Friedrich Nietzsche

There is nothing more necessary than truth, and in comparison with it everything else has only secondary value.
This absolute will to truth: what is it? Is it the will to not allow ourselves to be deceived? Is it the will not to deceive?
One does not want to be deceived, under the supposition that it is injurious, dangerous, or fatal to be deceived. (Nietzsche, 1890)

What if God were not exactly truth, and if this could be proved? And if he were instead the vanity, the desire for power, the ambitions, the fear, and the enraptured and terrified folly of mankind? (Nietzsche, 1890)

Do not allow yourselves to be deceived: Great Minds are Skeptical. (Nietzsche, 1890)

With the strength of his spiritual sight and insight the distance, and as it were the space, around man continually expands: his world grows deeper, ever new stars, ever new images and enigmas come into view. (Nietzsche, 1890)

On the End of Postmodernism and the Rise of Realism of the Wave Structure of Matter
The lack of True Knowledge of Reality causes humanity many profound problems. For without the truth our world has largely been forced to create its own rules for how we live and think, and this has resulted in our current age of Postmodernism - a world without absolute truth where knowledge is relative, evolving, and dependent upon culture. But this has also necessarily led us to being deceived, for without True Knowledge of Reality it was impossible to determine any absolute and eternal truths, and as Nietzsche observed, this self deception is injurious and dangerous to ourselves.

Quotations Friedrich Nietzsche 'Beyond Good and Evil'
The search for truth is a dubious enterprise, it seems, both because it isn't clear that it's a good idea for us to try and live with it, and because the very notion of finding truth is in itself suspect. (Intro. p15)

..most of a philosophers conscious thinking is secretly directed and compelled into definite channels by his instincts. Behind all logic too and its apparent autonomy there stands evaluations, in plainer terms physiological demands for the preservation of a certain species of life. (p35)

What makes one regard philosophers half mistrustfully and half mockingly is not that one again and again detects how innocent they are - how often and how easily they fall into error and go astray, in short their childishness and childlikeness - but that they display altogether insufficient honesty, while making a mighty and virtuous noise as soon as the problem of truthfulness is even remotely touched on. They pose as having discovered and attained their real opinions through the self-evolution of a cold, pure, divinely unperturbed dialectic (in contrast to the mystics of every rank, who are more honest and more stupid than they are - these speak of 'inspiration') : while what happens at the bottom is that a prejudice, a notion, an 'inspiration', generally a desire of the heart sifted and made abstract, is defended by them with reasons sought after the event - they are one and all advocates who do not want to be regarded as such, and for the most part no better than cunning pleaders for their prejudices, which they baptise 'truths' .. (p36)

One ought not to make 'cause' and 'effect' into material things, as natural scientists do (and those who, like them, naturalise in their thinking- ), in accordance with the prevailing mechanistic stupidity which has the cause press and push until it 'produces an effect' ; one ought to employ 'cause' and 'effect' only as pure concepts, that is to say as conventional fictions for the purpose of designation, mutual understanding, not explanation. In the 'in itself' there is nothing of 'causal connection', of 'necessity', of 'psychological unfreedom' ; there 'the effect' does not follow the cause', there no 'law' rules. It is we alone who have fabricated causes, succession, reciprocity, relativity, compulsion,, number, law, freedom, motive, purpose; and when we falsely introduce this world of symbols into things and mingle it with them as though this symbol-world were an 'in itself', we once more behave as we have always behaved, namely mythologically. 'Unfree will' is mythology: in real life it is only a question of strong and weak wills. (p51)

O sancta simplicitas! What strange simplification and falsification mankind lives on! One can never cease to marvel once one has acquired eyes for this marvel! How we have made everything around us bright and free and easy and simple! How we have known how to bestow on our senses a passport to everything superficial, on our thoughts a divine desire for wanton gambling and false conclusions! - how we have from the very beginning understood how to retain our ignorance so as to enjoy an almost inconceivable freedom, frivolity, impetuosity, bravery, cheerfulness of life, so as to enjoy life! (p55)

