Friedrich Nietzsche

Day 3834, all this.

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Friedrich Nietzsche

Daybreak
Book V

560 What we are at liberty to do. – One can dispose of one’s drives like a gardener and, though few know it, cultivate the shoots of anger, pity, curiosity, vanity as productively and profitably as a beautiful fruit tree on a trellis; one can do it with the good or bad taste of a gardener and, as it were, in the French or English or Dutch or Chinese fashion; one can also let nature rule and only attend to a little embellishment and tidying-up here and there; one can, finally, without paying any attention to them at all, let the plants grow up and fight their fight out among themselves – indeed, one can take delight in such a wilderness, and desire precisely this delight, though it gives one some trouble, too. All this we are at liberty to do: but how many know we are at liberty to do it? Do the majority not believe in themselves as in completefully-developed facts? Have the great philosophers not put their seal on this prejudice with the doctrine of the unchangeability of character?

Day 3827, and.

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Friedrich Nietzsche

Daybreak
Book V

550 Knowledge and beauty. – If, as they still do, people as it were reserve their reverence and feeling of happiness for works of imagination and dissembling, we ought not to wonder if the opposite of imagination and dissembling makes them feel cold and disconsolate. The delight produced by even the smallest definite piece of real progress in knowledge, which science as it is now bestows so abundantly and already upon so many – this delight is for the present not credited by all those who have accustomed themselves to finding delight only in relinquishing reality and plunging into the depths of appearance. These believe reality is ugly: but they do not reflect that knowledge of even the ugliest reality is itself beautiful, nor that he who knows much is in the end very far from finding ugly the greater part of that reality whose discovery has always brought him happiness. For is anything ‘beautiful in itself? The happiness of the man of knowledge enhances the beauty of the world and makes all that exists sunnier; knowledge casts its beauty not only over things but in the long run into things- may future mankind bear witness to the truth of this proposition! In the meantime let us recall an experience of olden time: two men as fundamentally different as Plato and Aristotle were in agreement as to what constituted supreme happiness, not only for them or for mankind but in itself, even for gods
of the highest empyrean: they found it in knowledge, in the activity of a well-trained inquisitive and inventive mind (not, that is to say, in ‘intuition’, as German theologians and semi-theologians do; not in visions, as mystics do; and likewise not in creating, as all practical people do). Descartes and Spinoza came to a similar conclusion: how they must all have enjoyed knowledge! And what a danger their honesty faced of becoming a panegyrist of things! –

Day 3820, the constant tension.

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Friedrich Nietzsche

Daybreak
Book V

546 Slave and idealist. – The human being after the model of Epictetus would certainly not be to the taste of those who strive after the ideal nowadays. The constant tension of his being, the unwearied glance turned inward, the reserve, caution, uncommunicativeness of his eye if it should even turn to view the outer world; not to speak of his silence or near-silence: all signs of the most resolute bravery- what could this mean to our idealists, who are above all greedy for expansion! In addition to all this, he is not fanatical, he hates the display and vainglory of our idealists: his arrogance, great though it is, has nonetheless no desire to disturb others, it admits a certain mild intimacy and wants to spoil no one’s good humour- it can, indeed, even smile! There is very much of the humanity of antiquity in this ideal! The fairest thing about it is, however, that it lacks all fear of God, that it believes strictly in reason, that it is no penitential preacher. Epictetus was a slave: his ideal human being is without class and possible in every class, but is to be sought above all in the depths of the masses as the silent, self-sufficient man within a universal enslavement who defends himself against the outside world and lives in a constant state of supreme bravery. He differs from the Christian, above all in that the Christian lives in hope, in the promise of’inexpressible glories’, in that he accepts gifts and expects and receives the best he knows at the hands ofdivine love and grace and not at his own hands: while Epictetus does not hope and does not accept the best he knows as a gift- he possesses it, he holds it bravely in his own hand, he defends it against the whole world if the world wants to rob him of it. Christianity was made for a different species of antique slave, for those weak in will and mind, that is to say for the great mass of slaves.

Day 3813, I know you.

