Hello
Friedrich Nietzsche is a truly uniqe philosopher because you can really understand what he is trying to say. His writings are filled with irony, wit, and very funny humor. If I were stranded on a island and had to choose between reading Hegel's
Phenomenology of Spirit and Nietzsche's
Genealogy of Morals I would without a doubt pick Nietzsche. Also Nietzsche is intresting because of the amount of myths surrounding him. The biggest (and oldest) myth is Nietzsche's relation with Nazism. On the basis of chronology Nietzsche could not have been a Nazi since he died in 1900. Hitler was only a young boy when Nietzsche died. But still many people think Nietzsche was a major influence on Nazism. Admittidly Nietzsche did influence Nazism, but that influence was immensly meager. When his ideas did influence Nazis it was due to a major misintrepation of Nietzsche on their part. Also Nietzsche was a major Anti-Anti-Semitic. He hated Jew haters. So the Nazi connection is false. But there are other myths too. But one can not deny that Nietzsche was not politically correct. But his more disturbing views had a purpose. Nietzsche did not hold them simply to have those weird beliefs. Nietzsche fierce writing style, and some of his fierce ideas must be understood as a reaction to the annoying and quite boring atomesphere of nineteen century philosophy. Everybody was obsesed with reason. As a result Nietzsche emphazed irrationalism and raw creativity. Instead of cold, objective, impersonal, and cosmic reason he offered a warm, subjective, personal, and diverse creativity. It is creativity, and that unadulterarted creativity that is the basic building block of his philosophy. In everything else his views often change. Besides this theres much more to Nietzsche. Nihilism, eternal recurrence, overman, post-Christaninty, annihilation of truth and a host of other things are important to a discussion of Nietzsche. Since I cant do justice to all of that I will have a bunch of internet articles at the end of quotations. Also a list of Nietzsche books. Before that a note on translations of Nietzsche. No translation can capture that pure joy and wit that pervades Nietzsche works. Also alot of the translations are inaccurate. The best translations of Nietzsche are by Walter Kaufmann. Very few of these quotes are from Kaufmann's translation. For this I am sorry. If you want to discuss Nietzsche come on this thread
http://free-minds.org/forum/index.php?topic=9597506.0. Now the Quotes.
QuotesGod is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him! (The Gay Science). What after all are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God? (The Gay Science). Good and evil are God?s prejudices. (The Gay Science). What is the seal of liberation??No longer to be ashamed in our own presence! (The Gay Science). Finding everything deep?that is an inconvenient trait: it causes a person constantly to strain his eyes and eventually to find out more than he might have wished. (The Gay Science). We hear only those questions for which we are in a position to find answers. (The Gay Science). What then in the last resort are the truths of mankind??They are the irrefutable errors. (The Gay Science). We have no organ at all for knowledge, for ?truth?: we ?know? (or believe or imagine) precisely as much as may be useful in the interest of the human herd, the species: and even what is here called ?usefulness? is in the end only a belief, something imagined and perhaps precisely that most fatal piece of stupidity by which we shall one day perish. (The Gay Science). And as for sickness: are we not almost tempted to ask whether we could get along without it? (The Gay Science). That grand drama in a hundred acts, which is reserved for the next two centuries of Europe?the most terrible, most questionable and perhaps also the most hopeful of all dramas. (The Genealogy of Morals, a note is that these words written in 1887). Everyone who has ever built anywhere a ?new heaven? first found the power thereto in his own hell. (The Genealogy of Morals). All in all, punishment hardens and renders people more insensible; it concentrates; it increases the feeling of estrangement; it strengthens the power of resistance. (The Genealogy of Morals). Does wisdom perhaps appear on the earth as a raven which is inspired by the smell of carrion? (Twilight of the Idols). Everything is the same, nothing is worthwhile, the world is senseless, knowledge strangles. (Thus Spoke Zarathustra). Man ... cannot learn to forget, but hangs on the past: however far or fast he runs, that chain runs with him. (The Use and Abuse of History). Existence really is an imperfect tense that never becomes a present. (The Use and Abuse of History). Among twelve apostles there must always be one who is as hard as stone, so that the new church may be built upon him. (The Wanderer and His Shadow). The press, the machine, the railroad, the telegraph are premises whose conclusion once a thousand years have passed no one has dared to draw as yet. (The Wanderer and His Shadow). A small garden, figs, a little cheese, and, along with this, three or