psychology

Day 2507, an error.

Daily picture, Quotes

Friedrich Nietzsche

Daybreak
Book I

32 The brake.- To suffer for the sake of morality and then to be told that this kind of suffering is founded on an error: this arouses indignation. For there is a unique consolation in affirming through one’s suffering a ‘profounder world of truth’ than any other world is, and one would much rather suffer and thereby feel oneself exalted above reality (through consciousness of having thus approached this ‘profounder world of truth’) than be without suffering but also without this feeling that one is exalted. It is thus pride, and the customary manner in which pride is gratified, which stands in the way of a new understanding of morality. What force, therefore, will have to be employed if this brake is to be removed? More pride? A new pride?

Day 2505, idle.

Daily picture, Poetry 

We opened our eyes to the world
from where we crashed
with clipped wings
staring at the chasm
we try to scale
in vain
 

Thrownness (German: Geworfenheit) is a concept introduced by German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) to describe humans’ individual existences as being ‘thrown’ (geworfen) into the world in the sense of its having been born into a specific family in a particular culture at a given moment of human history. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thrownness

Day 2494, free will.

Daily picture, Quotes

Friedrich Nietzsche

Twilight of the Idols, or How to Philosophize with a Hammer.
THE FOUR GREAT ERRORS

7 The error of free will. Today we no longer have any pity for the concept of “free will”: we know only too well what it really is–the foulest of all theologians’ artifices aimed at making mankind “responsible” in their sense, that is, dependent upon them. Here I simply supply the psychology of all “making responsible.”

Wherever responsibilities are sought, it is usually the instinct of wanting to judge and punish which is at work. Becoming has been deprived of its innocence when any being-such-and-such is traced back to will, to purposes, to acts of responsibility: the doctrine of the will has been invented essentially for the purpose of punishment, that is, because one wanted to impute guilt. The entire old psychology, the psychology of will, was conditioned by the fact that its originators, the priests at the head of ancient communities, wanted to create for themselves the right to punish–or wanted to create this right for God. Men were considered “free” so that they might be judged and punished–so that they might become guilty: consequently, every act had to be considered as willed, and the origin of every act had to be considered as lying within the consciousness (and thus the most fundamental counterfeit in psychologicis was made the principle of psychology itself).

Today, as we have entered into the reverse movement and we immoralists are trying with all our strength to take the concept of guilt and the concept of punishment out of the world again, and to cleanse psychology, history, nature, and social institutions and sanctions of them, there is in our eyes no more radical opposition than that of the theologians, who continue with the concept of a “moral world-order” to infect the innocence of becoming by means of “punishment” and “guilt.” Christianity is a metaphysics of the hangman.

Day 2490, power.

Daily picture 

Do we have the power to lift ourselves up? 

I am afraid we can't. Like the crane in this picture: powerful, tall, and mighty but incapable of lifting itself up, it can only lift a crane like itself like we can another. 

And the crane is not weak for this failure; sure, it gets its power from somewhere else, but besides that, it can move around, stand strong against nature, and counters the loads it carries with flair. 

The crane is a mighty structure for what it's made for.