I anticipate beginning a final revision of my comments upon selected passages from The Gay Science by Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s writing compelled my attention upon my introduction to the late 19th century philosopher when I was much younger. I was in my late 20’s, a student. Many years have passed and somehow there remains…
…those who suffer most and are poorest in life would need above all mildness, peacefulness, and goodness in thought as well as deed –if possible, also a god who would be truly a god for the sick, a healer and savior; The Gay Science by Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann, aphorism 370 The thought…
If we had not welcomed the arts and invented this kind of cult of the untrue, then the realization of general untruth and mendaciousness that now comes to us through science –the realization that delusion and error are conditions of human knowledge and sensation –would be utterly unbearable. Honesty would lead to nausea and…
Everything in a Greek or Christian building originally had a meaning, and referred to a higher order of things; this feeling of inexhaustible meaning enveloped the edifice like a mystic veil. Beauty was only a secondary consideration in the system, without in any way materially injuring the fundamental sentiment of the mysteriously-exalted, the divinely…
“Cause” and “effect” is what one says; but we have merely perfected the image of becoming without reaching beyond the image or behind it. In every case the series of “causes” confronts us much more completely, and we infer: first, this and that has to precede in order that this or that may then…
Another magnificent day, a morning all sunshine. I spoke with a friend about preparing for the growing season. He grows dahlias, and I grow vegetables. Nature is one of the bonds between us. Another bond, we see one another almost daily at the Geneva Starbucks. Perhaps both of us prefers dark roast coffee? Last…
These semi-animals which were well adapted to the wilderness, to war, to prowling about, to adventure –suddenly all their instincts were deprived of value and ‘suspended’… They felt incapable of the simplest undertakings, in this new unfamiliar world their former guides, the regulating and unconsciously certain guides, deserted them – These unhappy creatures were…
This is Monday. There has never been a Monday like this Monday. Today received by my senses is infused with early spring sunlight. To compare with the past seasonal average, a day like this is unusual for Mid-March. Light warms the soil, rousing those dormant subterranean living things, a world invisible to us for…
The Sunday of the time change, the switch to daylight ‘savings’ time. Is anything at all ‘saved’? Describe for me how shifting the imposed grid of punctuated time, industrial time, upon the flow of natural-seasonal time is useful? Disruptive yes. Worth it? Why keep doing, in lock step what we’ve always done? I glimpsed…
The slave revolt in morality begins when resentment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values; the resentment of creatures to whom the real reaction, that of the deed, is denied and who can indemnify themselves only through an imaginary revenge. While every noble morality develops from a triumphant affirmation of itself, slave morality…