four good friends?such was luxury to Epicurus. (The Wanderer and His Shadow). Probability but no truth, facility but no freedom?it is owing to these two fruits that the tree of knowledge cannot be confused with the tree of life. (The Wanderer and His Shadow). With deep men, as with deep wells, it takes a long time for anything that falls into them to hit bottom. Onlookers, who almost never wait long enough, readily suppose that such men are callous and unresponsive?or even boring. (The Wanderer and His Shadow). We must remain as close to the flowers, the grass, and the butterflies as the child is who is not yet so much taller than they are. We adults, on the other hand, have outgrown them and have to lower ourselves to stoop down to them. It seems to me that the grass hates us when we confess our love for it.?Whoever would partake of all good things must understand how to be small at times. (The Wanderer and His Shadow). Not every end is a goal. The end of a melody is not its goal: but nonetheless, had the melody not reached its end it would not have reached its goal either. A parable. (The Wanderer and His Shadow). They climb the mountain like beasts, stupid and sweating; it seems that no one bothered to tell them that there are beautiful vistas along the way. The Wanderer and His Shadow). This thinker needs no one to refute him: he manages to do that himself. (The Wanderer and His Shadow). Supposing that Truth is a woman--what then? Is there not ground for suspecting that all philosophers, in so far as they have been dogmatists, have failed to understand women--that the terrible seriousness and clumsy importunity with which they have usually paid their addresses to Truth, have been unskilled and unseemly methods for winning a woman? Certainly she has never allowed herself to be won; and at present every kind of dogma stands with sad and discouraged mien--If, indeed, it stands at all! (Beyond Good and Evil). For The search for truth is a dubious enterprise, it seems, both because it isn't clear that it's a good idea for us to try and live with it, and because the very notion of finding truth is in itself suspect. (Beyond Good and Evil). What makes one regard philosophers half mistrustfully and half mockingly is not that one again and again detects how innocent they are - how often and how easily they fall into error and go astray, in short their childishness and childlikeness - but that they display altogether insufficient honesty, while making a mighty and virtuous noise as soon as the problem of truthfulness is even remotely touched on. They pose as having discovered and attained their real opinions through the self-evolution of a cold, pure, divinely unperturbed dialectic (in contrast to the mystics of every rank, who are more honest and more stupid than they are - these speak of 'inspiration') : while what happens at the bottom is that a prejudice, a notion, an 'inspiration', generally a desire of the heart sifted and made abstract, is defended by them with reasons sought after the event - they are one and all advocates who do not want to be regarded as such, and for the most part no better than cunning pleaders for their prejudices, which they baptise 'truths' .. (Beyond Good and Evil). One ought not to make 'cause' and 'effect' into material things, as natural scientists do (and those who, like them, naturalise in their thinking- ), in accordance with the prevailing mechanistic stupidity which has the cause press and push until it 'produces an effect' ; one ought to employ 'cause' and 'effect' only as pure concepts, that is to say as conventional fictions for the purpose of designation, mutual understanding, not explanation. In the 'in itself' there is nothing of 'causal connection', of 'necessity', of 'psychological unfreedom' ; there 'the effect' does not follow the cause', there no 'law' rules. It is we alone who have fabricated causes, succession, reciprocity, relativity, compulsion, number, law, freedom, motive, purpose; and when we falsely introduce this world of symbols into things and mingle it with them as though this symbol-world were an 'in itself', we once more behave as we have always behaved, namely mythologically. 'Unfree will' is mythology: in real life it is only a question of strong and weak wills. (Beyond Good and Evil). Every superior human being will instinctively aspire after a secret citadel where he is set free from the crowd, the many, the majority, where, as its exception, he may forget the rule 'man' - except in the one case in which, as a man of knowledge in the great and exceptional sense, he will be impelled by an even stronger instinct to make straight for this rule. He who, when trafficking with men, does not occasionally glisten with all the shades of distress, green and grey with disgust, satiety, sympathy, gloom and loneliness, is certainly not a man of an elevated taste; but if he does not voluntarily assume this burden and displeasure, if he continually avoids it and, as aforesaid, remains hidden quietly and proudly away in his citadel, then one thing is for sure: he is not made, not predestined for knowledge.