Every superior human being will instinctively aspire after a secret citadel where he is set free from the crowd, the many, the majority, where, as its exception, he may forget the rule 'man' - except in the one case in which, as a man of knowledge in the great and exceptional sense, he will be impelled by an even stronger instinct to make straight for this rule. He who, when trafficking with men, does not occasionally glisten with all the shades of distress, green and grey with disgust, satiety, sympathy, gloom and loneliness, is certainly not a man of an elevated taste; but if he does not voluntarily assume this burden and displeasure, if he continually avoids it and, as aforesaid, remains hidden quietly and proudly away in his citadel, then one thing is for sure: he is not made, not predestined for knowledge.
..The study of the average human being, protracted, serious, and with much dissembling, self-overcoming, intimacy, bad company - all company is bad company unless the company of one's equals -; this constitutes a necessary part of the life story of every philosopher, perhaps the most unpleasant and malodorous part and the part most full of disappointments. (p57)

There are even cases in which fascination mingles with the disgust: namely where, by a caprice of nature, such as an indiscreet goat and monkey is touched with genius, as in the case of the Abbe Galiani, the profoundest, most sharp-sighted and perhaps also the dirtiest man of this century- he was far more profound than Voltaire and consequently also a good deal more silent. It is more often the case that, as already indicated, a scientific head is set on a monkey's body, a refined exceptional understanding on a common soul - no rare occurrence, for instance, among physicians and moral physiologists. (p58)

It is hard to be understood: especially when one thinks and lives gangasrotogati among men who think and live otherwise.. (p58)

Few are made for independence - it is a privilege of the strong. And he who attempts it, having the completest right to it but without being compelled to, thereby proves that he is probably not only strong but also daring to the point of recklessness. He ventures into a labyrinth, he multiplies by a thousand the dangers which life as such already brings with it, not the smallest of which is that no one can behold how and where he goes astray, is cut off from others, and is torn to pieces limb from limb by some cave-minotaur of conscience.
If such a one is destroyed, it takes place so far from the understanding of men that they neither feel it nor sympathise - and he can no longer go back! He can no longer go back even to the pity of men! (p60-1)

Our supreme insights must- and should! sound like follies, in certain cases like crimes, when they come impermissibly to the ears of those who are not predisposed and predestined for them. (p61)

Books for everybody are always malodorous books: the smell of petty people clings to them. Where the people eats and drinks, even where it worships, there is usually a stink. One should not go into churches if one wants to breathe pure air. (p61-2)

Whatever standpoint of philosophy we may adopt today: from every point of view the erroneousness of the world in which we believe we live is the surest and firmest thing we can get our eyes on- we find endless grounds for it which we would like to lure us to suppose a deceptive principle in the 'nature of things'. (p64)

Something might be true although at the same time harmful and dangerous in the highest degree; indeed, it could pertain to the fundamental nature of existence that a complete knowledge of it would destroy one- so that the strength of a spirit could be measured by how much 'truth' it could take, more clearly, to what degree it needed it attenuated, veiled, sweetened, blunted and falsified. But there can be no doubt that for the discovery of certain parts of truth the wicked and unhappy are in a more favourable position and are more likely to succeed; not to speak of the wicked who are happy - a species about whom the moralists are silent. Perhaps severity and cunning provide more favourable conditions for the formation of the strong, independent spirit and philosopher than does that gentle, sweet, yielding goodnaturedness and art of taking things lightly which is prized in a scholar and rightly prized. (p68)

One must test oneself to see whether one is destined for the independence and command; and one must do so at the proper time. One should not avoid one's tests, although they are perhaps the most dangerous game one could play and are in the end tests which are taken before ourselves and before no other judge. Not to cleave to another person, though he be the one you love most - every person is a prison, also a nook and corner. (p70)

And how could there exist a 'common good'! The expression is a self-contradiction: what can be common has ever but little value. In the end it must be as it is and has always been: great things are for the great, abysses for the profound, shudders and delicacies for the refined, and, in sum, all rare things for the rare. (p71) (GH - No, common knowledge of truth!)

