“something unteachable, a granite of spiritual fate”  Those written words make me shudder.  Do I detect an odor of a timeworn notion of destiny? I mean to say that even with the privilege of education, or perhaps of financial resources, of means – there’s a certain core that is untouchable by any circumstance, a complex of “conviction,” an inviolate, immutable “I”…  Learning alters us, of this I do not doubt.  And then there’s the “but”.

Bluntly put, is this the “great stupidity”?

Is the impasse between us, the great divide of opinion about who we are, how we (homo sapiens) ought to treat one another – illuminated by this possibility?

What is the “great divide”?

It is the difference between those who believe females are unsuited to sustain equal responsibility and influence as males, and those who believe the contrary.

What do you think?

Learning alters us,
it does what all nourishment does
that does not merely “conserve”–as the physiologist knows.
But at the bottom of our souls, quite “down below,”
there is certainly something unteachable, a granite of spiritual fate,
of predetermined decision and answer to predetermined, chosen questions.
In each cardinal problem
there speaks an unchangeable “I am this”;

a thinker cannot learn anew about man and woman, for instance,
but can only learn fully—
he can only follow to the end
what is “fixed” about them in himself.

Occasionally we find certain solutions of problems
which make strong beliefs for us;
perhaps they are henceforth called “convictions.”
Later on–one sees in them only footsteps to self-knowledge,
guide-posts to the problem which we ourselves ARE

–or more correctly
to the great stupidity which we embody,
our spiritual fate, the UNTEACHABLE in us,
quite “down below.”

Beyond Good and Evil, by Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. by Helen Zimmern, aphorism 231