Nietzsche himself was a fanatical seeker after truth and recognized no virtue above intellectual integrity.20 loc: 334
PART I loc: 358
A very popular error: having the courage of one's convictions; rather it is a matter of having the courage for an attack on one's convictions!!! loc: 358
Chapter I loc: 359
sick with dysentery and diphtheria, Nietzsche caught both diseases and, after delivering his charges to a field hospital, required medical attention himself. "Moreover"-he wrote his friend Gersdorff- "the atmosphere of my experiences had spread around me like a gloomy fog: for a time I heard a sound of wailing which seemed as if it would never end." One gathers that he may have had a physical and nervous breakdown. loc: 422
Moreover, as Nietzsche himself recognized in his preface to the second edition, he had weakened his case by appending to the fifteen sections which comprised his main thesis about ancient tragedy another ten which utilized these considerations for a poorly written eulogy of Wagner. loc: 432
It was Wagner's presence that convinced Nietzsche that greatness and genuine creation were still possible, and it was Wagner who inspired him with the persistent longing first to equal and then to outdo his friend. loc: 468
the friendship with a man of great creative genius; the jealous aspiration to excel the friend and, begotten by it, the deep insight into the artist's soul-the starting point of Nietzsche's depth psychology and one of the decisive inspirations of his later conception of the will to power.8 loc: 473
shared a passion for Schopenhauer. Tristan, moreover, celebrated not only Schopenhauer's ceaseless, blind, and passionately striving will but also a drunken frenzy which suggested to Nietzsche's mind the ecstatic abandonment of the ancient Dionysian cults. loc: 476
I think I know better than anyone else of what tremendous things Wagner is capable-the fifty worlds of alien ecstasies for which no one besides him had wings; and given the way I am, strong enough to turn even what is most questionable and dangerous to my advantage and thus to become stronger, I call Wagner the great benefactor of my life loc: 485
His days in the Wagners' house in Tribschen were as close as he ever came to having a home in which he belonged and of which he could feel proud. loc: 507
Nietzsche did not come fully into his own until he broke with the beloved tyrant who made him change the ending of his first book and then also of the third Meditation,tt the man who frowned on the second Meditation because it had no special reference to himself and who demanded frequent visits and exertions for his own cause, though they interfered with the work and ideas of the younger man. loc: 522
Independence of the soul-that is at stake here! No sacrifice can then be too great: even one's dearest friend one must be willing to sacrifice for it, though he be the most glorious human being, embellishment of the world, genius without peer loc: 527
Legend has it that Nietzsche, the pagan, broke with Wagner because he turned Christian in Parsifal. loc: 537
How much more sickening to him was the spectacle of Wagner, obviously burning with worldly ambition, making this ostentatious obeisance to Christian otherworldliness; Schopenhauer's foremost disciple writing the great Christian music drama; loc: 542
breach developed gradually, as Nietzsche became increasingly aware of the impossibility of serving both Wagner and his own call. loc: 545
Wagner's Bayreuth was developing into a symbol of the "extirpation of the German spirit in favor of the `German Reich"' loc: 553
Nietzsche, who was then championing the ideals of Voltaire and the Enlightenment, advocating intermarriage between different races, and propagating the vision of the "Good European"-views which, as we shall see, he never repudiated-considered intellectual integrity one of the cardinal virtues. loc: 566
Anti-Semitic Teutonism-or proto-Nazism-was one of the major issues in Nietzsche's life, if only because his sister and Wagner, the two most important figures in his development, confronted him with this ideology. loc: 644
I should like very much to be permitted to be your teacher. Finally, to tell the whole truth: I am now looking for human beings who could become my heirs; I am carrying around a few ideas that are not by any means to be found in my books-and am looking for the most beautiful and fruitful soil for them. loc: 720
He had reached a second great turning point in his career, comparable to the transition from his early works (The Birth of Tragedy and the Untimely Meditations) to Human, All-Too-Human; and a day later he wrote Lou, after mentioning that he was about to proofread The Gay Science: "This book marks the conclusion of that series of works which begins with Human, All-Too-Human: together, they are meant to erect 'a new image and ideal of a free spirit.' loc: 725
That Ree had spoken critically and indiscreetly about Nietzsche to Lou, is plain, and evidently Lou had cast up some of these remarks to Elisabeth, admitting they came from Ree. Now Elisabeth convinced Nietzsche that both of them had said terrible things about him behind his back, ruining his reputation and thus discrediting his books. loc: 859
It also seems to me that the rudest word, the rudest letter are still more benign, more decent than silence. . . . Swallowing things leads of necessity to a bad character . . . If one is rich enough for this, it is even a good fortune to be in the wrong loc: 873
In the end I am left with the very uncomfortable task of making good to some extent to Dr. Ree and Miss Salome what evil my sister has done loc: 886
As I see it, few men have fought more heroically against illness and agony, seeking to derive insight from their suffering, utilizing their talents to the last, and making their misery a stepping stone to new and bolder visions. loc: 968
Chapter 2 loc: 972
in Nietzsche's books the individual sentences seem clear enough and it is the total design that puzzles us. loc: 980
What is the mark of every literary decadence? That life no longer resides in the whole. The word becomes sovereign and leaps out of the sentence, the sentence reaches out and obscures the meaning of the page, and the page comes to life at the expense of the whole-the whole is no longer a whole. loc: 984
this style, which is so characteristic of Nietzsche's way of thinking and writing, might be called monadologic to crystallize the tendency of each aphorism to be self-sufficient while yet throwing light on almost every other aphorism. loc: 1008
Nietzsche's style can be taken to represent a brutally frank admission that today hardly anyone can offer more than scattered profound insights or single beautiful sentences-and loc: 1045
Nietzsche's style is more than the "style of decadence," and his aphorisms are not only monadologic but also add up to a philosophy. loc: 1046
What Nietzsche objects to is the failure to question one's own assumptions. The philosopher who boasts of a system would appear more stupid than he is, inasmuch as he refuses to think about his premises. loc: 1062
"the will to a system is a lack of integrity" loc: 1063
No one system reveals the entire truth; at best, each organizes one point of view or perspective. We must consider many perspectives, and a philosopher should not imprison his thought in one system. loc: 1077
envisaged Socrates from some such point of view as a fearless questioner who, instead of deducing a system from accepted premises, was ever engaged in the pursuit of independent problems and helping others with theirs-not by "blessing and oppressing" them with his own solutions but by showing them to their astonishment what they had presumed in formulating their problems. loc: 1092
He doubted that the truth was to be found in "things past and books." These had to be subjected to scrutiny no less than any other opinions. All assumptions had to be questioned. loc: 1108
Nietzsche's aphoristic style appears as an interesting attempt to transcend the maze of concepts and opinions in order to get at the objects themselves. The "style of decadence" is methodically employed in the service of Nietzsche's "experimentalism." loc: 1117
Each aphorism loc: 1120
maintained-may be considered as a thought experiment. loc: 1121
Kant already had insisted that we cannot apprehend ultimate reality, and that what we know are but phenomena. In other words, the world of our experience is not a likeness of the "real" world. loc: 1156
our "truths" are not accurate descriptions of a transcendent reality, but simply statements that "work" and thus fit us for survival-in loc: 1157
whatever one may think of pragmatism, Nietzsche did not think it through and failed to integrate it successfully with the remainder of his philosophy. loc: 1164
Experimenting involves testing an answer by trying to live according to it. loc: 1174
The problem itself is experienced deeply, and only problems that are experienced so deeply are given consideration. Only problems that present themselves so forcefully that they threaten the thinker's present mode of life lead to philosophic inquiries. loc: 1175
Inquiry must take for its starting point a problem that is concrete and not artificial or merely "academic." loc: 1179
Our "small daily life," the common events of the workshop, of nature, and of society, must be seen to give rise to "thousands of problems-painful, abashing, exasperating problems." Only then, feeling a need and thirst for scientific knowledge, we should also feel the proper "awe," and our souls would tremble "with the wrestling and succumbing and fighting on again . . . with the martyrdom that constitutes the history of strict science" (M '95). loc: 1182
"All truths are for me soaked in blood" loc: 1186
Questioning means experiencing fully, with an open mind and without reservations; and failure to question seems to Nietzsche more and more synonymous with the desire not to experience possible implications. loc: 1187
ideal is to consider each problem on its own merits. Intellectual integrity in the consideration of each separate problem seems not only the best way to particular truths, but it makes each investigation a possible corrective for any inadvertent previous mistakes. loc: 1195
occasion for revision. By "living through" each problem, Nietzsche is apt to realize implications that other, non-existential, thinkers who merely pose these problems histrionically have overlooked. loc: 1198
Philosophically, the works after Zarathustra do not any longer contain series of small experiments but the hypotheses that Nietzsche would base on his earlier works. loc: 1211
seem less tentative, and the tone is frequently impassioned: but Nietzsche still considers them Versuche and offers them with an open mind. loc: 1212
The discovery of inconsistencies should prompt not automatic compromise but further inquiry and eventual revision. The same consideration applies to external inconsistencies: the ultimate test of the truth of an observation is consistency with the rest of our experience-and loc: 1230
while offering many fruitful hypotheses, Nietzsche failed to see that only a systematic attempt to substantiate them could establish an impressive probability in their favor. Hence his experiments are often needlessly inconclusive. loc: 1234
Chapter 3 loc: 1246
to have lost God means madness; and when mankind will discover that it has lost God, universal madness will break out. This apocalyptic sense of dreadful things to come hangs over Nietzsche's thinking like a thundercloud. loc: 1268
Cassandra, prophetess of doom without promise and nemesis without love. Here we are confronted with ineluctable fate, unmitigated by salvation; loc: 1290
a diagnosis of contemporary civilization, not a metaphysical speculation about ultimate reality.3 loc: 1302
"What differentiates us is not that we find no God-neither in history, nor in nature, nor behind nature-but that we do not feel that what has been revered as God is 'godlike' loc: 1310
Chapter 12. Nietzsche was more deeply impressed than almost any other man before him by the manner in which belief in God and a divine teleology may diminish the value and significance of man: loc: 1312
To escape nihilism-which seems involved both in asserting the existence of God and thus robbing this world of ultimate significance, and also in denying God and thus robbing everything of meaning and value-that is Nietzsche's greatest and most persistent problem. loc: 1319
"I would believe only in a god who could dance" loc: 1322
