Friedrich Nietzsche

Day 3326, Preface.

Daily picture, Quotes

Friedrich Nietzsche

The Will to Power
Preface

1
Of what is great one must either be silent or speak with greatness. With greatness — that means cynically and with innocence.
2
What I relate is the history of the next two centuries. I describe what is coming, what can no longer come differently: the advent of nihilism . This history can be related even now; for necessity itself is at work here. This future speaks even now in a hundred signs, this destiny announces itself everywhere; for this music of the future all ears are cocked even now. For some time now, our whole European culture has been moving as toward a catastrophe, with a tortured tension that is growing from decade to decade: restlessly, violently, headlong, like a river that wants to reach the end, that no longer reflects, that is afraid to reflect.
3
He that speaks here, conversely, has done nothing so far but reflect: a philosopher and solitary by instinct, who has found his advantage in standing aside and outside, in patience, in procrastination, in staying behind; as a spirit of daring and experiment that has already lost its way once in every labyrinth of the future; as a soothsayer – bird spirit who looks back when relating what will come; as the first perfect nihilist of Europe who, however, has even now lived through the whole of nihilism, to the end, leaving it behind, outside himself.
4
For one should make no mistake about the meaning of the title that this gospel of the future wants to bear. “The Will to Power: Attempt at a Revaluation of All Values” — in this formulation a countermovement finds expression, regarding both principle and task; a movement that in some future will take the place of this perfect nihilism — but presupposes it, logically and psychologically, and certainly can come only after and out of it. For why has the advent of nihilism become necessary? Because the values we have had hitherto thus draw their final consequence; because nihilism represents the ultimate logical conclusion of our great values and ideals — because we must experience nihilism before we can find out what value these “values” really had. — We require, sometime, new values

Day 3312, notebook.

Daily picture, Quotes

Friedrich Nietzsche

Writings from the Early Notebooks
Notebook 29, summer – autumn 1873

16 All drives are connected with pleasure and displeasure there can be no drive for truth, i.e. for a pure truth entirely without any consequences or affects, because at that point pleasure and displeasure would cease, and there is no drive that has no premonition of pleasure in its own satisfaction. The pleasure of thinking does not indicate a desire for truth. The pleasure of all sensory perceptions derives from the fact that they are brought into being through inferences. To that extent man is always swimming in a sea of pleasure. But to what extent can inference, a logical operation, give pleasure? 

Day 3311, from earth.

Daily picture, Poetry, Quotes 
We live in darkness
a modern cave
we believe

not the messenger 
who speaks differently
another way
not from heaven
but from earth

Krishnamurti

Chapter I
Education and the Significance of Life

When one travels around the world, one notices to what an extraordinary degree human nature is the same, whether in India or America, in Europe or Australia. This is especially true in colleges and universities. We are turning out, as if through a mold, a type of human being whose chief interest is to find security, to become somebody important, or to have a good time with as little thought as possible.

Conventional education makes independent thinking extremely difficult. Conformity leads to mediocrity. To be different from the group or to resist environment is not easy and is often risky as long as we worship success. The urge to be successful, which is the pursuit of reward whether in the material or in the so-called spiritual sphere, the search for inward or outward security, the desire for comfort—this whole process smothers discontent, puts an end to spontaneity and breeds fear; and fear blocks the intelligent understanding of life. With increasing age, dullness of mind and heart sets in.

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Day 3305, walk through the city while charging.

Daily picture, Poetry

From:  Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche   

84. To Peter Gast
Marienbad, July 18, 1880 

My dear friend:
I still cannot help thinking several times a day of the delightful pampering I had in Venice and of the still more delightful pamperer, and all I can say is that one cannot have such good times for long and that it is only right I should once more be an ancho rite and as such go walking for ten hours a day, drink fateful doses of water and await their effect. Mean while I burrow eagerly inside my moral mines and at times feel quite subterranean in the process — at pres ent I seem to feel as if I had now discovered the principal artery and outlet. But this is the sort of belief that may return a hundred times only to be rejected. Now and again an echo of Chopin’s music rings in my ears, and this much you have achieved, that at such moments I always think of you and lose myself in meditating about possibilities. My trust in you has grown very great; you are built much more soundly than I suspected, and apart from the evil influence that Herr Nietzsche has exercised over you from time to time, you are in every respect well conditioned. Ceterum censeo mountains and woods are better than towns and Paris is better than Vienna.

