psychology

Day 2869, nihilism.

Daily picture, Quotes

Several notes from Nietzsche written in 1987 are to be found in the book The Will to Power, a collection of his notes published after his death and not meant for publication. 

Friedrich Nietzsche

The Will to Power
Book One: European Nihilism

What does nihilism mean? That the highest values evaluate themselves. The aim is lacking; “why?” finds no answer.

The supreme values in whose service man should live, especially when they were very hard on him and exacted a high price – these social values were erected over man to strengthen their voice, as if they were commands of God, as “reality,” as the “true” world, as a hope and future world. Now that the shabby origin of these values is becoming clear, the universe seems to have lost value, seems “meaningless”-but that is only a transitional stage. 

Values and their changes are related to increases in the power of those positing the values. The measure of unbelief, of permitted “freedom of the spirit” as an expression of an increase in power. “Nihilism” an ideal of the highest degree of powerfulness of the spirit, the over-richest life-partly destructive, partly ironic.

Day 2867, old poem.

Daily picture, Poetry
Poem in Dutch, 2006
Through the snow I continue where the path ends

the path that took me to that which is unexpected

thinking we know where we are going understand

what am I doing here what am I doing in the snow

I can give you reason or two maybe three or more

so what is true of all of this or what will value have

the cold snow on the ground I fall into is full of this

unthinkable thoughts a never-conceivable realities

without reason it wants to give anything the truth

It happens spontaneously in passing just like that

don't think too much think like a child every day

without a past dare to fall into the cold snow

do not be afraid of the wet or the blame

wet cloth can dry the days disappear

disappearing into the horizons

the one that is behind you

full of old imaginations

heavy as a burden

denied bitterness

you will forget

what it was 

as a child

to be to

fall in

snow

Wet

am 

I



that

is like

to become

a child

play

Day 2862, something to read.

Daily picture, Quotes

Friedrich Nietzsche

Human All Too Human II
Part II. The Wanderer And His Shadow.

23. Whether the Adherents of the Doctrine of Free Will have a Right to Punish?—Men whose vocation it is to judge and punish try to establish in every case whether an evil-doer is really responsible for his act, whether he was able to apply his reasoning powers, whether he acted with motives and not unconsciously or under constraint. If he is punished, it is because he preferred the worse to the better motives, which he must consequently have known. Where this knowledge is wanting, man is, according to the prevailing view, not responsible—unless his ignorance, e.g. his ignorantia legis, be the consequence of an intentional neglect to learn what he ought: in that case he already preferred the worse to the better motives at the time when he refused to learn, and must now pay the penalty of his unwise choice. If, on the other hand, perhaps through stupidity or shortsightedness, he has never seen the better motives, he is generally not punished, for people say that he made a wrong choice, he acted like a brute beast. The intentional rejection of the better reason is now needed before we treat the offender as fit to be punished.

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Day 2856, cannot.

Daily picture, Quotes

Friedrich Nietzsche

The Will to Power
Book III: Principle of a New Determination of Values/Part 1. The Will to Power as Knowledge

473 The intellect cannot criticize itself, precisely because it cannot be compared with different kinds of intellects, and because its ability to acquire knowledge would be manifested only in the face of ‘true reality’; i.e. in order to criticize the intellect, we should have to be superior beings who possessed ‘absolute knowledge’. This already presupposes that, apart from all perspectival kinds of observation and sensory and intellectual appropriation, there is something, an ‘in-itself’ – but the psychological derivation of the belief in things forbids our speaking of ‘things in themselves’.