..The study of the average human being, protracted, serious, and with much dissembling, self-overcoming, intimacy, bad company - all company is bad company unless the company of one's equals -; this constitutes a necessary part of the life story of every philosopher, perhaps the most unpleasant and malodorous part and the part most full of disappointments. (Beyond Good and Evil). Our supreme insights must- and should! sound like follies, in certain cases like crimes, when they come impermissibly to the ears of those who are not predisposed and predestined for them. (Beyond Good and Evil). Books for everybody are always malodorous books: the smell of petty people clings to them. Where the people eats and drinks, even where it worships, there is usually a stink. One should not go into churches if one wants to breathe pure air. (Beyond Good and Evil). Whatever standpoint of philosophy we may adopt today: from every point of view the erroneousness of the world in which we believe we live is the surest and firmest thing we can get our eyes on- we find endless grounds for it which we would like to lure us to suppose a deceptive principle in the 'nature of things'. (Beyond Good and Evil). Something might be true although at the same time harmful and dangerous in the highest degree; indeed, it could pertain to the fundamental nature of existence that a complete knowledge of it would destroy one- so that the strength of a spirit could be measured by how much 'truth' it could take, more clearly, to what degree it needed it attenuated, veiled, sweetened, blunted and falsified. But there can be no doubt that for the discovery of certain parts of truth the wicked and unhappy are in a more favourable position and are more likely to succeed; not to speak of the wicked who are happy - a species about whom the moralists are silent. Perhaps severity and cunning provide more favourable conditions for the formation of the strong, independent spirit and philosopher than does that gentle, sweet, yielding goodnaturedness and art of taking things lightly which is prized in a scholar and rightly prized. (Beyond Good and Evil). And how could there exist a 'common good'! The expression is a self-contradiction: what can be common has ever but little value. In the end it must be as it is and has always been: great things are for the great, abysses for the profound, shudders and delicacies for the refined, and, in sum, all rare things for the rare. (Beyond Good and Evil). In the end one has to do everything oneself if one is to know a few things oneself: that is to say, one has much to do! - But a curiosity like mine is after all the most pleasurable of vices - I beg your pardon! I meant to say: the love of truth has its reward in Heaven, and already upon earth- (Beyond Good and Evil). Why atheism today? - 'The father' in God is thoroughly refuted; likewise 'the judge', 'the rewarder' . Likewise his ' free will' : he does not hear - and if he heard he would still not know how to help. The worst thing is : he seems incapable of making himself clearly understood: is he himself vague about what he means? - These are what, in the course of many conversations, asking and listening, I found to be the causes of the decline of European theism; it seems to me that the religious instinct is indeed in vigorous growth - but that it rejects the theistic answer with profound mistrust. (Beyond Good and Evil). Did one not have to sacrifice God himself and out of cruelty against oneself worship stone, stupidity, gravity, fate, nothingness? To sacrifice God for nothingness - this paradoxical mystery of the ultimate act of cruelty was reserved for the generation which is even now arising: we all know something of it already. (Beyond Good and Evil). With the strength of his spiritual sight and insight the distance, and as it were the space, around man continually expands: his world grows deeper, ever new stars, ever new images and enigmas come into view. (Beyond Good and Evil). He who has seen deeply into the world knows what wisdom there is in the fact that men are superficial. It is their instinct for preservation which teaches them to be fickle, light and false. (Beyond Good and Evil). When you stare into the abyss the abyss stares back at you. (Beyond Good and Evil). Madness is something rare in individuals- but in groups, parties, peoples, and ages it is the rule. (Beyond Good and Evil). Ultimately one loves one's desires and not that which is desired. (Beyond Good and Evil). Love brings to light the exalted and concealed qualities of a lover- what is rare and exceptional in him: to the extent it can easily deceive as to what is normal in him. (Beyond Good and Evil). Inasmuch as ever since there have been human beings there have also been human herds (family groups, communities, tribes, nations, states, churches) and always very many who obey compared with the very small number of those who command - considering, that is to say, that hitherto nothing has been practiced and cultivated among men better or longer than obedience, it is fair to suppose that as a rule a need for it is by now innate as a kind of formal conscience which commands: 'thou shalt unconditionally do this, unconditionally not do that', in short 'thou shalt'. This need seeks to be satisfied and to fill out its form with a content; in doing so it grasps about wildly, according to the degree of its strength, impatience and tension, with little discrimination, as a crude appetite, and accepts whatever any commander - parent, teacher, law, class, prejudice, public opinion - shouts in its ears. The strange narrowness of human evolution, its hesitations, its delays, its frequent retrogressions and rotations, are due to the fact that the herd instinct of obedience has been inherited best and at the expense of the art of commanding. (Beyond Good and Evil). I insist that philosophical labourers and men of science in general should once and for all cease to be confused with philosophers.