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Day 3298,but.

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Friedrich Nietzsche

Twilight of the Idols
Reason in Philosophy

2 I set apart with high reverence the name of Heraclitus . When the rest of the philosopher crowd rejected the evidence of the senses because these showed plurality and change, he rejected their evidence because they showed things as if they possessed duration and unity. Heraclitus too was unjust to the senses, which lie neither in the way the Eleatics * believe nor as he believed – they do not lie at all. It is what we make of their evidence that first introduces a lie into it, for example the lie of unity, the lie of materiality, of substance, of duration.… ‘Reason’ is the cause of our falsification of the evidence of the senses. In so far as the senses show becoming, passing away, change, they do not lie.… But Heraclitus will always be right in this, that being is an empty fiction. The ‘apparent’ world is the only one: the ‘real’ world has only been lyingly added …

Day 3297, This explains a lot.

Daily picture, Quotes

Friedrich Nietzsche

The Will to Power
Book Three

494  It is improbable that our “knowledge” should extend further than is strictly necessary for the preservation of life. Morphology shows us how the senses and the nerves, as well as the brain, develop in proportion to the difficulty of finding nourishment.

Day 3284, single act.

Daily picture, Quotes

Friedrich Nietzsche

Human, All Too Human
The Wanderer and His Shadow

39 Origin of rights. – Rights can in the first instance be traced back to tradition, tradition to some agreement. At some time in the past men were mutually content with the consequences of the agreement they had come to, and at the same time too indolent formally to renew it; thus they lived on as though it were continually being renewed and, as forgetfulness spread its veil over its origin, gradually came to believe they were in possession of a sacred, immutable state of affairs upon which every generation had to continue to build. Tradition was now a compulsion, even when it no longer served the purpose for which the agreement had originally been concluded. – The weak have at all times found here their sure stronghold: they tend to regard that single act of agreement, that single act of grace, as valid eternally 

Day 3279, walled in.

Daily picture, My thoughts

This weekend, someone mentioned that he has been influenced a lot by Iain McGilchrist. I never heard of him. He has written some relatively famous books that are also very lengthy. YouTube to the rescue, and there you can find many lectures and interviews. I like many of his ideas; some of them are inspired by ancient wisdom and religions, and it has to do with the way people act and react in the world, but as a neuroscientist, he can look at the actual brain and see, in fact, what happens if you “turn off” the left or right part of the brain. His theory, in short, revolves around the idea that right-brain people are more thoughtful and left-brain people are more efficient without regard for the consequences. He argues that a balance is necessary and that there have been times when rulers, or the societies as a whole, were more in balance. It is interesting, and It is worth learning about it. There is an agenda for why he is pushing his ideas, and that has to do with the environment and how we destroy it and with the mindless rush for more power and money by a small elite that, in his mind, is on a trajectory to destroy the world.  

YouTube cannot be YouTube if it does not recommend other similar programs, and one of them was from another thinker and activist. His name is Daniel Schmachtenberg, and he is not only looking depressed, but his message is also depressing. Just watch the video, and you will know what I mean.

The thing is that I can understand what they say. The hard data is not lying, and though the world is always governed by people with little empathy, insight, and wisdom, the problem is now that besides the nuclear weapons that could kill us, it is now also possible to develop with the help of AI viruses that have the potential to kill us all. And climate change seems to be something that everybody tries to ignore. It might not affect us, but the story might be different in 50 to 100 years.

