When I visited humankind, I found them sitting upon an old self-conceit. Each one thought he had long since known what was good and evil for humankind. All talk of virtue seemed to them an ancient wearied affair; and he who wished to sleep well spoke of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ before retiring. I disturbed…
The strongest and most evil spirits… rekindled the dozing passions. –every ordered society puts the passions to sleep… Time and again they reawakened the sense of comparison, of contradiction, of delight in what is new, daring, un-attempted; they forced humankind to pit opinion against opinion, ideal model against ideal model. Mostly by force of…
Rob Brezsny’s Freewill Astrology newsletter stimulates me to think. He is a happy warrior, samurai-like with unflagging dedication to his craft as a writer, faith in the mana/power of words to humanize us. The last newsletter from Rob offered a list of neologisms. The list is relevant, important to the work that remains in…
There is a constant moiling and toiling going on in morality –the effect of successful crimes (among which, for example, are included all innovations in moral thinking.) Daybreak by Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. by R. G. Collingwood aphorism 98 Nietzsche the wordsmith, was adept in three languages. A philologist by education, a specialist in classical…
The oldest moral judgments. What really are our reactions to the behavior of someone in our presence? First of all, we see what there is in it for us we regard it only from this point of view. We take this effect as the intention behind the behavior and finally we ascribe the harboring…
All earlier people found it much more likely that wherever there is madness there is also a grain of genius and wisdom — something ‘divine’, as one whispered to oneself. Or rather: as one said aloud forcefully enough. ‘It is through madness that the greatest good things have come to Greece’, Plato said, in…
A patient in a large hospital room with many beds complains to the doctor about the constant noise other patients are making, which is driving him crazy. The doctor replies that nothing can be done, one cannot forbid the patients from expressing their despair, since they all know they are dying. The first patient…
Morality is nothing other than obedience to customs, of whatever kind there may be; customs, however, are the traditional way of behaving and evaluating. In things in which no tradition commands there is no morality; and the less life is determined by tradition, the smaller the circle of morality… The free human being is…
…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…