..It may be required for the education of a philosopher that he himself has also once stood on all those steps on which his servants, the scientific labourers of philosophy, remain standing- have to remain standing; he himself must perhaps have been critic and skeptic and dogmatist and historian and, in addition, poet and collector and traveller and reader of riddles and moralist and seer and ?free spirit? and practically everything, so as to traverse the whole range of human values and value-feelings and be able to gaze from the heights into every distance, from the depths into every height, from the nook-and-corner into every broad expanse with manifold eyes and a manifold conscience. But all these are only preconditions of his task: this task itself demands something different ? it demands that he creates values. (Beyond Good and Evil). Whether it be hedonism or pessimism or utilitarianism or eudaemonism: all these modes of thought which assess the value of things according to pleasure or pain, that is to say according to attendant and secondary phenomena, are fore-ground modes of thought and naiveties which anyone conscious of creative powers and an artists conscience will look down on with derision, though not without pity. Pity for you!
That, to be sure, is not pity for social ?distress?, for ?society? and its sick and unfortunate, for the vicious and broken from the start who lie all around us; even less is it pity for the grumbling, oppressed, rebellious slave classes who aspire after domination ? they call it ?freedom?.
Our pity is more elevated, more farsighted pity ? we see how man is diminishing himself, how you are diminishing him! ? and there are times when we behold your pity with an indescribable anxiety, when we defend ourselves against this pity ? when we find your seriousness more dangerous than any kind of frivolity. You want it possible ? and there is no madder ?if possible? ? to abolish suffering; and we? ? it really does seem that we would rather increase it and make it worse than it ever has been! Wellbeing as you understand it ? that is no goal, that seems to us an end! A state which soon renders man ludicrous and contemptible ? which makes it desirable that he should perish!
The discipline of suffering, of great suffering ? do you not know that it is this discipline alone which has created every elevation of mankind hitherto? That tension of the soul in misfortune which cultivates its strength, its terror at the sight of great destruction, its inventiveness and bravery in undergoing, enduring, interpretating, exploiting misfortune, and whatever of depth, mystery, mask, spirit, cunning and greatness has been bestowed upon it- has it not been bestowed through suffering, through the discipline of great suffering? (Beyond Good and Evil). ..But to repeat, there are higher problems than the problems of pleasure and pain and pity; and every philosophy that treats only of them is a piece of naivety ... (Beyond Good and Evil). We immoralists! This world which concerns us, in which we have to love and fear, this almost invisible, inaudible world of subtle commanding, subtle obeying, a world of ?almost? in every respect, sophistical, insidious, sharp, tender: it is well defended, indeed, against clumsy spectators and familiar curiosity! We are entwined in an austere shirt of duty and cannot get out of it ? and in this we are ?men of duty?, we too! Sometimes, it is true, we may dance in our ?chains? and between our ?swords?; often, it is no less true, we gnash our teeth at it and frown impatiently at the unseen hardship of our lot. But do what we will, fools and appearances speak against us and say ?these are men without duty? ? we always have fools and appearances against us! (Beyond Good and Evil). Honesty- granted that this is our virtue, from which we cannot get free, we free spirits ? well, let us labour at it with all love and malice and not weary of ?perfecting? ourselves in our virtue, the only one we have: may its brightness one day overspread this ageing culture and its dull, gloomy seriousness like a gilded azure mocking evening glow! And if our honesty should one day none the less grow weary, and sigh, and stretch its limbs, and find us too hard, and like to have things better, easier, gentler, like an agreeable vice: let us remain hard, we last of the Stoics! Our honesty, we free spirits ? let us see to it that our honesty does not become our vanity, our pomp and finery, our limitation, our stupidity! .. let us see that through honesty we do not becomes saints and bores! Is life not a hundred times too short to be- bored in it?
(Is the moralist not the opposite of the Puritan? That is to say, as a thinker who regards morality as something questionable, as worthy of question-marks, in short, as a problem? Is moralising not ? immoral?)