I don’t know what to do with this. I try to live my life as consciously as possible. I try not to pollute more than necessary and try to be thoughtful in my interactions with the people around me. I educate myself and think about ways to educate others. I like the idea of anarchism because it has the potential to take away the handful of leaders who always seem to mess it up for us. But all of this is child’s play, and the best thing it does is keeping my consciousness clean(ish). 

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Day 3277, a road.

Daily picture, Quotes

Friedrich Nietzsche

Daybreak
Book I

26 Animals and morality. – The practices demanded in polite society: careful avoidance of the ridiculous, the offensive, the presumptuous, the suppression of one’s virtues as well as of one’s strongest inclinations, self-adaptation, self-deprecation, submission to orders of rank – all this is to be found as social morality in a crude form everywhere, even in the depths of the animal world – and only at this depth do we see the purpose of all these amiable precautions: one wishes to elude one’s pursuers and be favoured in the pursuit of one’ s prey. For this reason the animals learn to master themselves and alter their form, so that many, for example, adapt their colouring to the colouring of their surroundings (by virtue of the socalled ‘chromatic function’), pretend to be dead or assume the forms and colours of another animal or of sand, leaves, lichen, fungus (what English researchers designate ‘mimicry’). Thus the individual hides himself in the general concept ‘man’, or in society, or adapts himself to princes, classes, parties, opinions of his time and place:

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Day 3270, condemnation.

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Friedrich Nietzsche

The Antichrist

20.
In my condemnation of Christianity I surely hope I do no injustice to a related religion with an even larger number of believers: I allude to Buddhism . Both are to be reckoned among the nihilistic religions — they are both décadence religions — but they are separated from each other in a very remarkable way. For the fact that he is able to compare them at all the critic of Christianity is indebted to the scholars of India. — Buddhism is a hundred times as realistic as Christianity — it is part of its living heritage that it is able to face problems objectively and coolly; it is the product of long centuries of philosophical speculation.

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Day 3263, True World.

Daily picture, Quotes

Friedrich Nietzsche

Twilight of the Idols
How the “True World” Finally Became a Fiction
History of an Error


1. The true world, attainable for the wise, the devout, the virtuous—they live in it, they are it.

(Oldest form of the idea, relatively clever, simple, convincing. Paraphrase of the assertion, “I, Plato, am the truth.”)

2. The true world, unattainable for now, but promised to the wise, the devout, the virtuous (“to the sinner who does penance”).

(Progress of the idea: it becomes more refined, more devious, more mystifying—it becomes woman, it becomes Christian . . .)

3. The true world, unattainable, unprovable, unpromisable, but a consolation, an obligation, an imperative, merely by virtue of being thought.

(The old sun basically, but glimpsed through fog and skepticism; the idea become sublime, pallid, Nordic, Königsbergian.)

4. The true world—unattainable? In any case, unattained. And if it is unattained, it is also unknown. And hence it is not consoling, redeeming, or obligating either; to what could something unknown obligate us? . . .

(Gray dawn. First yawnings of reason. Rooster’s crow of positivism.)

5. The “true world”—an idea with no use anymore, no longer even obligating—an idea become useless, superfluous, hence a refuted idea: let’s do away with it!

(Bright day; breakfast; return of bon sens [good sense] and cheerfulness; Plato blushes; pandemonium of all free spirits.)

6. We have done away with the true world: what world is left over? The apparent one, maybe? . . . But no! Along with the true world, we have also done away with the apparent!

Day 3225, why.

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Friedrich Nietzsche

The Gay Science
Book two

93 But why do you write?– A: I am not one of those who think with an inky pen in their hand, much less one of those who in front of an open inkwell abandon themselves to their passions while they sit in a chair and stare at the paper. I am annoyed by and ashamed of my writing; writing is for me a pressing and embarrassing need, and to speak of it even in a parable disgusts me. B: But why, then, do you write? -A: Well, my friend, to be quite frank: so far, I have not discovered any other way of getting rid of my thoughts. -B: And why do you want to get rid of them? -A: Why 1 want to? Do I want to? I must. -B: Enough! Enough!