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Friedrich Nietzsche

Daybreak
Book V

543 Do not make passion an argument for truth!– O you good-natured and even noble enthusiasts, I know you! You want to win your argument against us, but also against yourself, and above all against yourself!- and a subtle and tender bad conscience so often incites you against your enthusiasm! How ingenious you then become in the outwitting and deadening of this conscience! How you hate the honest, the simple, the pure, how you avoid their innocent eyes! That knowing better whose representatives they are and whose voice you hear all too loudly within you, how it casts doubt on your belief- how you seek to make it suspect as a bad habit, as a sickness of the age, as neglect and infection of your own spiritual health! You drive yourself to the point of hating criticism, science, reason! You have to falsify history so that it may bear witness for you, you have to deny virtues so that they shall not cast into the shade those of your idols and ideals! Coloured pictures where what is needed is rational grounds! Ardour and power of expression! Silvery mists! Ambrosial nights! You understand how to illuminate and how to obscure, and how to obscure with light! And truly, when your passion rises to the point of frenzy, there comes a moment when you say to yourself: now I have conquered the good conscience, now I am light of heart, courageous, self-denying, magnificent, now I am honest! How you thirst for those moments when your passion bestows on you perfect self-justification and as it were innocence; when in struggle, intoxication, courage, hope, you are beside yourself and beyond all doubting; when you decree: ‘he who is not beside himself as we are can in no way know what and where truth is!’ How you thirst to discover people of your belief in this condition – it is that of intellectual vice – and ignite your flame at their torch! Oh your deplorable martyrdom! Oh your deplorable victory of the sanctified lie! Must you inflict so much suffering upon yourself? – Must you?

Day 3806, need of.

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Friedrich Nietzsche

Daybreak
Book V

535 Truth has need of power. – In itself truth is no power at all – whatever its flatterers of the Enlightenment may be accustomed to say to the contrary!- It has, rather, to draw power over to its side, or go over to the side of power, or it will perish again and again! This has been proved sufficiently and more than sufficiently!

Day 3800, with many.

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Friedrich Nietzsche

Daybreak

Book V

530 Thinker’s digressions. -With many thinkers, the course of their thought as a whole is rigorous and inexorably bold, indeed sometimes cruel towards themselves, while in detail they are gentle and flexible; with benevolent hesitation they circle around a thing ten times, though in the end they resume their rigorous path. They are rivers with many meanderings and secluded hermitages; there are places in their course where the river plays hide-and-seek with itself and creates for itself a brief idyll, with islands, trees, grottos and waterfalls: and then it goes on again, past rocky cliffs and breaking its way through the hardest stone.

Day 3793, esprit.

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FriedrichNietzsche

Daybreak
Book V

524 Jealousy of the solitary. – Between sociable and solitary natures there exists this distinction (presupposing they both possess spirit!): the former will be happy, or almost happy with a thing, whatever it may be, from the moment they have found in their spirita communicable and pleasing way of expressing it – this will reconcile them to the Devil himselfl The solitary, however, have their enjoyment or their torment ofa thing in silence, they hate a clever and glittering display of their innermost problems as they hate to see their beloved too carefully dressed: they gaze at her with melancholy eyes, as though becoming prey to the suspicion she wants to appear pleasing to others! This is the jealousy which all solitary thinkers and passionate dreamers feel towards esprit.

Day 3786, his old ones.

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Friedrich Nietzsche

Daybreak
Book V

512 Courageous against causes. – He who is by nature considerate or timid with regard to people but is courageous against causes, shuns new and closer acquaintanceships and circumscribes his old ones: so that his incognito and his ruthlessness for truth may increase together.

Day 3779,

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Friedrich Nietzsche

Daybreak
Book V

507 Against the tyranny of the true.- Even ifwe were mad enough to consider all our opinions true, we should still not want them alone to exist-: I cannot see why it should be desirable that truth alone should rule and be omnipotent; it is enough for me that it should possess great power. But it must be able to struggle and have opponents, and one must be able to find relief from it from time to time in untruth – otherwise it will become boring, powerless and tasteless to us, and make us the same.

Day 3772, in excess.

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Friedrich Nietzsche

Daybreak
Book V

500 Against the grain– A thinker can for years on end force himself to think against the grain: that is to say, to pursue not the thoughts which offer themselves from within him but those to which an office, a prescribed schedule, an arbitrary kind of industriousness seem to oblige him. In the end, however, he will fall sick: for this apparently moral overcoming of himself will ruin his nervous energy just as thoroughly as any regularly indulged in excess could do.

Day 3765, learning.

