a wild landscape possessing its own bold lineaments and effects of light, if the same man appears to our eyes as a sketch and caricature and, as a blot in nature, causes us pain, when he poses as good and law-abiding? – Yes, it is forbidden: hitherto we have been permitted to seek beauty only in the morally good – a fact which sufficiently accounts for our having found so little of it and having had to seek about for imaginary beauties without backbone! – As surely as the wicked enjoy a hundred kinds of happiness of which the virtuous have no inkling, so too they possess a hundred kinds of beauty: and many of them have not yet been discovered.
Day 3695, a book.
Daily picture, Quotes
Friedrich Nietzsche
Daybreak
Book V
454 Digression. -A book such as this is not for reading straight through or reading aloud but for dipping into, especially when out walking or on a journey; you must be able to stick your head into it and out of it again and again and discover nothing familiar around you.
Day 3689, will to be free.
Daily picture, My thoughts, Quotes
This is what I was thinking this morning.
I don’t believe in free will because I don’t believe we have a fixed “I” or soul. The I that I think of is more of a snapshot in an ever-changing row of identities. If I think or talk about who I am, I will change that story over time without realizing it. We forget how we identified ourselves in the past, making it seem as if our identity is a constant. You could say that decisions of my earlier me’s influence who I am now. I did not make those decisions; earlier circumstances and versions of me did. That’s one of the reasons I don’t believe in free will.
I do feel that I have a core that stays the same, but I also realize I have no independent way to check this. We all know that we change over time; no one will deny that. But that kind of change is more like what you go through at school, where you take classes and learn things. The things you learn add to who you are. But underneath these life lessons, so to speak, we also feel a more constant identity. We also know that a big part of this identity is located in the brain; change the brain, and your identity changes. Phineas Gage (https://www.verywellmind.com/phineas-gage-2795244) is the obvious example: whether he fully understood the change himself is less important than the fact that people around him did. Like everything in our bodies, our brains also deteriorate over time, and with them, perhaps our identities.
Our identity is constantly changing, and we might be lucky to hold onto the same identity for a few weeks before events alter our perception of our past and present us, the you that is in the making, with a new identity.
Many other thinkers have written about this idea. The way I wrote it down just now might be unique, but I can trace the path back into my past to see who influenced me and shaped my thoughts. Hume is one of those who have influenced me, not so much by the work I read from him but by the place he has in Philosophy. I have a book from him, and though I have had it for 20 years, it still looks brand new, though I found one of my bookmarks at page 92. I just tell myself that the mere presence of these kinds of books in my house rubs off on me. In reality, I used them to verify quotes because you should never trust a source to guarantee a quote’s accuracy.
I used my AI helper to point me in the right direction for finding a quote in Hume’s work about what I was writing about. It pointed me to this chapter, and though it quoted the passage incorrectly, the whole chapter is about an idea similar to what I thought of this morning. In my experience, the AI is almost always bad at quoting, and it tells so much itself. As I said before, you should always go to the source. On the other hand, the AI quote was not wrong; it still portrayed Hume’s intention, and like the modern “translation” into today’s English, they both differ substantially from the original in the words they use. Underneath the text, I will put two screenshots.
Day 3688, Saturday Nietzsche.
Daily picture, Quotes
Friedrich Nietzsche
Daybreak
Book V
450 The allurement of knowledge. – A glance through the portals of science affects passionate spirits as the magic of all magic; and it will probably turn them into fantasists and, in the most favourable case, into poets: so vehement is their craving for the happiness of those with knowledge. Does it not thrill through all your senses – this sound of sweet allurement with which science has proclaimed its glad tidings, in a hundred phrases and in the hundred-and-first and fairest: ‘Let delusion vanish! Then “woe is me!” will vanish too; and with “woe is me!” woe itself will be gone.’ (Marcus Aurelius)
Day 3674, simple things.
Daily picture, Quotes
Friedrich Nietzsche
Daybreak
Book V
434 Making intercession.– Unprepossessing landscapes exist for the great landscape painters, remarkable and rare ones for the petty. For the great things of nature and mankind have to intercede for all the petty, mediocre and ambitious among their admirers- but the great man intercedes for the simple things.