What, In The End….
What, in the end, is common?
Words are acoustical signs for concepts; concepts, however, are more or less definite image signs for often recurring and associated sensations, or groups of sensations. To understand on another, it is not enough that one use the same words; one also has to use the same words for the same species of inner experiences; in the end one has to have one’s experience in common.
Therefore the human beings of one people understand one another better than those belonging to different peoples even if they employ the same language; or rather when human beings have long lived together under similar conditions (of climate, soil, danger, needs, and work), what results from this people who “understand one another”—-a people.
……….The greater the danger is, the greater is the need to reach agreement quickly and easily about what must be done; not misunderstanding one another in times of danger is what human beings simply cannot do without in their relations. In every friendship or love affair one still makes this test:
Nothing of that sort can endure once one discovers that one’s partner associates different feelings, intentions, nuances, desires, and fears with the same words.
Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche, What is Noble #268
What to write this morning? I read these lines near the end of Nietzsche’s book. They seem apt concluding remarks on the condition of American society at this early stage of the 21st century.