..even scarecrows when we need to be - and today we need to be: in so far, that is, as we are born, sworn, jealous friends of solitude, of our own deepest, most midnight, most midday solitude - such a type of man are we, we free spirits! and perhaps you too are something of the same type, you coming men? you new philosophers? (p73)

In the end one has to do everything oneself if one is to know a few things oneself: that is to say, one has much to do! - But a curiosity like mine is after all the most pleasurable of vices - I beg your pardon! I meant to say: the love of truth has its reward in Heaven, and already upon earth- (p74)

Why atheism today? - 'The father' in God is thoroughly refuted; likewise 'the judge', 'the rewarder' . Likewise his ' free will' : he does not hear - and if he heard he would still not know how to help. The worst thing is : he seems incapable of making himself clearly understood: is he himself vague about what he means? - These are what, in the course of many conversations, asking and listening, I found to be the causes of the decline of European theism; it seems to me that the religious instinct is indeed in vigorous growth - but that it rejects the theistic answer with profound mistrust. (p80)

Did one not have to sacrifice God himself and out of cruelty against oneself worship stone, stupidity, gravity, fate, nothingness? To sacrifice God for nothingness - this paradoxical mystery of the ultimate act of cruelty was reserved for the generation which is even now arising: we all know something of it already. (p81)

With the strength of his spiritual sight and insight the distance, and as it were the space, around man continually expands: his world grows deeper, ever new stars, ever new images and enigmas come into view. (p82)

..I mean leisure with a good conscience, inherited, by blood, which is not altogether unfamiliar with the aristocratic idea that work degrades - that is to say, makes soul and body common? And that consequently modern, noisy, time-consuming, proud and stupidly proud industriousness educates and prepares precisely for 'unbelief' more than anything else?
Among those in Germany for example who nowadays live without religion, I find people whose 'free-thinking' is of differing kinds and origins but above all a majority of those in whom industriousness from generation to generation has extinguished the religious instincts: so that they no longer have any idea what religions are supposed to be for and as it were merely register their existence in the world with a kind of dumb amazement. (p83)

He who has seen deeply into the world knows what wisdom there is in the fact that men are superficial. It is their instinct for preservation which teaches them to be fickle, light and false. (P84-5)

It is the profound suspicious fear of an incurable pessimism which compels whole millennia to cling with their teeth to a religious interpretation of existence: the fear born of that instinct which senses that one might get hold of the truth too soon, before mankind was sufficiently strong, sufficiently hard, sufficient of an artist.. (p85)

The philosopher as we understand him, we free spirits - as the man of the most comprehensive responsibility who has the conscience for the collective evolution of mankind: this philosopher will make use of the religions of his work of education and breeding, just as he will make use of existing political and economic conditions. The influence on selection and breeding, that is to say the destructive as well as the creative and formative influence which can be exercised with the aid of the religions, is manifold and various depending on the kind of men placed under their spell and protection. For the strong and independent prepared and predestined for command, in whom the art and reason of a ruling race is incarnated, religion is one more means of overcoming resistance so as to be able to rule: as a bond that unites together ruler and ruled and betrays and hands over to the former the consciences of the latter, all that is hidden and most intimate in them which would like to exclude itself from obedience; (p86)

In the end, to be sure, to present the debit side of the account to these religions and to bring into the light of day their uncanny perilousness - it costs dear and terribly when religions hold sway, not as means of education and breeding in the hands of the philosopher, but in their own right and as sovereign, when they themselves want to be final ends and not means besides other means. AMong men, as among every other species, there is a surplus of failures, of the sick, the degenerate, the fragile, or those who are bound to suffer; the successful cases are, among men too, always the exception, and, considering that man is the animal whose nature has not yet been fixed, the rare exception. (p88)

The sage as astronomer. - As long as you still feel the stars as being something 'over you' you still lack the eye of the man of knowledge. (p91)

The same emotions in man and woman are, however, different in tempo: therefore man and woman never cease to misunderstand one another. (p93)

If one trains one's conscience it will kiss us as it bites. (p95)

By means of music the passions enjoy themselves. (p96)

Where neither love nor hate is in the game a woman is a mediocre player. (p97)

The will to overcome an emotion is ultimately only the will of another emotion or of several others. (p98)

The sexes deceive themselves about one another: the reason being that fundamentally they love and honour only themselves (or their own ideal, to express it more pleasantly). Thus man wants woman to be peaceful - but woman is essentially unpeaceful, like the cat, however well she may have trained herself to present an appearance of peace. (p100)

All credibility, all good conscience, all evidence of truth comes only from the senses. (p100)

In revenge and in love woman is more barbarous than man. (p101)

When a woman has scholarly inclinations there is usually something wrong with her sexuality. Unfruitfulness itself disposes one to a certain masculinity of taste; for man is, if I may be allowed to say so, 'the unfruitful animal'. (p101)