Nietzsche's problem was whether it might he possible to put "in place of our `moral values' only naturalistic values" loc: 1328 • Delete this highlight
Note: isn't this what Spinoza's proof of god was gettong at? Edit this note
his profound concern whether universally valid values and a meaningful life are at all possible in a godless world, loc: 1333
On the basis of this moral law, Kant sought to establish the freedom of the will, the immortality of the soul, and the existence of God and a moral world-order-all the while assuming the possibility of synthetic judgments a priori as an unquestioned premise. loc: 1341
Yet what is good-heartedness, refinement, and genius to me, when the human being who has these virtues tolerates slack feelings in his faith and judgments, and when the demand for certainty is not to him the inmost craving and the deepest need-that which distinguishes the higher from the lower men. . . . Not loc: 1351
model philosopher is pictured as a physician who applies the knife of his thought "vivisectionally to the very virtues of the time." loc: 1404
uncovering "how much hypocrisy, comfortableness," and lack of self-discipline is really "hidden under the best honored type of contemporary morality." 12 loc: 1405
the "revaluation" means a war against accepted valuations, not the creation of new ones. loc: 1433
Revaluation of all values: that is my formula for an act of ultimate self-examination by mankind loc: 1434
Nietzsche's attitude is positive insofar as he negates a negation-for he considers Christianity as the "revaluation of all the values of antiquity" loc: 1447
The revaluation is thus the alleged discovery that our morality is, by its own standards, poisonously immoral: that Christian love is the mimicry of impotent hatred; that most unselfishness is but a particularly vicious form of selfishness; and that ressentiment is at the core of our morals. loc: 1461
one must never ask whether the truth will be useful or whether it may become one's fatality. loc: 1471
The enterprise requires a probing intellect that shrinks from no discovery; it consists in an examination of the psychological motivation of religious beliefs, metaphysical doctrines, and morality; and Nietzsche feels inspired by a relentless determination to make this motivation a matter of conscience. loc: 1472
spontaneously and instinctively, the weak who insist on conformity to the old standards-says Nietzsche-find in such conformity a mere screen for what is, according to these very standards, petty wickedness. loc: 1475
"Be a man and do not follow me16-but yourself! But yourself! loc: 1486
Man often craves religious certainty in direct proportion to his profound and tormenting doubts. loc: 1500
What distinguishes Nietzsche is not that he experienced this attraction, but that he felt obliged to resist it to retain his integrity loc: 1501
in The Antichrist, it had not been a new faith that Nietzsche had pitted against Christianity, but the "gay science" of the open mind, a fanaticism for truth, and a new skepsis loc: 1516
PART II loc: 1530
Chapter 4 loc: 1534
The crown of Nietzsche's philosophy is the dual vision of the overman and the eternal recurrence; its key conception is the will to power. After setting out to question all that could be doubted, Nietzsche wound up with these eminently questionable notions. loc: 1535
labyrinth of Nietzsche's thought: where is Nietzsche's most fundamental problem on which all his philosophic labors are focused? loc: 1540
little doubt does Nietzsche leave concerning his primary concern: values. loc: 1541
What does nihilism mean? That the highest values devaluate themselves. The goal is lacking; the answer is lacking to our "Why?" loc: 1545
Modern man finds that his values are worthless, that his ends do not give his life any purpose, and that his pleasures do not give him happiness. loc: 1546
Nietzsche's basic problem is whether a new sanction can be found in this world for our values; whether a new goal can be found that will give an aim to human life; and what is happiness? loc: 1546
he was not able to solve them to his own satisfaction; and that he then temporarily abandoned his ambitious project, turned to psychological inquiries, discovered the will to power in the course of these by a bold induction-and then returned to his value problem to supplement and strengthen his earlier efforts by introducing this novel conception. loc: 1549
Nietzsche and Hegel were both primarily concerned about the realm of Absolute Spirit, i.e., art, religion, and philosophy, and both evaluated the State in terms of its relation to these higher pursuits. Hegel had praised the State because he thought that it alone made possible these supra-social enterprises; Nietzsche condemned the State as their archenemy. loc: 1558
firm opposition to Kant's doctrine of the primacy of moral values. loc: 1561
he would establish values without divine sanction; but unlike many of the thinkers of the Enlightenment, he begins by doubting that moral values can be maintained in this manner. loc: 1592
Kant speaks of a "purpose of nature"; loc: 1595
Kant's own intention to found such values solely on rationality, we shall have occasion later to note that his conception of reason was as unempirical as his "nature": both rested, in the last analysis, on Kant's unquestioned faith in God.6 loc: 1601
Nietzsche's inquiry as to whether values could be maintained without supernatural sanctions was based on his "existential" questioning of God's existence: and because he really questioned it, he lacked Lessing's and Kant's easy conviction that our ancient values could be salvaged after the ancient God had been banished from the realm of philosophic thought. loc: 1613
perhaps because moral values were so closely associated with transcendent sanctions, whether it be God or Plato's Idea of the Good, Nietzsche began his inquiries with aesthetic values. loc: 1615
Apollo represents the aspect of the classical Greek genius extolled by Winckelmann and Goethe: the power to create harmonious and measured beauty; the strength to shape one's own character no less than works of art; the "principle of individuation" (GT I); the form-giving force, which reached its consummation in Greek sculpture. loc: 1617
Dionysus, in Nietzsche's first book, is the symbol of that drunken frenzy which threatens to destroy all forms and codes; the ceaseless striving which apparently defies all limitations; the ultimate abandonment we sometimes sense in music.8 loc: 1619
if he favors one of the two gods, it is Apollo. His thesis is that it took both to make possible the birth of tragedy, and he emphasizes the Dionysian only because he feels that the Apollinian genius of the Greeks cannot be fully understood apart from it. loc: 1620
culture is born of conflict, and the beauty of ancient Hellas must be understood in terms of a contest of two violently opposed forces. loc: 1625
later the Dionysian represents passion controlled as opposed to the extirpation of the passions which Nietzsche more and more associated with Christianity. loc: 1631
In The Birth of Tragedy, the Dionysian represents that negative and yet necessary dialectic element without which the creation of aesthetic values would be, according to Nietzsche, an impossibility. loc: 1635
artistic creation is prompted by something which the artist lacks, by suffering rather than undisturbed good health, loc: 1643
Their magnificent tragedies represent to Nietzsche's mind a yet unbroken reply to the vicissitudes of fortune, a triumphant response to suffering, and a celebration of life as "at bottom, in spite of all the alterations of appearances, indestructible, powerful, and joyous." loc: 1648
Nietzsche envisages "the sublime as the artistic conquest of the horrible"; and he celebrates the Greek ,,who has looked with bold eyes into the dreadful destructive turmoil of so-called world-history as well as into the cruelty of nature" and, without yielding to resignation loc: 1651
reaffirms life with the creation of works of art loc: 1653
one can face the terrors of history and nature with unbroken courage and say Yes to life. loc: 1655
health not as an accidental lack of infection but as the ability to overcome disease; loc: 1656
"How much did these people have to suffer to be able to become so beautiful." loc: 1663
"For the healthy type, sickness may be an energetic stimulant to life, to more life" loc: 1665
"culture is above all the unity of the artistic style in all the expressions of the life of a people" loc: 1694
"culture" is the only end which can give meaning to our lives: loc: 1698
First: I only attack causes that are victorious; loc: 1706
Second: I only attack causes against which I would not find allies, so that I stand alone-so loc: 1707
Third: I never attack persons; I merely avail myself of the person as of a strong magnifying glass that allows one to make visible a general but creeping and elusive calamity. loc: 1708
attack is in my case a proof of good will, sometimes even of gratitude loc: 1712
incarnation of the Zeitgeist: unproductive smugness, intellectual snobbery, superficial assimilation of great works of art and new scientific theories, myopic criticism and patronizing praise of even the greatest genius, loc: 1713
in five main points of his doctrine I recognize myself; this most unusual and loneliest thinker is closest to me precisely in these matters: he denies the freedom of the will, teleology, the moral world-order, the unegoistic, and evil. loc: 1765
second Meditation is entitled Of the Use and Disadvantage of History for Life,18 and the Preface refers to it as a "meditation about the value and disvalue of history." loc: 1785
In the essay on Strauss, he had not yet been ready to tackle Darwin: the denial of any cardinal difference between man and animal had not seemed comforting or beneficial to him, but he was not prepared to deal with it en passant. In the second and third Meditation he returns to this question; and he is taken to the point where he begins to realize the inadequacy of his early philosophy. loc: 1792
For Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche-no less than Schopenhauer and Burck- hardt-history is decidedly not the ground of happiness.19 While the stress on suffering is familiar, Nietzsche's version of it is distinguished from Kant's and Hegel's by its vivid personal coloring, which gives his philosophy that characteristic unacademic flavor to which his readers react so diversely: loc: 1796
On the basis of his historical studies, possibly to some extent under Burckhardt's influence, and on the grounds of his personal experience, he was impressed with the terrors and "cruelty" of life. loc: 1801
In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche emphasized the horrors of history as a challenge that may lead the weak to negate life, while it leads the strong to create the beautiful. loc: 1806
"Monu- mentalistic" history, to put it briefly, means the concentration on the heroes of the past in an effort to derive comfort and inspiration from the fact that man is capable of greatness, contemporary mediocrity notwithstanding.23 loc: 1814
"Antiquarian" history means the pious and reverent consolidation of our knowledge of the past, which is considered as an object of respect simply on account of its age. loc: 1815
"Critical" history, finally, turns the historian into a judge who passes sentence on the course of past events, without illusion or mercy. loc: 1816
happiness and suffering. The study of history does not, prima facie, make us happy; rather it tends to make us unhappy. loc: 1820
"The unhistorical and the historical are equally needed for the health of an individual, a people, and a culture." In everyday language: men must "know how to forget at the right time as well as how to remember at the right time" loc: 1823
he is eager to criticize the monstrous preoccupation of his age with historical research; he offers his polemics against an education that tells man more about the past than he can possibly digest; he shows the disadvantages of what he calls "an excess of history" or, in more nearly physiological language, the "hypertrophy" of "the historical sense in our time" (1). loc: 1831
In Nietzsche's words, they "believe that the meaning of existence will come to light progressively in the course of its process." The "historical man" has faith in the future. The "supra-historical" man, on the other hand, is the one "who does not envisage salvation in the process but for whom the world is finished in every single moment and its end [Ende] attained. What could ten new years teach that the past could not teach?" loc: 1851
