…the despairing and salvation-thirsty heart to which the madness whispers: ‘Behold thou art the lamb that beareth the sins of God.’ –the error lies not only in the feeling ‘I am accountable’, but equally in that antithesis ‘I am not, but somebody has to be.’ —This is, in fact, not true: The philosopher has…
It is absurd to praise and blame nature and necessity. In the same way as he loves a fine work of art, but does not praise it, because it can do nothing for itself; in the same way as he regards plants, so must he regard his own actions and those of mankind. He…
We do not complain of nature as immoral because it sends a thunderstorm and makes us wet, — why do we call those who injure us immoral? Because in the latter case we take for granted a free will functioning voluntarily; in the former we see necessity. But this distinction is an error. Thus…
I read a passage from Nietzsche’s Human, All Too Human about justice. The words stayed with me as if barbed. Nietzsche refers to a passage written by Thucydides (431 BC), his account of the war between Athens and Sparta. Thucydides recounts a negotiation between Athenian ambassadors and representatives of Melos, a island community in…
There is thus and element of truth in a joke about a young Christian girl’s ideal prayer to the Virgin Mary: “O thou who conceived without having sinned, let me sin without having to conceive!” –in the perverse functioning of Christianity, religion is, in effect, evoked as a safeguard allowing us to enjoy life…
How far the perspectival character of existence extends or indeed whether existence has any other character than this; whether existence without interpretation, without sense, does not become “meaninglessness”. Whether on the other hand, all existence is not essentially actively engaged in interpretation –that cannot be decided even by the most industrious and most scrupulously…
How far the perspectival character of existence extends or indeed whether existence has any other character than this; whether existence without interpretation, without sense, does not become “meaninglessness”. Whether on the other hand, all existence is not essentially actively engaged in interpretation –that cannot be decided even by the most industrious and most scrupulously…
I take this explanation from the street. I heard one of the common people say, “he knew me right away.” Then I asked myself: What is it that the common people take for knowledge? What do they want when they want “knowledge”? Nothing more than this: Something strange is to be reduced to something…
…we could think, feel, will, and remember, and we could also “act” in every sense of that word, and yet none of all this would have to “enter our consciousness”. The whole of life would be possible without, as it were, seeing itself in a mirror. Man… as the most endangered animal, he needed…
The intellectual fight became an occupation, an attraction, a profession, a duty, something dignified-and eventually knowledge and the striving for the true found their place as a need among other needs. Henceforth not only faith and conviction but also scrutiny, denial, mistrust, and contradiction became a power; all “evil” instincts were subordinated to knowledge,…