Comparing man and woman in general one may say: woman would not have the genius for finery if she did not have the instinct for the secondary role. (p102)

He who fights monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. ANd when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you. (p102)

That which is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil. (p103)

Madness is something rare in individuals- but in groups, parties, peoples, ages it is the rule. (p103)

Love brings to light the exalted and concealed qualities of a lover- what is rare and exceptional in him: to the extent it can easily deceive as to what is normal in him. (P104)

Ultimately one loves one's desires and not that which is desired. (p106)

Inasmuch as ever since there have been human beings there have also been human herds (family groups, communities, tribes, nations, states, churches) and always very many who obey compared with the very small number of those who command - considering, that is to say, that hitherto nothing has been practised and cultivated among men better or longer than obedience, it is fair to suppose that as a rule a need for it is by now innate as a kind of formal conscience which commands: 'thou shalt unconditionally do this, unconditionally not do that', in short 'thou shalt'. This need seeks to be satisfied and to fill out its form with a content; in doing so it grasps about wildly, according to the degree of its strength, impatience and tension, with little discrimination, as a crude appetite, and accepts whatever any commander - parent, teacher, law, class, prejudice, public opinion - shouts in its ears. The strange narrowness of human evolution, its heistations, its delays, its frequent retrogressions and rotations, are due to the fact that the herd instinct of obedience has been inherited best and at the expense of the art of commanding. (p120) (GH- get herd to follow truth i.e. the role of philosophy!)

The man of an era of dissolution which mixes the races together and who therefore contains within him the inheritance of a diversified descent that is to say contary and often not merely contary drives and values which struggle with one another and rarely leave one another in peace – such a man of late cultures and broken lights will, on average, be a rather weak man: his fundamental desire is the war which he is should come to an end; happiness appears to him, in accord with a sedative (for example Epicurean or Christian) medicine and mode of thought, pre-eminently as the happiness of repose, of tranquility, of satiety, of unity at last attained, as a ‘Sabbath of Sabbaths’, to quote the holy rhetorician Augustine, who was himself such a man. If, however, the contriety and war in such a nature should act as one more stimulus and enticement to life – and if, on the other hand, in addition to powerful and irreconcilable drives, there has also been inherited and cultivated a proper mastery and subtlety in conducting a war against oneself, that is to say self-control, self-outwitting: then there arise those marvelously incomprehensible and unfathomable men, these enigmatic men predestined for victory and the seduction of others, the fairest examples of which are Alcibiades and Caesar and among artists perhaps Leonardo da Vinci. They appear in precisely the same ages as those in which that rather weak type with his desire for rest comes to the fore: the two types belong together and originate in the same cause. (p121-2)

We, who have a different faith- we, to whom the democratic movement is not merely a form assumed by political organisations in decay, that is to say in diminishment, in process of becoming mediocre and losing his value: whither must we direct our hopes? Towards new philosophers, we have no other choice; towards spirits strong and original enough to make a start on antithetical evaluations and to revalue and reverse ‘eternal values’; towards heralds and forerunners, towards men of the future who in their present knot together the constraint which compels the will of millennia on to new paths. To teach the man the future of man as his will, as dependent on a human will, and to prepare for great enterprises and collective experiments in discipline and breeding so as to make an end of that gruesome dominion of chance and nonsense that has hitherto been called ‘history’ – the nonsense of the ‘greatest number’ is only its latest form- (p126)

Science is flourishing today and its good conscience shines in its face, while that to which the whole of modern philosophy has gradually sunk, this remnant of philosophy, arouses distrust and displeasure when it does not arouse mockery and pity. Philosophy reduced to ‘theory of knowledge’ actually no more than a timid epochism and abstinence doctrine: a philosophy that does not even get over the threshold and painfully denies itself the right of entry – that is philosophy at its last gasp, an end, an agony, something that arouses pity. How could such a philosophy- rule! (p131)

The perils in the way of the evolution of the philosopher are in truth so manifold today one may well doubt whether this fruit can still ripen at all. The compass and tower-building of the sciences has grown enormous, and therewith the probability has also grown enormous that the philosopher will become weary while still no more than a learner, or that he will let himself be stopped somewhere and ‘specialise’: so that he will never reach his proper height, the height from which he can survey, look around and look down. (p131)