Nietzsche's long polemic against the hypertrophy of the historical sense is not nearly as important as, and receives what significance it has from, this problem in which philosophy of history and theory of values meet: whether there are genuinely supra-historical values or whether all values are merely historical phenomena which are valid only in a certain place and time. loc: 1857
Nietzsche asks whether beauty is perhaps not "infra-historical" but "supra- historical"-not beneath historical change but above and beyond it. If the beauty of Greece is still beauty to us, is not its independence of time rather different from that of the human anatomy? Is there not a decisive difference between biological data and works of art? loc: 1861
The historian must not only be able to forget and to select from millions of events the few worth remembering: he should also have faith that this knowledge has an additional value inasmuch as these events, or some of them, are "symbols." loc: 1870
Empirical facts do not seem to him to warrant the belief that history is a story of progress, loc: 1876
"The goal of humanity cannot lie in the end [Ende] but only in its highest specimens" (g). Perhaps there is no more basic statement of Nietzsche's philosophy in all his writings than this sentence. loc: 1878
In the highest specimens of humanity we envisage the meaning of life and history: loc: 1880 • Delete this highlight
Note: is it age, or why do i have so much trouble buying into this now? if we say that the mass of humanity leads meaningless existences, then we have denied importance to ourselves and our fellow travelers and sufferers. it does seem like the height of arrogance to do so. is it because i'm old and nearing the end of a rather mediocre life that i feel this way? and is answering nietzsche without the arrogance and exclusion the most important problem: how to find meaning and worth for all humanity, and life, wirhout supernatural authority? Edit this note
When God and any supernatural sanction of our values are questioned, the bottom falls out of our values, and they have no basis any more. loc: 1883
if he is just another of the primates; then it would follow, Nietzsche thinks, that the mass of mankind lack any essential dignity or worth. loc: 1885
If man is to have any worth, there must be a "qualitative leap," loc: 1889 • Delete this highlight
Note: why does there have to be a qualitative leap? what is the problem of a continuum between man and all animals, all beings? so what if there are no supernatural sanctions to our values? nierzsche claims kinship with spinoza, but isn't he just taking the other side of liebniz' coin in declaimingthat it's nihilism otherwise? but do we have to base our values on biological processes, a la patricia churchland, otherwise? Edit this note
What philosophers are living today whom one could even compare to Plato or Spinoza; and what artists, whom one could seriously juxtapose to Phidias or Michelangelo? Has the worth of man increased? Nietzsche concluded that what comes later in time is not necessarily more valuable. loc: 1894
He maintains in effect that the gulf separating Plato from the average man is greater than the cleft between the average man and a chimpanzee. loc: 1901
need be. Nietzsche agrees with the Christian tradition and such thinkers as Kant and Hegel that the worth of man must consist in a feature he does not share with any other animal. He believes that the worth of man, and thus the value of his life, his creations, and his acts, depends on his Sonderstellung, his unique position, in the cosmos. loc: 1905 • Delete this highlight
Note: this is the point where i part company with nietzsche. but in doing so does that just throw us back on survival of the species as the highest value? Edit this note
Most men are essentially animals, not basically different from chimpanzees-distinguished only by a potentiality that few of them realize: they can, but rarely do, rise above the beasts. loc: 1908
Hell is, so to speak, man's natural state: only by a superhuman effort can he ascend into the heavens, leave the animal kingdom beneath him, and acquire a value and a dignity without equal in all of nature. loc: 1911 • Delete this highlight
Note: this is far too radical a disvaluation of nature. he really is rejecting spinoza's Nature. in effect, he's saying that any attempt to find meaning in nature is doomed to nihilism. in a way, nietzsche is as reactionary as liebniz Edit this note
World history, like evolution, does not relate the story of progress but only the endless and futile addition of zeros, which does not show us that life can have worth or meaning. It does not teach us to have faith in the future but rather to despair at the sight of our depravation. loc: 1915
the Greeks, three thousand years ago, took a step that raised them above ourselves, loc: 1917
The Greeks, in the beginning of their history, were in danger of being completely overwhelmed by a chaotic flood of "foreign, Semitic, Babylonian, Lydian, and Egyptian forms and concepts": their early religion was a veritable arena in which the gods of the Orient fought each other. Yet the Greeks, imbued with the Apollinian spirit, learned to "organize the chaos" loc: 1918
The birth of tragedy, Dionysus and Apollo, Socrates and Goethe, Strauss and Wagner become, in Nietzsche's vision, symbols of timeless themes. The conception of organizing the chaos turns out to be of the utmost significance: introduced in an apparently historical account as the essence of the Apollinian genius, it remains one of the persistent motifs of Nietzsche's thought-and loc: 1923
The Greeks' originality did not preclude their overwhelming debt to earlier civilizations, and to the Oriental religions in particular; and it may well be true that Greek culture consisted, to a considerable extent, in the gradual refinement of the Dionysian religion, through Orphism and Pythagoreanism, to Platonism: loc: 1937 • Delete this highlight
Note: given what we know of greek culture, and of socrates and plato's aristocratic politics (vide stone), isn't this an overglorification of greek culture? Edit this note
what he associated with Goethe was neither the boundless striving that pushes on into infinity, like Schopenhauer's irrational will, nor the dreamlike dissolution of all border lines between illusion and reality (which Schlegel had found in Meister)-but the hardness of the creator who creates himself. loc: 1949
what Nietzsche now endorses is clearly not biological nature but "culture as another and improved physis [nature]." Nature must be transformed, and man must become like a work of art. loc: 1960
Chapter 5 loc: 1966
Man, as such, is an animal. What distinguishes him is not that he is co ipso superior, but only that he has an additional potentiality and can raise himself above the animals, if he will cultivate his nature-his physis. loc: 1976
The reason why most men fail to heed the voice of their true self is twofold. Nietzsche hesitates to decide which is the most universal human characteristic: fear or laziness. Both keep man from heeding the call to achieve culture and thus to realize himself. loc: 1983
Men are afraid of social retaliation and do not dare be their own unique selves. It is for this reason that the State becomes the devil of Nietzsche's ethics: it intimidates man into conformity and thus tempts and coerces him to betray his proper destiny. loc: 1985
Man's fundamental problem is to achieve true "existence" instead of letting his life be no more than just another accident. loc: 1988
As we contemplate our self-chosen educators and meditate upon the dearest features of those we have elected from millions past and present to help us shape our selves-we envisage our true nature which we would realize if we were not too lazy and afraid. loc: 1994
What Schopenhauer "teaches us," when he is approached in this supra-historical manner, is "how neither riches nor honors, nor scholarship can raise the single one out of his profound discouragement over the worthlessness of his existence, and how the striving for these goals can receive meaning only from a high and transfiguring overall aim: to gain power in order to aid the physis [nature]." loc: 2015
What is required is a goal that only man can reach. loc: 2021
Chapter 6
Man, in his highest and most noble capacities, is wholly nature and embodies its uncanny dual character. Those of his abilities which are awesome and considered inhuman are perhaps the fertile soil out of which alone all humanity ... can grow.-u, loc: 2228
When Nietzsche introduced the will to power into his thought, all the dualistic tendencies which had rent it previously could be reduced to mere manifestations of this basic drive. loc: 2231
next book after the Meditation on Wagner represented a new direction in Nietzsche's thought: loc: 2263
style now is aphoristic, and his books consist of a large number of analyses of various psychological loc: 2264
The irrational springs of human behavior are uncovered expertly, and the self-styled vivisectionist cuts mercilessly through prejudices and conventions to lay bare the hidden motivations of our actions. loc: 2265
but need I elaborate that our drives, when we are awake, also do nothing else than interpret nerve stimulations and posit "causes" according to their requirements? That between waking and dreaming there is no essential difference? . . . That even our moral judgments and valuations are only pictures and phantasies about a physiological process which is unknown to us ? loc: 2284
all our so-called consciousness is a more or less fantastic commentary on an unknown, perhaps unknowable, but felt text? loc: 2286
In the books now under consideration, Nietzsche's open-mindedness and lack of any commitment to a central thesis gives rise to a host of suggestive and fruitful observations-some loc: 2291
Even asceticism, humility, self-abasement, and renunciation of worldly power are perhaps motivated in this way. With this insight, the possibility of a psychological monism suggests itself: all psychological phenomena might be reducible to the will to power. loc: 2317
Nietzsche approached the conception of a will to power from two distinct points of view. First, he thought of it as a craving for worldly success, which he repudiated as harmful to man's interest in perfecting himself. Secondly, he thought of the will to power as a psychological drive in terms of which many diverse phenomena could be explained; loc: 2319
it seems worth insisting that, at least at first, Nietzsche used the will to power as a principle to explain behavior -as a psychological hypothesis. More often than not, he used it to explain behavior he happened to dislike. loc: 2323
pleasure is lacking, too" (ix, 398). Power is enjoyed only as more power. One enjoys not its possession but its increase: the overcoming of impotence. Since impotence is the equivalent of dependence, one might say that the achievement of independence is the source of pleasure. loc: 2331
He wants not freedom from something but freedom to act and realize himself. loc: 2335
Dawn, loc: 2353
Prevalent moral valuations form the subject; the subtitle reads "Thoughts about Moral Prejudices"; and the implication is that current moral valuations are nothing but prejudices. loc: 2354
one of Nietzsche's most sustained attempts at a "vivisection" of altruistic ethics.4 loc: 2356
implicit hypothesis that psychological phenomena can be explained in terms of two key concepts: fear and power. loc: 2357
In his next work, The Gay Science, Nietzsche still experimented with the notion of power loc: 2363
The book also contains the first tentative consideration of the conception of the eternal recurrence of all events.6 loc: 2364
Then, suddenly, the implications of both the will to power and the eternal recurrence struck Nietzsche's mind at once, like a flash of lightning, and in a frenzied feeling of inspiration (EH-Z) he wrote his Zarathustra-the first published work to contain any mention of the will to power by that name-and there expounded both concepts.7 loc: 2364
A privation of power gives rise to both fear and the will to power: fear is the negative motive which would make us avoid something; the will to power is the positive motive which would make us strive for something. loc: 2381
Fear, however, is also a great teacher: the mother of our knowledge of man. loc: 2387
Suddenly it occurred to Nietzsche that the basic drive that prompted the development of Greek culture might well have been the will to power. loc: 2409