Ultimately they all want English morality to prevail: inasmuch as mankind, or ?the general utility?, or ?the happiness of the greatest number?, no! the happiness of England would best be served; they would like with all their might to prove to themselves that to strive after English happiness, I mean after comfort and fashion (and, as the supreme goal, a seat in Parliament), is at the same time the true path of virtue, indeed that all virtue there has ever been on earth has consisted in just such a striving. Not one of all these ponderous herd animals with their uneasy conscience (who undertake to advocate the cause of egoism as the cause of general welfare-) wants to know or scent that the ?general welfare? is not an ideal, or a goal, or a concept that can be grasped at all, but only a emetic- that what is right for one cannot by any means therefore be right for another, that the demand of one morality for all is detrimental to precisely the higher men, in short that there exists an order of rank between man and man, consequently also between morality and morality.
In late ages which may be proud of their humaneness there remains so much fear, so much superstitious fear of the ?savage cruel beast?, to have mastered which constitutes the very pride of those humane ages, that even palpable truths as if by general agreement, remain unspoken for centuries, because they seem as though they might help to bring back to life that savage beast which has finally been laid to rest.
..One should open one?s eyes and take a new look at cruelty.
..Almost everything we call ?higher culture? is based on the spiritualisation and intensification of cruelty ? this is my proposition; the ?wild beast? has not been laid to rest at all, it lives, it flourishes, it has become ? defined. That what constitutes the painful voluptuousness of tragedy is cruelty ... (Beyond Good and Evil). The power of the spirit to appropriate what is foreign to it is revealed in a strong inclination to assimilate the new to the old, to simplify the complex, to overlook or repel what is wholly contradictory: just as it arbitrarily emphasizes, extracts and falsifies to suit itself certain traits and lines in what is foreign to it, in every piece of ?external world?. Its intention in all this is the incorporation of new ?experiences? , the arrangement of new things within old divisions ? growth, that is to say; more precisely, the feeling of growth, the feeling of increased power.
The same will is served by an apparently antithetical drive of the spirit, a sudden decision for ignorance, for arbitrary shutting-out, a closing of the windows, an inner denial of this or that thing, a refusal to let it approach, a kind of defensive posture against much that can be known, a contentment with the dark, with the closed horizon, an acceptance and approval of ignorance; all this being necessary according to the degree of its power to appropriate, its ?digestive power?, to speak in a metaphor ? and indeed ?the spirit? is more like a stomach than anything else. (Beyond Good and Evil). What the verse is to the poet, dialectical thinking is to the philosopher; he snatches at it in order to hold fast his enchantment, in order to petrify it. And just as words and verse to the dramatist are only stammerings in a foreign language, to tell in it what he lived, what he saw, and what he can directly promulgate by gesture and music only, thus the expression of every deep philosophical intuition by means of dialectics and scientific reflection is, it is true, on the one hand the only means to communicate what has been seen, but on the other hand it is a paltry means, and at the bottom a metaphorical, absolutely inexact translation into a different sphere and language. Thus Thales saw the Unity of the "Existent," and when he wanted to communicate this idea he talked of water. (The Greeks). Greek philosophy seems to begin with a preposterous fancy, with the proposition that water is the origin and mother-womb of all things. Is it really necessary to stop there and become serious? Yes, and for three reasons: firstly, because the preposition does enunciate something about the origin of things; secondly, because it does so without figure and fable; thirdly and lastly, because it contained, although only in the chrysalis state, the idea :everything is one. ..That which drove him (Thales) to this generalization was a metaphysical dogma, which had its origin in a mystic intuition and which together with the ever renewed endeavors to express it better, we find in all philosophies- the proposition: everything is one! (The Greeks).
Internet Resources http://www.textetc.com/theory/nietzsche.htmlhttp://www.iep.utm.edu/n/nihilism.htmhttp://www.fiu.edu/~grenierg/nietzsche_bio.htmlhttp://www.mith.demon.co.uk/index.htmhttp://www.hunter.cuny.edu/philosophy/jns/http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nietzsche/http://www4.hmc.edu:8001/humanities/beckman/Nietzsche/Birth.htmNote some of these resources are misleading.
Books by Nietzsche on Internet http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/nietzsche/1886/beyond-good-evil/index.htmhttp://records.viu.ca/~johnstoi/Nietzsche/beyondgoodandevil_tofc.htm Diffrent Translation
http://records.viu.ca/~johnstoi/Nietzsche/genealogytofc.htmhttp://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/nietzsche/1874/challenge.htm http://records.viu.ca/~johnstoi/Nietzsche/history.htmhttp://records.viu.ca/~johnstoi/Nietzsche/tragedy_all.htm Final NoteNietzsche's ideas evolved with time.