But the genuine philosopher – as he seems to us, my friends? – lives ‘unphilosophically’ and ‘unwisely’, above all imprudently, and bears the burden and duty of a hundred attempts and temptations of life- he risks himself constantly, he plays the dangerous game… (p132)

Let us look more closely: what is the man of science? An ignoble species of man for a start, with the virtues of an ignoble, that is to say subservient, unauthorative and un-selfsufficent species of man: he possesses industriousness, patient acknowledgement of his proper place in the rank and file, uniformity and moderation in abilities and requirements, he possesses the instinct for his own kind and for that which his own kind have need of, for example that little bit of independence and green pasture without which there is no quiet work, that claim to honour and recognition (which first and foremost presupposes recognizability-), that sunshine of good name… (p133)

Perhaps he is troubled by his health or by the pettiness and stuffiness of his wife and friends, or by a lack of companions and company- yes, he forces himself to reflect on his troubles: but in vain! Already his thoughts are roaming, off to a more general case, and tomorrow he will know as little how to help himself as he did yesterday. (p134)

It may need not only wars in India and Asian involvements to relieve Europe of the greatest danger facing it, but also internal eruptions, the explosion of the empire into small fragments, and above all the introduction of the parliamentary imbecility, including the obligation upon everyone to read his newspaper at breakfast. I do not say this because I desire it: the reverse would be more after my own heart- I mean such an increase in the Russian threat that Europe would have to resolve to become equally threatening, namely to acquire a single will by means of a new caste dominating all Europe, a protracted terrible will of its own which could set its objectives thousands of years ahead- so that the long-drawn-out comedy of its petty states and the divided will of its dynasties and democracies should finally come to an end. The time for petty politics is past: the very next century will bring with it the struggle for mastery over the whole earth – the compulsion to grand politics. (p138)

I insist that philosophical labourers and men of science in general should once and for all cease to be confused with philosophers.
..It may be required for the education of a philosopher that he himself has also once stood on all those steps on which his servants, the scientific labourers of philosophy, remain standing- have to remain standing; he himself must perhaps have been critic and skeptic and dogmatist and historian and, in addition, poet and collector and traveller and reader of riddles and moralist and seer and ‘free spirit’ and practically everything, so as to traverse the whole range of human values and value-feelings and be able to gaze from the heights into every distance, from the depths into every height, from the nook-and-corner into every broad expanse with manifold eyes and a manifold conscience. But all these are only preconditions of his task: this task itself demands something different – it demands that he creates values. (p142)

Actual philosophers, however, are commanders and law givers: they say ‘thus it shall be!’, it is they who determine the Wherefore and Whither of humankind, and they possess for this task the preliminary work of all the philosophical labourers, of all those who have subdued the past – they reach for the future with creative hand, and everything that is or has been becomes for them a means, an instrument, a hammer. Their ‘knowing’ is creating, their creating is law-giving, their will to truth is – will to power. – Are there such philosophers today? Must there not be such philosophers?.. (p142-3)

It seems to me more and more that the philosopher, being necessarily a man of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, has always found himself and had to find himself in contradiction to his today: his enemy has always been the ideal of today. (p143)

Today, conversely, when the herd animal alone obtains and bestows honours in Europe, when ‘equality of rights’ could all to easily change into equality in wrongdoing: I mean into a general war on everything rare, strange, privileged, the higher man, the higher soul, the higher duty, the higher responsibility, creative fullness of power and mastery – today, being noble, wanting to be by ones self, the ability to be different, independence and the need for self-responsibility pertains to the concept ‘greatness’- (p144)

What the philosopher is, is hard to learn, because it cannot be taught: one has to ‘know’ it from experience. (p144)

Thus, for example, that genuinely philosophical combination of a bold exuberant spirituality which runs presto and a dialectical severity and necessity which never takes a false step is to most thinkers and scholars unknown from experience and consequently, if someone should speak of it in their presence, incredible. (p145)

Artists may here have a more subtle scent: they know only too well that it is precisely when they cease to act ‘voluntarily’ and do everything of necessity that their feeling of freedom, subtlety, fullness of power, creative placing, disposing, shaping reaches its height – in short, that necessity and ‘freedom of will’ are then one in them. (p145) (GH- As in Sport)