This sudden association of the will to power with the Greeks was one of the most decisive steps in the development of this conception into an all-embracing monism. loc: 2411
Nietzsche had previously considered the contest (agon) the most fruitful concept for any analysis of Greek culture. loc: 2412
The will to power is thus not only the devil who diverts man from achieving culture, or a psychological urge that helps to explain diverse and complex types of human behavior: it is also envisaged as the basis of Greek culture, which Nietzsche then considered the acme of humanity. loc: 2416
Philosophic discourse, the ancient tragedies and comedies, the Platonic dialogues, and the sculptures of the Periclean age are all understood in terms of the Greeks' will to outdo, excel, and overpower one another. loc: 2419
power itself does not corrupt but ennobles the mind. The powerful, as Nietzsche points out expressly, have no need to prove their might either to themselves or to others by oppressing or hurting others; if they do hurt others, they do so incidentally in the process of using their power creatively; loc: 2436
Only the weak man "wishes to hurt and to see the signs of suffering" loc: 2438
The assumption is that the powerful and the impotent are both imbued with the will to power, and that extreme or prolonged oppression and frustration may easily pervert this drive and make the oppressed look for petty occasions to assert their will to power by being cruel to others. loc: 2446
The "history of culture" is thus to be explained in terms of man's will to overwhelm, outdo, excel, and overpower his neighbor. The barbarian does it by torturing his neighbor. In the light of Nietzsche's previous comments, he is essentially weak, else he would not need to inflict hurt. loc: 2460
Toward the middle of the scale, we find what might be called the normal degree of power: one seeks to evoke envy and admiration; loc: 2463
Nietzsche believed the ascetic to have a greater feeling of power than almost any other man; loc: 2465
Nietzsche first speaks of the "will to power" in the chapter "On the Thousand and One Goals." The chapter begins with moral relativism. Different nations have-this is the meaning of the title-different goals and moral codes. All of these, however, have one thing in common: they are creations of the will to power. loc: 2519
A table of virtues hangs over every people. Behold, it is the table of its overcomings; behold, it is the voice of its will to power. Praiseworthy is whatever seems difficult to a people; whatever seems indispensable and difficult is called good; and . . . the rarest, the most difficult-that they call holy.to loc: 2524
The will to power is thus introduced as the will to overcome oneself. loc: 2526
In Nietzsche's vision the globe becomes a Greek gymnasium where all nations vie with each other, each trying to overcome itself and thus to excel all others. loc: 2533
Nietzsche raises a new and difficult question by suggesting that the will to truth is a function of the will to power. loc: 2559
He looked upon himself as an experimental philosopher who wished to break with a tradition of "unlimited ambition." For the delusion of the metaphysicians that they might be able "to solve all with one stroke, with one word" and thus become 11 'unriddlers of the universe,' " Nietzsche proposed to substitute "the small single questions and experiments" (M 547). Now one can hardly help inquiring whether his vision of the will to power is still an attempt to answer "small single questions" with an "experiment"-or an effort "to solve all with one stroke, with one word" and to unriddle the universe with a phrase. loc: 2572
Nietzsche asserts that any attempt to Understand the universe is prompted by man's will to power. If so, it would seem that his own conception of the will to power must be admitted by him to be a creation of his will to power. loc: 2578
'Why is the belief in such judgments necessary?' " And he even questioned that this belief was "necessary" in the sense of being required by the make-up of the human mind; instead he suggested "that for the sake of the survival of beings like ourselves such judgments must be believed to be true; though they might, of course, be false judgments for all that" loc: 2594
His theory of the will to power might be the one and only interpretation of human behavior of which we are capable when we consider the evidence and think about it as clearly as we can. loc: 2599
Nietzsche claims that it is not only the basic urge of man but nothing less than the fundamental drive of all living beings: loc: 2604
one must turn to his later writings. There one will find much further evidence as well as the still more extreme hypothesis that the will to power is the basic force of the entire universe. loc: 2612
it may be suggested that the constitution of the human mind might conceivably require it to interpret not only human behavior but the entire cosmos in terms of the will to power. loc: 2614
PART III loc: 2621
Chapter 7 loc: 2626
nothing less than a generic definition of morality, an attempt to crystallize the common essence of all moral codes. loc: 2630
common generic element, self-overcoming. loc: 2632
Kant insisted that man is not morally good unless his conduct is marked by the total absence of any psychological inclination and motivated solely by respect for reason'-and loc: 2633
The force of his ethics is due in large measure to the fact that he crystallized elements that had long been implicit in the Western religious tradition, which commanded man to do the good because God willed it, regardless of the consequences. loc: 2644
As a generic definition of moral goodness, the utilitarian definition must therefore be rejected. loc: 2648
expediency as such is not the essence of morality. loc: 2650
There is another element that distinguishes the moral from the nonmoral-and this, says Nietzsche, is self-overcoming. That Kant's ethic as well as, say, the Ten Commandments exhibits this characteristic seems clear; and the element of self-overcoming is no less essential to the utilitarian position. The force and plausibility of utilitarianism are inseparable from its insistence that the individual must overcome himself and subordinate his own interests to those of the greatest number. loc: 2650
Wherever man is found he imposes restraints on himself; and it seems empirically sound to call man not only a "rational animal" but also a "moral animal." The two epithets are inseparable. loc: 2659
The general concepts which are the characteristic function of reason involve the transcendence of the merely given, including impulse which can thus be criticized reflectively. Such self-criticism-i.e., man's critical reflection on his own intentions and actions-is the core of morality. loc: 2660
Morality always consists in not yielding to impulses: moral codes are systems of injunctions against submission to various impulses, and positive moral commandments always enjoin a victory over animal instincts. loc: 2667
Expediency, on the other hand, is no more than an important characteristic of some moral codes, conceivably of the best-but not, like self-overcoming, the very essence of morality itself. loc: 2668
the simile of overcoming-and we must not forget that the word is metaphorical-implies the presence of two forces, one of which overcomes the other. loc: 2678
Apart from such a duality, apart from the picture of one force as overcoming and controlling another, self-overcoming seems impossible. loc: 2679
"our drives [Triebe] are reducible to the will to power" (xiv, 287). This is the result of Nietzsche's "small single questions and experiments" by which he penetrated human motivation far more deeply-so he thought-than any of the more systematic philosophers had done before him: they had all been impeded by the conventionally moralistic presuppositions of their systems: loc: 2694
process of the overcoming of the impulses and the kind of control Nietzsche had in mind. This process and control Nietzsche defines in a single word as-sublimation. loc: 2716
He considers the will to power, which remains throughout, the "essence," while "all 'ends,' 'objectives,' " and the like, are merely accidental and changing attributes "of the one will," "of the will to power" (WM 675). In other words, not only the energy remains but also the objective, power; and those so-called objectives which are canceled are only accidental attributes of this more basic striving: loc: 2757
Nietzsche did not decide to reduce the will to power to a sexual libido; for sexuality is that very aspect of the basic drive which is canceled in sublimation and cannot, for that reason, be considered the essence of the drive. loc: 2767
The feeling of potency is essential, while its sexual manifestation is accidental; and thus the feeling of sexual potency can be sublimated into that ultimate feeling of power loc: 2769
This contrast of the abnegation, repudiation, and extirpation of the passions on the one side, and their control and sublimation on the other, is one of the most important points in Nietzsche's entire philosophy. loc: 2779
he was not sure "whether we have really become more moral." Perhaps we have just become emasculated, and our failure to do evil is to be ascribed merely to our inability to do evil. Perhaps we are just weak. To be moral is to overcome one's impulse; if one does not have any impulses, one is not therefore moral. loc: 2789
there was more hope for the man of strong impulses than for the man with no impulses: loc: 2793
Nietzsche believed that a man without impulses could not do the good or create the beautiful loc: 2795
Nietzsche's few references to the "blond beast"-blonde Bestie-are to be understood similarly. The Borgia and the beast are both ideograms for the conception of unsublimated animal passion. Nietzsche does not glorify either of them. loc: 2805
Our impulses are in a state of chaos. We would do this now, and another thing the next moment-and even a great number of things at the same time. We think one way and live another; we want one thing and do another. No man can live without bringing some order into this chaos. This may be done by thoroughly weakening the whole organism or by repudiating and repressing many of the impulses: but the result in that case is not a "harmony," and the physis is castrated, not "improved." Yet there is another way-namely, to "organize the chaos": sublimation allows for the achievement of an organic harmony and leads to that culture which is truly a "transfigured physis." 14 loc: 2829
8 Sublimation, Geist, and Eros loc: 2833
Nietzsche was deceived by the word, or whether his earlier dualism loc: 2838
Note: so, i really don't get the need for a monistic doctrine to wrap up the world. is this still wrestling with spinoza's substance. the chinese seemed happy with a dualism. why the need to find the One? Is it Parmenides all over again? Edit this note
Eventually, he must account for sublimation solely on the basis of the will to power, having recourse to no other ultimate principle. loc: 2843
His monism was not derived from ratiocinations about Schopenhauer's metaphysics; rather he did not consider it legitimate to accept unquestioned the traditional belief in the supranatural status of reason. Having questioned God, he felt obliged also to question the supernatural origin of reason. loc: 2845
Reason and the sex drive are both forms of the will to power. The sex drive, however, is an impulse, and in yielding to it in its unsublimated form, man is still the slave of his passions and has no power over them. Rationality, on the other hand, gives man mastery over himself; and as the will to power is essentially the "instinct of freedom" (GM II 18), it can find fulfillment only through rationality. Reason is the "highest" manifestation of the will to power, in the distinct sense that through rationality it can realize its objective most fully. loc: 2853 • Delete this highlight
Note: this seems a bit overwrought to me. given what we know about neuroscience now,i'm not so sure that reason can give us the freedom promised here. and where does the ultimate principle of life--wi to power--become an instinct of freedom? Isn't that an awfully large leap? of faith? Edit this note
While Nietzsche thus comes to the conclusion that reason is man's highest faculty, his view is not based on any other principle than the power standard. Reason is extolled not because it is the faculty that abstracts from the given, forms universal concepts, and draws inferences, but because these skills enable it to develop foresight and to give consideration to all the impulses, to organize their chaos, to integrate them into a harmony -and thus to give man power: power over himself and over nature. loc: 2856 • Delete this highlight
