Beginning To Learn Anew
I shall be asked why really
I have narrated all these little and,
according to traditional judgment, insignificant things…
Answer: these little things
-food, place, climate, recreation,
the whole casuistry of egoism
-are beyond all comparison more serious things
than anything that has been taken seriously hitherto.
It is precisely here that one must begin to learn anew.
The things which humanity has hitherto earnestly pondered on
are not even realities, mere figments of the imagination,
more strictly lies out of the bad instinct of sick,
in the profoundest sense pernicious natures –
All those concepts
‘God’,
‘soul’,
‘virtue’,
‘sin’,
‘the Beyond’,
‘truth’,
‘eternal life’,…
But the greatness of human nature, its ‘divinity’,
has been sought in these…
Every question of politics, of the social order,
of education has been falsified to the very bottom
through taking the most pernicious men for great men –
through teaching contempt for the ‘little’ things,
which is to say for the fundamental affairs of life itself…
Ecce Homo by Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. R. H. Collingdale, Why I am So Clever aphorism 10
A friend responded to selections from Nietzsche which have been featured and commented upon here. He observed that the points of friction which Nietzsche visits time and time again in his writing seem as contemporary to our 21st century, as they were to the late 19th century. Our nature, the human manner of experience seems to have changed very little.
The question looming dimly behind us and above us is whether there is a point at all to these discussions, why bother with concern, with laboring to untangle misdirected thinking, to dispel illusions inherited from many past generations. The ethereal, ghost-like specter of interrogation ought not be avoided. Either grapple with the form these perennial illusions take in our own time or float down the lazy river of cynicism with the majority of one’s fellows.
Begin anew: learning what to take seriously, and also learning, what to-take-seriously means.
I’ll begin with this cup of dark roast coffee. It’s very delicious. There is a satisfying buzz of conversation in the room. Is this sufficient eternity, to palate and to ear, in this room?
I think so.
2 thoughts on “Beginning To Learn Anew”
My sense is that cynicism manifests itself in many different forms. I have certainly succumbed to the siren of a cynical point of view many times, but that perspective is founded in my own distrust of zealotry. Whereas the zealot is cyclical towards me because I don’t buy into his/her nonsensical musings (or at least my take on their musings).
One of the most difficult aspects of life is to fully accept the differences in how all of us view the world around us. To be able to allow, without prejudice, our fellow creatures to embrace what I view as conspiratorial inanity. This would include most belief systems that lead to magical, non rational thinking. Also included are those who are myopic about the incredibly dysfunctional nature of our species, somehow believing that all will work out if we just ignore the myriad problems long enough.
In the end I hear my own siren calling me to join to my fellow humans in numbing my mind and turning a blind eye to the horrors around me. The garden whispers that all will be well and all I have to do is dig up a few weeds. As my favorite phrase goes: Easy Street, Where Ignorance is Bliss.
No question but there is a lot of “crazy” going around. All that it takes to contract the virus is to cozy up to a leader with a pitch, with enough devotees to stir the pot. I have been crazy before and at the time if felt normal until I couldn’t live with those ideas (or those people) any longer. Now of course I care about many things, including good food, good company, philosophy that makes me uncomfortable, and stories about the potential greatness within humankind.