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Friedrich Nietzsche

Daybreak
Book V

495 Our teachers.- In our youth we take our teachers and guides from the time in which we happen to live and the circle in which we happen to move: we are thoughtlessly confident that the times we live in are bound to have teachers better suited to us than to anyone else and that we are bound to find them without much trouble. For this childishness we have in later years to pay a heavy price: we have to expiate our teachers in ourself We then perhaps go in search of our true guides throughout the whole world, the world of the past included, but perhaps it is too late. And in the worst case we discover that they were living when we were young – and that we missed them.

Day 3758, should it?

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Friedrich Nietzsche

Daybreak
Book V

492 Among south winds. -A: I no longer understand myself! Only yesterday I felt so wild and stormy and at the same time so warm, so sunny and bright in the extreme. And today! All is now motionless, flat, dejected, gloomy, like the lagoon of Venice: – I want nothing and draw a deep breath of relief at that, and yet I am secretly vexed at this wanting nothing. Thus do the waves splash back and forth in the lake of my melancholy.- 8: You have described a pleasant little illness. The next north-east wind will blow it away! – A: Why should it!

Day 3751, solitude.

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Friedrich Nietzsche

Daybreak
Book V

491 Another reason for solitude!– A: So you intend to return to your desert?- B: I am not quick moving, I have to wait for myself- it is always late before the water comes to light out of the well of my self, and I often have to endure thirst for longer than I have patience. That is why I go into solitude- so as not to drink out ofeverybody’s cistern. When I am among the many I live as the many do, and I do not think as I really think; after a time it always seems as though they want to banish me from myself and rob me of my soul – and I grow angry with everybody and fear everybody. I then require the desert, so as to grow good again.

Day 3744, blueprint 9

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Friedrich Nietzsche

Thus Spoke Zarathustra
On the Afterwordly

At one time Zarathustra too cast his delusion beyond man, like all the afterworldly. The work of a suffering and tortured god, the world then seemed to me. A dream the world then seemed to me, and the fiction of a god: colored smoke before the eyes of a dissatisfied deity. Good and evil and joy and pain and I and you-colored smoke this seemed to me before creative eyes. The creator wanted to look away from himself; so he created the world. Drunken joy it is for the sufferer to look away from his suffering and to lose himself. Drunken joy and loss of self the world once seemed to me. This world, eternally imperfect, the image of an eternal contradiction, an imperfect image-a drunken joy for its imperfect creator: thus the world once appeared to me. Thus I too once cast my delusion beyond man, like all the afterworldly. Beyond man indeed? Alas, my brothers, this god whom I created was man-made and madness, like all gods! Man he was, and only a poor specimen of man and ego: out of my own ashes and fire this ghost came to me, and, verily, it did not come to me from beyond. What happened, my brothers? I overcame myself, the sufferer; I carried my own ashes to the mountains; I invented a brighter flame for myself. And behold, then this ghost fled from me. Now it would be suffering for me and agony for the recovered to believe in such ghosts: now it would be suffering for me and humiliation. Thus I speak to the afterworldly. It was suffering and incapacity that created all afterworlds, this and that brief madness of bliss which is experienced only by those who suffer most deeply. Weariness that wants to reach the ultimate with one leap, with one fatal leap, a poor, ignorant weariness that does not want to want any more: this created all gods and afterworlds.

Day 3729, the unnatural death.

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There are many people in our time and region who think about the end of their life, and especially about the circumstances in which they want a doctor to end it. They talk about suffering, dignity, and fear of losing control.

You say you want to die with dignity. Why should dignity disappear when strength disappears? Why should dependence be undignified? Why should confusion, illness, or old age stand outside life?

It is the illusion that if you lose any of your faculties, you lose your dignity. We don’t even know what dignity entails. Is it a fixed state that slowly disappears?

These arguments seem to imply that some forms of life are beneath dignity, whereas I see dignity as belonging to life itself, not to a particular level of health, independence, or control.

I have less of a problem with people who reason their way to suicide because of unrelievable pain or unavoidable depression, but planning your own suicide by crossing off some boxes because you believe that what comes after these boxes is not life sounds…

We live in a time and place where we have the illusion of controlling our own lives. It starts young, when you choose a career, decide what color hair your boyfriend should have, and decide where you are going to live. Superficially, our lives seem to be a constant string of decisions of our own design, but unbeknownst to most, life is a constant stream of coincidences. You are just lucky that the car had an accident a few seconds later when you crossed the street; otherwise, your life would have gone a totally different way than you thought you had planned it.

You live to prepare yourself for the circumstances you encounter, and if you are lucky enough, or brave enough, you will learn to embrace fate, even if it means years spent staring at a ceiling on your deathbed.

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