My home is Batavia, a river town established at a time when Americans were settling the West. The importance of Christianity for past generations is borne witness by several substantial churches at the center of town, steeples with a Crosses piercing the sky. Even if forms of Christian thinking are not as close to…
If we transport ourselves back to the ages in which the religious life flourished most vigorously we discover a fundamental conviction which we no longer share… In those ages one as of yet knows nothing of natural laws; neither the earth nor the sky are constrained by any compulsion; any season, sunshine, rain can…
Every mistake (in every sense of the word) is the result of a degeneration of instinct, a disintegration of the will: one could almost equate what is bad with whatever is a mistake. All that is good is instinctive — and hence easy, necessary, uninhibited. Effort is a failing: the god is typically different…
The most general formula on which every religion and morality is founded is: “Do this and that, refrain from this and that — and then you will be happy! And if you don’t…” I call it the original sin of reason, the immortal unreason. — the first example of my “revaluation of all values.”…
Today especially, the real is no more than a stockpile of dead matter, dead bodies, and dead language. It still makes us feel secure today to evaluate this stock of what is real (let’s not talk about energy; the ecological complaint that hides the fact that it is not material energy which is disappearing…
behind every great human destiny there resounded as a refrain an even greater ‘in vain!’ The Genealogy of Morals by Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. by R. J. Hollingdale, What Is the Meaning of Ascetic Ideals, aphorism 28 I think that there is no conclusive counterargument to this assertion. When I consider my experience of life,…
A question without an answer; the will for man and the earth is lacking; behind every great human destiny there resounded as a refrain an even greater ‘in vain!’ The meaninglessness of suffering, not suffering itself, was the curse which hitherto lay over mankind… Any meaning is better than no meaning at all. From…
People should rethink their ideas about cruelty and open up their eyes;… This is my claim: almost everything we call “higher culture” is based on the spiritualization and deepening of cruelty. The “wild animal” has not been killed off at all; it is alive and well, it has just – become divine. Cruelty is…
The ear, the organ of fear, could not have evolved so greatly as it has only in the night and twilight of obscure caves and woods, in accordance with the mode of life of the age of timidity, that is to say the longest human age there has ever been: in bright daylight the…
How can a man take pleasurein nonsense?For wherever in the worldthere is laughterthis is the case;one can say, indeed,that almost everywhere there is happinessthere is pleasure in nonsense. The overturning of experienceinto its opposite,of the purposive into the purposelessness,of the necessary into the arbitrary,but in such a way that this eventcauses no harmand is…