Note: and here's Nietsche's answer, but even if Reason does give man more power and freedom, that doesn't elevate it to any special place in the ultimate scheme. And how do we know that we aren't fooling ourselves, finding reasons for decisions that we made before we were aware of them ? Edit this note
Foresight and patience, and above all "great self-mastery" (which, under unfavorable circumstances, also makes possible dissimulation)-that is, according to Nietzsche, of the very essence of Geist loc: 2860
Rationality "distinguishes the higher from the lower men." loc: 2869
premises. Much of his attack on Christianity is similarly based on what he took to be the Christian repudiation of reason and the glorification of the "poor in spirit." loc: 2872
the people to whom the Church addressed itself simply lacked the power to control, sublimate, and spiritualize their passions; they were "poor in spirit." loc: 2874
Nietzsche, the philosopher, considered philosophy "the most spiritual will to power" (J 9) and proposed to measure power and weakness in terms of man's willingness to subject even his most cherished beliefs to the rigors of rationality. loc: 2881
Now, as in all the later works, power is the sole standard, and rationality is valuable insofar as it is a manifestation of power. loc: 2891
a strong spirit need not make war on the impulses: it masters them fully and is-to Nietzsche's mind-the acme of human power. loc: 2899
The "unconsciousness" that Nietzsche considers a sign of power is what one might call an attained unconsciousness and a state of perfect mastery. Nietzsche considers both the man who acts on impulse and the man who deliberately counteracts his impulses inferior to the man who acts rationally on instinct.2 loc: 2904
In other words, the truly rational man need not go to war against his impulses. If his reason is strong enough, he will naturally control his passions. He is, without being ostentatious, an ascetic-insofar as he does not yield to his impulses-but instead of extirpating them he masters and employs them. loc: 2912
reason is pictured as the fulfillment of the will to power; and the irrational is not envisaged as something that is adverse to rationality but only as aweak form of rationality: it lacks the force, the rigor, and the power to be rational. loc: 2920
nature is not entirely irrational either, for it strives toward the development of rationality. Nature is nothing but the phenomenology of the will to power, and its craving for power cannot be fulfilled short of the development of reason. loc: 2924 • Delete this highlight
Note: nature as striving to become rational? are we suddenly in the realm of Tielhard? Edit this note
Both impulse (passion) and reason (spirit) are manifestations of the will to power; and when reason overcomes the impulses, we cannot speak of a marriage of two diverse principles but only of the self-overcoming of the will to power. This one and only basic force has first manifested itself as impulse and then overcomes its own previous manifestation. loc: 2925 • Delete this highlight
Note: are we back to Spinoza's Substance and modalities? Edit this note
The question then becomes: can one force differentiate itself into two forces? With this problem we enter a new field: cosmology. loc: 2930
Nietzsche was a dialectical monist. His basic force, the will to power, is not only the Dionysian passionate striving, akin to Schopenhauer's irrational will, but is also Apollinian and possesses an inherent capacity to give itself form. The victory of the Dionysian is thus not complete, and the will to power is a synthesis of Nietzsche's earlier two dualistic principles. loc: 2931
Sublimation is possible only because there is a basic force (the will to power) which is defined in terms of an objective (power) which remains the same throughout all "metamorphoses" (WM 657). This essential objective is preserved no less than is the energy, while the immediate objective is canceled; and the lifting up consists in the attainment of greater power. loc: 2941 • Delete this highlight
Note: the best rxplanation pf sublimation so far and compared to Hegel's aufheben. Edit this note
This entire exposition could, of course, be repeated for Hegel's conception of aufheben; only Hegel's basic force is not the will to power but spirit-not mind 6-and its aim is freedom rather than power. loc: 2943
Neither Hegel's spirit nor Nietzsche's will to power can be restricted in such fashion: each is conceived as, above all, the essence of the cosmos. Aufheben and sublimation are coextensive with these basic principles and are thus essentially cosmic processes. loc: 2946
The will to power is the heir of Dionysus and Apollo. It is a ceaseless striving, but it has an inherent capacity to give form to itself. loc: 2952 • Delete this highlight
Note: and we're back to Yin andYang? Is there a basic underlying them? Edit this note
In overcoming or sublimating itself, it appears in a strange dual capacity. It is both that which overcomes (e.g., reason) and that which is overcome (e.g., impulse). In Aristotelian terms, it is both matter and form; in Hegel's, it is both "substance" and "subject." loc: 2954
Hegel's account of this puzzle in the Preface of his Phanomenologie is helpful also in understanding Nietzsche's conception. Hegel repudiated Spinoza's God, Kant's thing-in-itself, and Schelling's Absolute for the same reason: they were all "substances" (matter) only and not also "subject" (form); theirs was an "inert simplicity" without any inherent necessity to give form to itself, to embody itself, and to become incarnate; and their manifold manifestations remained a mystery. loc: 2955 • Delete this highlight
Note: Hegel repudiates Spinoza's Substance as not being able to manifest diversity Edit this note
Hegel, however, contended that on Spinoza's, Kant's, and Schelling's assumptions the diversity of appearances could never have come about. Hence the ultimate reality cannot be an inert simplicity: we must start with experience and argue back from it, and the multiplicity of experience proves that reality cannot be an inert and simple "substance" (matter). loc: 2959
At the same time, both Hegel and Nietzsche insisted on a metaphysical monism. They assumed that metaphysical inquiry has not been pushed to the limits as long as a thinker is confronted with two or more principles. Ultimately, any duality has to be explained in terms of a single force. loc: 2963
A critic might grant that, if the universe is to be explained in terms of a single force, that principle cannot be defined as an inert simplicity; yet he might object that the assumption that the cosmos can, and must, be reduced to one principle is due only to the Western heritage of monotheism. loc: 2965 • Delete this highlight
Note: Didn't I just say that? Edit this note
Both thinkers postulated a single basic force whose very essence it is to manifest itself in diverse ways and to create multiplicity-not ex nihilo, but out of itself. loc: 2970
The will to power is, as it were, always at war with itself. The battle between reason and impulse is only one of countless skirmishes. All natural events, all history, and the development of every human being, consist in a series of such contests: all that exists strives to transcend itself 'and is thus engaged in a fight against itself. loc: 2999
"My formula for the greatness of a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity" loc: 3016
Nietzsche, however, thought of himself as standing at the beginning of a new era, as the first philosopher to have really "uncovered" Christian morality, as the herald of an anti-Christian epoch. loc: 3023
Nietzsche's valuation of suffering and cruelty was not the consequence of any gory irrationalism, but a corollary of his high esteem of rationality. The powerful man is the rational man who subjects even his most cherished faith to the severe scrutiny of reason and is prepared to give up his beliefs if they cannot stand this stern test. loc: 3033
He does not yield to his inclinations and impulses and is willing to give up even his relatives and friends, if intellectual integrity demands it. loc: 3035
The theme of the entire third part of the Genealogy is that all truly worth-while human achievements so far, including most of art, religion, and philosophy, have involved asceticism and thus required man to be cruel toward himself and to suffer. loc: 3042
even a single compromise with the tastes of public opinion might lead a thinker eventually to lose his intellectual integrity loc: 3064
striving to transcend and perfect oneself. loc: 3082
insistence that nothing that is alive is sufficient unto itself. loc: 3082
This striving for immortality seemed important to Nietzsche. loc: 3091 • Delete this highlight
Note: and we are really just carriers of dna that is striving for immortality Edit this note
Life, as Nietzsche sees it, is essentially dialectical. It is of the very essence of the living that it denies itself the gratification of some of its impulses, even that it sacrifices life itself, for more life and power. loc: 3104
A genuinely creative act contains its own norms, and every creation is a creation of new norms. loc: 3112
all established codes must ever be transcended by men who are creative. This is one of the most significant connotations of the phrase "Beyond Good and Evil." loc: 3115
Great power reveals itself in great self-mastery. loc: 3123
"Giving style" to one's character-a great and rare art! It is exercised by those who see all the strengths and weaknesses of their own nature and then comprehend them in an artistic plan until everything appears as art and reason. loc: 3127
Nietzsche points out that man could not become conscious of the beautiful and the good without becoming conscious of the ugly and evil. To become powerful, to gain freedom, to master his impulses and perfect himself, man must first develop the feeling that his impulses are evil. This recognition is the essence of the bad conscience; loc: 3149
Self-overcoming is not accomplished by a man's saying to himself: I would rather sublimate my impulses. First he must, as it were, burn a No into his own soul; he must brand his own impulses with contempt and become aware of the contradiction of good and evil. loc: 3153
This is Nietzsche's own conclusion of his argument about the bad conscience: it is a necessary evil; it is the pregnancy through which one must pass to be reborn in beauty.23 When man is reborn, that state terminates: loc: 3158
Man has not only "physiological interests" in the things his body requires and "psychological interests" in the things the individual may consciously desire: he also has an "ontological interest" common to all men. loc: 3160
men share their physiological interests because of their common physical make-up, they share their ontological interest insofar as they all have both body and spirit and find themselves in the same "ontological predicament." loc: 3161
as human beings we have ideals of perfection which we generally find ourselves unable to attain. We recognize norms and standards of which we usually fall short; we long for a triumph over old age, suffering, and death; we yearn for perfection and immortality-and seem incapable of fulfillment. loc: 3164
This "ontological" privation leads to "ontological" interests.25 loc: 3166
what is desired is not the possession of an object, but a state of being. loc: 3168
Nietzsche finds the same yearning for another state of being. They all crave neither the preservation of their lives, nor merely freedom from something, nor even power as a means to accomplish some specific end: what they desire is power itself; another life, as it were, richer and stronger; a rebirth in beauty and perfection. loc: 3175
Nature is not perfectly rational and does not efficiently fulfill her own longing for perfection. Recognizing this, Nietzsche speaks of the will to power; but he leaves no doubt that this drive is an Eros and can be fulfilled only through self-perfection. loc: 3180
9 POWER loc: 3182
Pleasure is, at the most, coextensive with consciousness-perhaps it even requires self-consciousness-while power does not necessarily require any conscious state or feeling. loc: 3237
even if pleasure were granted to be a mere "epiphenomenon" (xvti, 269) of the possession of power, one need not at all concede that, for that reason, man does not strive for pleasure. It is entirely conceivable that what man craves is this epiphenomenon. Nietzsche, however, denied that man strives for pleasure. loc: 3242