Many generations must have worked to prepare for the philosopher; each of his virtues must have been individually acquired, tended, inherited, incorporated, and not only the bold, easy, delicate course and cadence of his thoughts but above all the readiness for great responsibilities, the lofty glance that rules and looks down, the feeling of being segregated from the mob and its duties and virtues, the genial protection and defence of that which is misunderstood and culminated, be it god or devil, the pleasure in and exercise of grand justice, the art of commanding, the breadth of will, the slow eye which seldom admires, seldom looks upward, seldom loves… (p146)

Measure is alien to us, let us admit it to ourselves; what we itch for is the infinite, the unmeasured. Like a rider in a charging steed we let fall the reins before the infinite, we modern men, like semi-barbarians – and attain our state of bliss only when we are most –in danger. (p154)

Whether it be hedonism or pessimism or utilitarianism or eudaemonism: all these modes of thought which assess the value of things according to pleasure or pain, that is to say according to attendant and secondary phenomena, are fore-ground modes of thought and naiveties which anyone conscious of creative powers and an artists conscience will look down on with derision, though not without pity. Pity for you!
That, to be sure, is not pity for social ‘distress’, for ‘society’ and its sick and unfortunate, for the vicious and broken from the start who lie all around us; even less is it pity for the grumbling, oppressed, rebellious slave classes who aspire after domination – they call it ‘freedom’.
Our pity is more elevated, more farsighted pity – we see how man is diminishing himself, how you are diminishing him! – and there are times when we behold your pity with an indescribable anxiety, when we defend ourselves against this pity – when we find your seriousness more dangerous than any kind of frivolity. You want it possible – and there is no madder ‘if possible’ – to abolish suffering; and we? – it really does seem that we would rather increase it and make it worse than it ever has been! Wellbeing as you understand it – that is no goal, that seems to us an end! A state which soon renders man ludicrous and contemptible – which makes it desirable that he should perish!
The discipline of suffering, of great suffering – do you not know that it is this discipline alone which has created every elevation of mankind hitherto? That tension of the soul in misfortune which cultivates its strength, its terror at the sight of great destruction, its inventiveness and bravery in undergoing, enduring, interpretatintg, exploiting misfortune, and whatever of depth, mystery, mask, spirit, cunning and greatness has been bestowed upon it- has it not been bestowed through suffering, through the discipline of great suffering? (P154-5)

..But to repeat, there are higher problems than the problems of pleasure and pain and pity; and every philosophy that treats only of them is a piece of naivety.. (p156)

We immoralists! This world which concerns us, in which we have to love and fear, this almost invisible, inaudible world of subtle commanding, subtle obeying, a world of ‘almost’ in every respect, sophistical, insidious, sharp, tender: it is well defended, indeed, against clumsy spectators and familiar curiosity! We are entwined in an austere shirt of duty and cannot get out of it – and in this we are ‘men of duty’, we too! Sometimes, it is true, we may dance in our ‘chains’ and between our ‘swords’; often, it is no less true, we gnash our teeth at it and frown impatiently at the unseen hardship of our lot. But do what we will, fools and appearances speak against us and say ‘these are men without duty’ – we always have fools and appearances against us! (p156)

Honesty- granted that this is our virtue, from which we cannot get free, we free spirits – well, let us labour at it with all love and malice and not weary of ‘perfecting’ ourselves in our virtue, the only one we have: may its brightness one day overspread this ageing culture and its dull, gloomy seriousness like a gilded azure mocking evening glow! And if our honesty should one day none the less grow weary, and sigh, and stretch its limbs, and find us too hard, and like to have things better, easier, gentler, like an agreeable vice: let us remain hard, we last of the Stoics! (p156)

Our honesty, we free spirits – let us see to it that our honesty does not become our vanity, our pomp and finery, our limitation, our stupidity! .. let us see that through honesty we do not becomes saints and bores! Is life not a hundred times too short to be- bored in it? (P157)

(Is the moralist not the opposite of the Puritan? That is to say, as a thinker who regards morality as something questionable, as worthy of question-marks, in short, as a problem? Is moralising not – immoral?)
Ultimately they all want English morality to prevail: inasmuch as mankind, or ‘the general utility’, or ‘the happiness of the greatest number’, no! the happiness of England would best be served; they would like with all their might to prove to themselves that to strive after English happiness, I mean after comfort and fashion (and, as the supreme goal, a seat in Parliament), is at the same time the true path of virtue, indeed that all virtue there has ever been on earth has consisted in just such a striving. Not one of all these ponderous herd animals with their uneasy conscience (who undertake to advocate the cause of egoism as the cause of general welfare-) wants to know or scent that the ‘general welfare’ is not an ideal, or a goal, or a concept that can be grasped at all, but only a emetic- that what is right for one cannot by any means therefore be right for another, that the demand of one morality for all is detrimental to precisely the higher men, in short that there exists an order of rank between man and man, consequently also between morality and morality. (p158)

In late ages which may be proud of their humaneness there remains so much fear, so much superstitious fear of the ‘savage cruel beast’, to have mastered which constitutes the very pride of those humane ages, that even palpable truths as if by general agreement, remain unspoken for centuries, because they seem as though they might help to bring back to life that savage beast which has finally been laid to rest.
..One should open one’s eyes and take a new look at cruelty.
..Almost everything we call ‘higher culture’ is based on the spiritualisation and intensification of cruelty – this is my proposition; the ‘wild beast’ has not been laid to rest at all, it lives, it flourishes, it has become – defined. That what constitutes the painful voluptuousness of tragedy is cruelty.. (p159)

The power of the spirit to appropriate what is foreign to it is revealed in a strong inclination to assimilate the new to the old, to simplify the complex, to overlook or repel what is wholly contradictory: just as it arbitrarily emphasizes, extracts and falsifies to suit itself certain traits and lines in what is foreign to it, in every piece of ‘external world’. Its intention in all this is the incorporation of new ‘experiences’ , the arrangement of new things within old divisions – growth, that is to say; more precisely, the feeling of growth, the feeling of increased power.
The same will is served by an apparently antithetical drive of the spirit, a sudden decision for ignorance, for arbitrary shutting-out, a closing of the windows, an inner denial of this or that thing, a refusal to let it approach, a kind of defensive posture against much that can be known, a contentment with the dark, with the closed horizon, an acceptance and approval of ignorance; all this being necessary according to the degree of its power to appropriate, its ‘digestive power’, to speak in a metaphor – and indeed ‘the spirit’ is more like a stomach than anything else. (p160-1)

He will say, “There is something cruel in the inclination of my spirit” – let the amiable and virtuous try to talk him out of that! In fact, it would be nicer if, instead of with cruelty, we were perhaps credited with ‘extravagant honesty’ – we free, very free spirits – and perhaps that will actually one day be our posthumous fame? In the meantime – for it will be long time before that happens – we ourselves are likely to be least inclined to dress up in moralistic verbal tinsel and valences of this sort: all our labour hitherto has spoiled us for this taste and its buoyant luxuriousness. They are beautiful, glittering, jingling, festive words: honesty, love of truth, love of wisdom, sacrifice for the sake of knowledge, heroism of the truthful – there is something about them that makes one’s pride swell. (p161-2)

For to translate man back into nature; to master the many vain and fanciful interpretations and secondary meanings which have hitherto been scribbled and daubed over that eternal basic text homo natura; to confront man henceforth with man in the very way in which, hardened by the discipline of science, man today confronts the rest of nature, with dauntless Oedipus eyes and stopped-up Odysseus ears, deaf to the siren songs of old metaphysical bird-catchers who have all too long been piping to him, ‘you are more! You are higher! You are of different origin!’ – that may be a strange and extravagant task but it is a task, who would deny that? Why did we choose it, this extravagant task? Or to ask the question differently: ‘ why knowledge at all?’ – Everyone will ask us that. And we, thus pressed, we who have asked ourselves the same question a hundred times, we have found and can find no better answer… (p162)

But she does not want truth: what is truth to a woman! From the very first nothing has been more alien, repugnant, inimical to woman than truth- her great art is the lie, her supreme concern is appearance and beauty. Let us confess it, we men: it is precisely this art and this instinct in woman which we love and honour: we who have a hard time and for our refreshment like to associate with creatures under whose hands, glances and tender follies our seriousness, our gravity and profundity appear to us almost as folly. Finally, I pose the question: has any woman ever conceded profundity to a woman’s mind or justice to a woman’s heart? And is it not true that on the whole ‘woman’ has hitherto been slighted most by woman herself- and not at all by us? (p165)