Nietzsche claims not only that the feeling of pleasure is an epiphenomenon of the possession of power, but also that the striving for pleasure is, similarly, an epiphenomenon of the will to power which, in turn, is independent of consciousness. loc: 3247
human conduct must be explained in the same terms as the behavior of animals or even plants. loc: 3248
Two fictions: the concept of motion (taken from our sense language) and the concept of the atom (i.e., unit, derived from our psychical "experience") . . . No things remain but dynamic quanta in a relation of tension to all other dynamic quanta: their essence consists in their relation to all other quanta, in their "affecting" ["Wirken" auf] them. The will to power is neither a being nor a becoming, but a pathos -it is the most fundamental fact from which becoming and affecting result loc: 3269 • Delete this highlight
Note: I have to admit that I don't have a fucking clue about what Nietzsche is trying to say here, and frankly, Kaufmann isn't exactly doing a very god job of explianing it. Thw will to power is neither a being nor a becoming but a pathos? WTF? Edit this note
Nietzsche's "monadology" culminates in "a necessary perspectivism by virtue of which every force center-and not only man-construes the whole rest of the world from its own point of view . ." loc: 3273
We have nothing resembling a "sense for the perception of efficient causes." Thus Hume is right that only habit (but not just that of the individual!) makes us expect that one often observed process follows another. What gives us the extraordinary firmness of our faith in causality, however, is not the great habit . . . but our inability to interpret what happens except as something that happens on purpose. It is the faith that only what lives and thinks is effective-the faith in will and purpose; it is the faith that all that happens is a doing, and that all doing presupposes a doer loc: 3276
There is not, as Kant supposed, a sense of causality. One is surprised, one is disturbed-one desires something familiar one can hold on to. As soon as something old is pointed out in the new, we are calmed. The alleged instinct for causality is merely the fear of the unfamiliar and the attempt to discover something familiar in it-a search not for causes, but for the familiar loc: 3280
Nietzsche's occasional insistence on a reversal of cause and effect, which would seem to imply a deprecation of consciousness, must be understood as a polemical antithesis against current prejudices. loc: 3288
The first "error" consists in mistaking effects for causes-as loc: 3290
his virtue is the consequence of his happiness" loc: 3293
the weak who hope that their conformity to traditional morals may in the end ensure their happiness will, as a matter of fact, not find ultimate happiness; those, on the other hand, who have attained that happy state of being toward which we all strive will eo ipso be gracious and kindly. Happiness is envisaged less as a state of consciousness than as a state of being: as power. loc: 3294
second "error" consists of the assumption of a "false causality" of "spiritual causes," such as "will," "consciousness," and "ego." loc: 3297
third "error" consists of the assumption of "imaginary causes" loc: 3298
one may here think of the Indian conception of karma or of the friends of job who inferred that he must have sinned because they could not explain his affliction otherwise. loc: 3299
fourth "error," finally, consists in the assumption of a "free will." loc: 3300
he considers the popular notion of causality untenable and is convinced that the assumption of free will depends on it. loc: 3301
Nietzsche-occasional polemical antitheses or popular expressions notwithstanding-did not deprecate consciousness in favor of physiological processes, but did criticize the conception of consciousness as a separate "thing," as an "entity" apart from the body, as a "spiritual cause." loc: 3305
All of nature is imbued with a striving to overcome and transcend itself, and man cannot be extricated from this total picture. loc: 3309
he did not repudiate the pursuit of happiness but claimed that the conscious aspect of that state for which man strives is not marked by the definitive absence of pain and discomfort-or loc: 3348
he insisted that man, by nature, strives for something to which pleasure and pain are only incidental. loc: 3350
Nietzsche differs with Christianity in his naturalistic denial of the breach between flesh and spirit, in his claim that self-sacrifice is the very essence of life, and in his paradoxical assertion-so well illustrated by his previously considered polemics against the Stoics-that man's attempts to sublimate his animal nature exemplify the very way of nature. loc: 3359
Spirit is not opposed to life altogether, but directed only against one level of it. Its mission is not to destroy but to fulfill, to sublimate or-to use the expressions of the Meditations-to transfigure and perfect man's nature. loc: 3366
pleasure and pain are "so knotted together that whoever wants as much as possible of the one, must also have as much as possible of the other . . . The Stoics believed that this was so and were consistent in desiring as little as possible [of both]" loc: 3375 • Delete this highlight
Note: cf comments on McElvy, or, is that all there is? Edit this note
To prove his point, Nietzsche must clearly go a step further. He must claim not only that suffering is a necessary antecedent of all great pleasure, but he must further insist that happiness-i.e., that state which men desire-is not marked by the absence of discomfort and pain. loc: 3379
It seems that a little inhibition is overcome and then immediately succeeded by another little inhibition that is again overcome-this play of resistance and victory-is the strongest stimulus of that total feeling of . . . overflowing power which constitutes the essence of joy. loc: 3392
disease-can we define joy as essentially the overcoming of suffering? Perhaps one could define it not as the state attained at the end of suffering, in which case suffering would have merely instrumental value, but as the process of the overcoming itself-in which case joy would not be a passive sensation but rather the conscious aspect of activity. loc: 3411 • Delete this highlight
Note: this seems pretty vague to me. How can joy be the "conscious aspect pf activity"?, especially when suffering is involved? Edit this note
he might say that Nirvana was here conceived as the only chance to overpower life and suffering and that what is wanted here, too, is this ultimate and absolute triumph over the world. Just here-thus Nietzsche's defense might proceed to attack-power is wanted even at the price of consciousness; just here pleasure is not only incidental to ultimate happiness, but actually renounced altogether as incompatible with that highest power which man yearns for most. loc: 3449 • Delete this highlight
Note: nirvana as an expression of will to power? Edit this note
If happiness is defined as the state of being man desires; if joy is defined as the conscious aspect of this state; and if pleasure is defined as a sensation marked by the absence of pain and discomfort; then Nietzsche's position can be summarized quite briefly: happiness is the fusion of power and joy-and joy contains not only ingredients of pleasure but also a component of pain. loc: 3461
Nirvana is not ultimate happiness but a substitute desired by some of the weak who are incapable of achieving that state of joyous power which they, too, would prefer if they had the strength to attain it. loc: 3469
The pleasures of "modern man," finally, are even further removed from true happiness, which is not an aggregate of pleasures, nor any conglomeration of sensations, but a way of life. loc: 3471
Every pleasurable sensation, however trivial-the smell of a flower or the taste of cold water-is valued for its own sake. The indefinite addition of such pleasures, however, does not make for happiness: loc: 3472
one must consider the man who is strong enough to maintain his mastery in the face of vehement passions as being more powerful than the ascetic who suppresses or extirpates his impulses. loc: 3486
The Good Life is the powerful life, the life of those who are in full control of their impulses and need not weaken them, and the good man is for Nietzsche the passionate man who is the master of his passions. loc: 3488
The saint is now pictured as the man who has extirpated his passions and thus destroyed his chances of ever living the Good Life, while artist and philosopher employ their passions in spiritual pursuits and are the most nearly perfect of men; for the powerful life is the creative life. loc: 3493 • Delete this highlight
Note: so, why not the athlete? or the teacher, or for that matter the computer programmer who can strive for creative power in their professions, assuming that they are professions, or vocations, as in callings? Edit this note
Goethe conceived a human being who would be strong, highly educated, skillful in all bodily matters, self-controlled, reverent toward himself, and who might dare to afford the whole range and wealth of being natural, loc: 3499
Such a spirit who has become free stands amid the cosmos with a joyous and trusting fatalism, in the faith that only the particular is loathsome, and that all is redeemed and affirmed in the whole-he does not negate any more. Such a faith, however, is the highest of all possible faiths: I have baptized it with the name of Dionysus loc: 3502
The Good Life does not consist in unconscious creativity but is crowned by what Nietzsche would call a Dionysian faith: the apotheosis of joy or-as Nietzsche sometimes calls it-amor fati. loc: 3509
Since the powerful man is able to redeem his every impulse and to integrate into the sublime totality of his own nature even "the ugly that could not be removed" (FW 29o)', assigning it a meaning and a redeeming function, he has the faith that in the macrocosm, too, the particular may have meaning in the vast totality of nature. loc: 3510
Realizing that his own being is inextricably entangled in "the fatality of all that which has been and will be" (G vi 8), he knows that when he says Yes to his own being he also affirms the rest of the world; and as he would say of his own character, so he says of the cosmos: "Nothing that is may be subtracted, nothing is dispensable" loc: 3512
Chapter 10: The Master Race loc: 3522
Nietzsche's views are quite unequivocally opposed to those of the Nazis-more so than those of almost any other prominent German of his own time or before him-and that these views are not temperamental antitheses but corollaries of his philosophy. loc: 3749
Chapter 11: Overman and Eternal Recurrence loc: 3784
This one went out like a hero in quest of truths, and eventually he conquered a little dressed-up lie. His marriage, he calls it. loc: 3831
For Nietzsche, the overman does not have instrumental value for the maintenance of society: he is valuable in himself because he embodies the state of being that has the only ultimate value there is; and society is censured insofar as it insists on conformity and impedes his development loc: 3866
He has overcome his animal nature, organized the chaos of his passions, sublimated his impulses, and given style to his character-or, as Nietzsche said of Goethe: "lie disciplined himself to wholeness, he created himself" and became "the man of tolerance, not from weakness but from strength," "a spirit who has become free." loc: 3896
The doctrine of the eternal recurrence of all things has actually been referred to previously-as the Dionysian faith. The man-Nietzsche chose Goethe as his representative-who has organized the chaos of his passions and integrated every feature of his character, redeeming even the ugly by giving it a meaning in a beautiful totality-this Ubermensch would also realize how inextricably his own being was involved in the totality of the cosmos: and in affirming his own being, he would also affirm all that is, has been, or will be loc: 3926
All things are entangled, ensnared, enamored. If ever you wanted one thing twice, if ever you said "you please me, happiness! Abide, moment!" then you wanted back all. All anew, all eternally, all entangled, ensnared, enamored-oh, then you loved the world. loc: 3934
This is the ultimate apotheosis of the supra-historical outlook, the supreme exaltation of the moment. Negatively, the doctrine of eternal recurrence is the most extreme repudiation of any deprecation of the moment, the finite, and the individual-the antithesis of any faith in infinite progress, loc: 3937
Particular actions seemed much less important to Nietzsche than the state of being of the whole man-and those who achieve self-perfection and affirm their own being and all eternity, backward and forward, have no thought of the morrow. They want an eternal recurrence out of the fullness of their delight in the moment. They do not deliberate how they should act to avoid unpleasant consequences-knowing all the while that whatever they are about to do has already been done by them an infinite number of times in the past. loc: 3957
eternal recurrence was to Nietzsche less an idea than an experience-the supreme experience of a life unusually rich in suffering, pain, and agony. loc: 3965
the man who perfects himself and transfigures his physis achieves ultimate happiness and experiences such an overwhelming joy that he no longer feels concerned about the "justification" of the world: he affirms it forward, backward, and "in all eternity." "Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it ... but love it" loc: 3970
he gives meaning to his own life by achieving perfection and exulting in every moment. loc: 3974
If an end state could be reached-and no beginning of time is posited-the end state must have been reached by now: but empirically that is not the case, and there is still change. Therefore, Nietzsche concluded, the doctrine of the eternal recurrence of the same-at great intervals-must be considered "the most scientific of all possible hypotheses" loc: 4003 • Delete this highlight
Note: WTF? Edit this note
scientific than his own, because-if no beginning in time is posited, loc: 4012
Note: but a beginning in time has been posited, ergo, the universe has not run out of energy and or matter. What happened before the beginno\ing, we cannot know in our present state of knowledge. Edit this note
"Let us think this thought in its most terrible form: existence as it is, without sense and aim, but recurring inevitably without a finale of nothingness: `the eternal recurrence' loc: 4020
The doctrine means that all events are repeated endlessly, that there is no plan nor goal to give meaning to history or life, and that we are mere puppets in an absolutely senseless play. The eternal recurrence is the epitome of "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." loc: 4021
"After the vision of the overman, in a gruesome way the doctrine of the recurrence: now bearable!" loc: 4023
these men represent the "power" for which all beings strive-for the basic drive, says Nietzsche, is not the will to preserve life but the will to power-and it should be clear how remote Nietzsche's "power" is from Darwin's "fitness." Moreover, the sharp antitheses of these notes underline the fact that Nietzsche's dual vision of overman and recurrence glorifies the moment-"all simultaneously" -and not progress. loc: 4041
events are timeless symbols that reflect each other; and the meaning that is progressively revealed in history "for us" is actually completely given in each moment.26 This is, in fact, the very core of Hegel's vision, loc: 4062
PART IV: Synopsis loc: 4081
Chapter 12: Nietzsche's Repudiation of Christ loc: 4082
Nietzsche conceived of Jesus in the image of Dostoevsky's Idiot. loc: 4125
Here was indeed endurance almost beyond belief, but complete indifference to advantage. Here was serenity but not self-control-for there was nothing to be controlled. "Here we find blessedness in peace, in gentleness, in not being able to be an enemy" (A 29). This was not Nietzsche's ideal of the passionate man who controls his passions-nor, of course, an embodiment of the extirpation of the passions which Nietzsche associated with later Christianity-but a childlike state of freedom from the passions. loc: 4135
That mankind lies on its knees before the opposite of that which was the origin, the meaning, the right of the evangel, that in the concept "Church" it has pronounced holy just that which the "bringer of the glad tidings" felt to be beneath and behind himself-one would look in vain for a greater example of world-historical irony [A loc: 4154
The "justification by faith" seems to Nietzsche an inversion of Jesus' evangel. He never tires of insisting that the legacy of Jesus was essentially a practice, loc: 4157
The Christian religion, however, seems to him to be founded on Paul's denial of this proposition-a loc: 4160
Augustine, Luther, or Calvin. Paul is for Nietzsche "the first Christian" (M 68); the discoverer of faith as a remedy against the incapacity for what one deems to be right action; loc: 4161
This concomitance of "escape" and "revenge"-"faith" as a way out of one's inability "to get rid of one's sins" and faith as a screen for fanatical hatred-that seems to Nietzsche the essence of "the Christianity of Paul, Augustine, and Luther" loc: 4167
Evidently, the small community did not understand the main point, the exemplary character of this kind of death, the freedom, the superiority over any feeling of ressentiment loc: 4171
by the very worst: that of Paul. In Paul was embodied the opposite type of that of the "bringer of the glad tidings": the genius in hatred, in the vision of hatred, in the inexorable logic of hatred loc: 4180
First, the conception of a life after death has historically furnished the basis for the deprecation of this life. loc: 4189
Secondly, the deprecation of this world could be carried to the extent of a complete disvaluation of anything a man might do in this life-and loc: 4191
The third point, finally, is that the conception of the resurrection furnished the setting for a new doctrine of retribution-of revenge and reward. loc: 4201
He even proposes an alteration of this famous phrase into credo quia ab- surdus sum loc: 4253
The new emphasis on faith means not only the negation of the Christian practice but also the partial paralysis of reason. loc: 4255
the men who were most vocal in shaping Christianity were ungeistig: reason was not their strength. In antiquity the slaves of the Roman Empire, among whom Christianity first made spectacular progress, lacked the mental capacity for intellectual integrity and thus brought about "a revaluation of all ancient values": they could not appreciate their masters' "freedom from faith . . . 'Enlightenment' enrages: for the slave wants the unconditional, he understands only the tyrannical" loc: 4270
Luther is ungeistig, he deprecates reason, and he is therefore nowhere at all compared to Montaigne (xvi, 33). And from this point of view, Nietzsche-who notes elsewhere that "the Protestant minister is the grandfather of German philosophy" (A io)8 -says: "in this respect German philosophy is a piece of Counter-Reformation" loc: 4277
What Nietzsche opposes are Leibniz's and Hegel's concessions to faith; loc: 4281
First, conviction is no proof of truth. loc: 4292
"a very popular error: having the courage of one's convictions; rather it is a matter of having the courage for an attack on one's convictions!!!" loc: 4295
"Strength and that freedom which issues from the force and over-force of the spirit [Geist] prove themselves by skepsis. . . . Convictions are prisons." loc: 4303
insistence that happiness and unhappiness are completely irrelevant to the truth of a proposition, loc: 4312
Something might be true, though it were in the highest degree obnoxious and dangerous" loc: 4314
At every step, one has to wrestle for truth; one has had to surrender for it almost everything to which the heart, to which our love, our trust in life cling otherwise. That requires greatness of soul: the service of truth is the hardest service. What does it mean after all to have integrity in matters of the spirit? That one is severe against one's heart, that one despises "beautiful sentiments," that one makes of every Yes and No a matter of conscience! loc: 4319
According to Nietzsche, utility, and even conduciveness to the preservation of life, is equally irrelevant to truth. loc: 4323
A belief [Glaube] may be a necessary condition of life and yet be false loc: 4328
The question arises, of course, from what point of view the fictions of the intellect could possibly be criticized and found out to be only fictions. With Kant, Nietzsche believes in reason's capacity for self-criticism-and the fictions in question may be found either to be self-contradictory or to contradict each other. To be bold in offering such criticisms is part of the service of truth. loc: 4331
It is clear that science, too, rests on a faith; there is no science "without presuppositions." The question whether truth is needed must not only have been affirmed in advance, but affirmed to the extent that the principle, the faith, the conviction is expressed: "nothing is needed more than truth, and in relation to it all else has only a second-rate value." loc: 4338
Nietzsche concludes that the "will to truth," not being founded on considerations of utility, means-"there remains no choice-'I will not deceive, not even myself': and with this we are on the ground of morality." loc: 4348
But one will have gathered what I am driving at: namely that it is still a metaphysical faith upon which our faith in science rests-that loc: 4351
Nietzsche, on the other hand, values power not as a means but as the state of being that man desires for its own sake as his own ultimate end. And truth he considers an essential aspect of this state of being. Self-perfection and ultimate happiness are not compatible with self-deception and illusion. loc: 4358
his emphatic and fundamental assertion that man wants power more than life. loc: 4362
What he wanted was totality: he fought the mutual extraneousness of reason, senses, feeling, and will. . . . Goethe conceived a human being who would be strong, highly educated, skillful in all bodily matters, self-controlled . . . the man of tolerance, not from weakness but from strength loc: 4394
Mens sana in corpore sano, the new barbarian, Goethe, the passionate man who is the master of his passions-that is Nietzsche's ethic and his critique of Christian morality, loc: 4396
This modern philosophers' predilection for, and overestimation of, pity is really something new: it was precisely on the unworthiness of pity that the philosophers had agreed until now. loc: 4424
Nietzsche thought that almost all the great philosophers of the past, from Plato to Kant, had agreed that self-perfection was the goal of morality. loc: 4427
Friendship. . . . In classical antiquity, friendship was experienced deeply and strongly. . . . In this consists their head-start before us: we, on the other side, have developed idealized love between the sexes. All the great virtues of the ancients were founded on this, that man stood next to man, loc: 4431
his disciples. In Zarathustra, finally, the conception of friendship is presented full grown. The "common higher thirst for an ideal above" has become a common "longing for the Ubermenschen" (Z 1 14): friendship is a means toward the self-perfection of two human beings. loc: 4442 • Delete this highlight
Note: i think that Jimmy and I were tending toward this at one tome, but then i just wussed out. Edit this note
he renounced Christian love for the sake of Greek friendship. loc: 4445
farthest." Elsewhere, Zarathustra says: "Do love your neighbors as yourselves-but first be such as love themselves" loc: 4448
Love is usually not unselfish; it is often the escape of two immature persons neither of whom has learned to be alone or to make something of himself. loc: 4452
if a friend wrongs you, then say: "I forgive you what you did to me; but that you have done it to yourself-how could I forgive that." loc: 4457
The best that a friend can do for a friend is to help him to gain self-mastery. And that cannot be done by commiserating with him or by indulging his weaknesses. loc: 4459
In short, Nietzsche thought that friends should be educators to one another; and educators must not be-sentimental. loc: 4465 • Delete this highlight
Note: cf concept of educator in Schopenhauet Edit this note
According to Nietzsche, pity is bad both for those who feel it and for those who are being pitied. It is bad for the pitied because it does not help them toward happiness and perfection and well-being. It even degrades, for pity includes a measure of condescension and sometimes even contempt. loc: 4465
Moreover, the pitying one rarely understands the "whole inner sequence" and the "entire economy of the soul": "he wants to help and does not realize that there is a personal necessity of suffering." loc: 4467
Self-perfection, however, is possible only through suffering, and the ultimate happiness of the man who has overcome himself does not exclude suffering. loc: 4469
There is even a secret seduction in all this . . . : just our "own path" is too hard . . . and too far from the love and gratitude of others . . . we do not at all mind escaping it loc: 4472
Pity is not unselfish; all our conduct is selfish, and we cannot help that. Pity, however, is our bad love of ourselves, while the Eros for the friend and toward our own self-perfection is a superior love. loc: 4473
Hardness against oneself and one's friends is essential for those who would educate and perfect themselves and their friends-but hardness against those who would not be able to stand such treatment is, says Nietzsche, entirely unpardonable: loc: 4491
he takes consideration for the weak to be the spiritual man's duty toward himself: he owes it to himself. loc: 4496
To be kindly when one is merely too weak and timid to act otherwise, to be humble when any other course would have unpleasant repercussions, and to be obliging when a less amiable gesture would provoke the master's kick or switch-that is the slave's morality, making a virtue of necessity. And such "morality" may well go together with impotent hatred and immeasurable envy, with ressentiment which would like nothing better than revenge-a loc: 4512
have claws and not to use them, and above all to be above any ressentiment or desire for vengeance, that is, according to Nietzsche, the sign of true power; and this is also the clue to his persistent critique of punishment.18 loc: 4517
The difference between Nietzsche's ethics and what he himself took to be Christian ethics is not ultimately reducible to different forms of behavior or divergent tables of virtues: it revolves primarily around the agent's state of mind or, more basically, his state of being. loc: 4545
The basic distinction here is that between two states of being: the "overfullness of life" and the "impoverishment of life," power and impotence. Both may express themselves in superficially similar ways-but Nietzsche would judge the expressions not according to appearances but in the light of their psychological origins. loc: 4570
Christian faith and morality are-he claims-no less than romantic philosophy and art, or anarchism, or, as he suggests elsewhere (GM ii ii), anti-Semitism, expressions of a deeply rooted ressentiment. loc: 4572
Goethe's formulation, "egoism coupled with weakness" is the very essence of Nietzsche's conception of romanticism. loc: 4618
the position of the allegedly Heraclitean and irrationalistic Nietzsche is to be found-superbly formulated-in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics: "the good man ought to be a lover of self, since he will then act nobly, and so both benefit himself and aid his fellows; loc: 4630
relevant passage from the Nicomachean Ethics: loc: 4636 • Delete this highlight
Note: There is so much quoting in this chapter that I wonder if Kaufmann is running out of steam. He is certainly not spending as much time explaining the quotes as he was in the first half of the book. Edit this note
A person is thought to be great-souled if he claims much and deserves much. . . . He that claims less than he deserves is small-souled loc: 4636
Great honours accorded by persons of worth will afford [the great-souled man] pleasure in a moderate degree: he will feel he is receiving only what belongs to him, or even less, for no honour can be adequate to the merits of perfect virtue, yet all the same he will deign to accept their honours, because they have no greater tribute to offer him. loc: 4638
He is fond of conferring benefits, but ashamed to receive them, because the former is a mark of superiority and the latter of inferiority. loc: 4643
It is also characteristic of the great-souled men never to ask help from others, or only with reluctance, but to render aid willingly; and to be haughty towards men of position and fortune, but courteous towards those of moderate station . . . and loc: 4646
Modern man perhaps? "I have got lost; I am everything that has got lost," sighs modern man. This modernity was our sickness: lazy peace, cowardly compromise, the whole virtuous uncleanliness of the modern Yes and No. . . . Rather loc: 4672 • Delete this highlight
Note: I'm not seeing much in this chapter about resentiment or of the last man. Isn't that what this chapter is supposed to be about. Edit this note
what counts in this context is that Nietzsche was convinced that modern man was failing in his pursuit of happiness, that modern man was far from the state that he-like all men-longed for most, and that this happiness consisted in a. state Nietzsche called "power." Nietzsche's critique of modern man, of romanticism, and of Christianity is thus the negative counterpart of his philosophy of power. Nietzsche understands all three as forms of weakness-sickness, dearth, and ressentiment are key terms in his criticism-and as he has come to identify happiness with power, he contends that those who lack such power as he has in mind cannot find ultimate happiness. loc: 4679
You should have eyes that always seek an enemy-your enemy. . . . You should seek your enemy and you should wage your war-for your thoughts. And if your thought be vanquished, your honesty should still find cause for triumph in that. loc: 4688
The atmosphere of his time seemed to him opposed to an uncompromising and uninhibited commitment to truth, and anything that would change that atmosphere might be welcome. The Greeks attained greatness through competition; could we hope to attain it through conformity and "lazy peace"? loc: 4704
Self-perfection involves non-conformity and not what Nietzsche calls the "lazy peace, cowardly compromise, the whole virtuous uncleanliness of the modern Yes and No" loc: 4721
Pity and altruism must be curbed by those who want to perfect themselves; but Nietzsche-his own Hyperborean loneliness notwithstanding-thinks that friendship may ease the way. Here man does not flee from himself or exert his will to "power" cheaply by indebting others to him. In friendship man can sublimate his jealousy into a keen spiritual competition, and the friends may vie with each other to make something of themselves that will delight, inspire, and spur on the other. loc: 4723
Chapter 13: Nietzsche's Attitude Toward Socrates loc: 4735
Independence of the soul-that is at stake here! No sacrifice can then be too great: even one's dearest friend one must be willing to sacrifice for it, though he be the most glorious human being, embellishment of the world, genius without peer loc: 4749
While Socrates is pictured, in the following pages, as the embodiment of that rationalism which superseded tragedy, his superhuman dignity is emphasized throughout. loc: 4758
Socrates the one turning point . . . of world history. For if one were to think of this whole incalculable sum of energy . . . as not employed in the service of knowledge, . . . then the instinctive lust for life would probably have been so weakened in general wars of annihilation . . . that suicide would have become a general custom, loc: 4779
Unrestrained pessimism would not only fail to produce great art, but it would lead to race suicide. The Socratic heritage, the elemental passion for knowledge, must "by virtue of its own infinity guarantee the infinity" and continuation of art loc: 4783
Nietzsche says further that three of the pre-Platonics embody the "purest types: Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Socrates-the sage as religious reformer, the sage as proud and lonely truth-finder, and the sage as the eternally and everywhere seeking one" loc: 4796
Socrates is celebrated as "the first philosopher of life [Lebensphilosoph]": "Thought serves life, while in all previous philosophers life served thought and knowledge" loc: 4798
In his own historical situation, Socrates acted as wisely and courageously as was then possible; but in the same passage Nietzsche claims that Socrates was a pessimist who "suffered life" as a disease. This is what must be overcome-and the following aphorism contains one of the first statements of the conception of eternal recurrence. With this ultimate affirmation of life, Nietzsche would overcome pessimism; loc: 4853
Nietzsche's violent objection to the Socratic identification of the good with the useful and agreeable, loc: 4873
In our time, however, equality is confused with conformity-as Nietzsche sees it-and it is taken to involve the renunciation of personal initiative and the demand for a general leveling. Men are losing the ambition to be equally excellent, which involves as the surest means the desire to excel one another in continued competition, and they are becoming resigned to being equally mediocre. Instead of vying for distinction, men nurture a ressentiment against all that is distinguished, superior, or strange. The philosopher, however, must always stand opposed to his time and may never conform; it is his calling to be a fearless critic and diagnostician-as Socrates was. And Nietzsche feels that he is only keeping the faith with this Socratic heritage when he calls attention to the dangers of the modern idealization of equality, and he challenges us to have the courage to be different and independent. loc: 4889
"What does a philosopher demand of himself, first and last? To overcome his time in himself, to become `timeless.' " This conception of the decadent philosopher who cannot cure his own decadence but yet struggles against it loc: 4907
Socratism is considered dialectically as something necessary-in fact, as the very force that saved Western civilization from an otherwise inescapable destruction. loc: 4914
"one had only one choice: either to perish or-to be absurdly rational" (io). In this way alone could the excesses of the instincts be curbed in an age of disintegration and degeneration; Socratism alone could prevent the premature end of Western man. loc: 4915
Ecce Homo! Man can live and die in a grand style, working out his own salvation instead of relying on the sacrifice of another. loc: 4922 • Delete this highlight
Note: Is this pretty much Nietzsche's philosophy in a nutshell? Edit this note
He saw himself standing at the end of an era as a fulfillment. Nietzsche answered his own question, "why I am a destiny," by claiming that he was the first to have "uncovered" Christian morality. He believed that after him no secular Christian system would be possible any more; and he considered himself the first philosopher of an irrevocably anti-Christian era. "To be the first one here may be a curse; in any case, it is a destiny" (6). His anti-Christianity, therefore, does not seem to him essentially negative. He is no critic who would have things be different: he lives at the beginning of a new era, and things will be different. loc: 4930
Socratic "wisdom full of pranks which constitutes the best state of the soul of man," and of the "sarcastic assurance" of the "great ironist" who vivisected the virtues of his age. loc: 4945
Nietzsche expressly associates cynicism with the "new barbarians" who combine "spiritual superiority with well-being and excess of strength" loc: 4949
the last line of his last book: "Has one understood me?-Dionysus versus the Crucified-" loc: 4956
Nietzsche encountered the death and resurrection of a god in both Orphism and Christianity; but the rebirth of Dionysus seemed to him a reaffirmation of life as "indestructible, powerful, and joyous," in spite of suffering and death, while he construed the crucifixion as a "curse on life," loc: 4957
"Dionysus" absorbed the Apollinian, and the reaffirmation of life assumed the meaning of passion sublimated as opposed to passion extirpated, loc: 4959
EPILOGUE loc: 4977
One thing is needful. "Giving style" to one's character-a great and rare art! It is exercised by those who see all the strengths and weaknesses of their own natures and then comprehend them in an artistic plan until everything appears as art and reason, and even weakness delights the eye. Here a large mass of second nature has been added; there a piece of original nature has been removed: both by long practice and daily labor. Here the ugly that could not be removed is hidden; there it has been reinterpreted and made sublime. loc: 5069
For one thing is needful: that a human being attain his satisfaction with himself . . . only then is a human being at all tolerable to behold. Whoever is dissatisfied with himself is always ready to revenge himself therefor; we others will be his victims loc: 5076