To blunder over the fundamental problem of ‘man and woman’ to deny here the most abysmal antagonism and the necessity of an eternally hostile tension, perhaps to dream here of equal rights, equal education, equal claims and duties: this is a typical sign of shallow-mindedness, and a thinker who has proved himself to be shallow on this dangerous point – shallow of instinct! – may be regarded as suspect in general.. (p166)

Since the French revolution the influence of woman in Europe has grown less in the same proportion as her rights and claims have grown greater; and the ‘emancipation of woman’, in so far as it has been demanded and advanced by women themselves (and not only by male shallow-pates), is thus revealed as a noteworthy symptom of the growing enfeeblement and blunting of the most feminine instincts.
There is a stupidity in this movement, an almost masculine stupidity, of which real woman- who is always a clever woman – would have to be ashamed from the very heart. To lose her sense for the ground on which she is most sure of victory; to neglect to practice the use of her own proper weapons; to let herself go before the man, perhaps even ‘to the extent of producing a book’, where formerly she kept herself in check and in subtle cunning humility; to seek with virtuous assurance to destroy man’s belief that a fundamentally different ideal is wrapped up in woman, that there is something eternally, necessarily feminine; emphatically and loquaciously to talk man out of the idea that woman has to be maintained, cared for, protected, indulged like a delicate, strangely wild and often agreeable domestic animal.. (p168)

..and she is being rendered more and more hysterical with every day that passes and more and more incapable of her first and last profession, which is to bear strong children. (p168)

That in woman which inspires respect and fundamentally fear is her nature, which is more ‘natural’ than that of man, her genuine, cunning, beast-of-prey suppleness, the tiger’s claws beneath the glove, the naivety of her egoism, her ineducability and inner savagery, and how incomprehensible, capacious and prowling her desires and virtues are..(p169)

..Fear and Pity: it is with these feelings that man has hitherto stood before woman, always with one foot in tragedy, which lacerates as it delights. – What? And is this now over with? And is woman now being deprived of her enchantment? Is woman slowly being made boring? (p169)

Whether that which now distinguishes the European be called ‘civilisation’ or ‘humanisation’ or ‘progress’; whether one calls it simply, without implying any praise or blame, the democratic movement in Europe: behind all the moral and political foregrounds indicated by such formulas a great physiological process is taking place and gathering greater and ever greater impetus- the process of the assimilation of all Europeans, their growing detachment from the conditions under which races dependent on climate and class originate, their increasing independence of any definite milieu which, through making the same demands for centuries, would like to inscribe itself on soul and body- that is to say, the slow emergence of an essentially supra-national and nomadic type of man which, physiologically speaking, possesses as its typical distinction a maximum of the art and power of adaption. This process of the becoming European, the tempo of which can be retarded by great relapses but which will perhaps precisely through them gain in vehemence and depth – the still-raging storm and stress of ‘national feeling’ belongs here, likewise the anarchism now emerging- this process will probably lead to results which its naïve propagators and panegyrists, the apostles of ‘modern ideas’, would be least inclined to anticipate.
The same novel conditions which will on average create a levelling and mediocritizing of man – a useful, industrious, highly serviceable and able herd-animal man – are adapted in the highest degree to giving rise to exceptional men of the most dangerous and enticing quality. For while that power of adaptation which continually tries out changing conditions and begins a new labour with every new generation, almost with every new decade, cannot make possible the powerfulness of the type; while the total impression produced by such future Europeans will probably be that of multifarious, garrulous, weak-willed and highly employable workers who need a master, a commander, as they need their daily bread; while, therefore, the democratization of Europe will lead to the production of a type prepared for slavery in the subtlest sense: in individual and exceptional cases the strong man will be found to turn out stronger and richer than has perhaps ever happened before- thanks to the unprejudiced nature of his schooling, thanks to the tremendous multiplicity of practice, art and mask. What I mean to say is that the democratization of Europe is at the same time an involuntary arrangement for the breeding of tyrants- in every sense of the word, including the most spiritual. (p172-3)

Every elevation of the type ‘man’ has hitherto been the work of an aristocratic society – and so it will always be: a society which believes in a long scale of orders of rank and differences of worth between man and man and needs slavery in some sense or other. (p192)

As to how an aristocratic society (that is to say, the precondition for this elevation of the type ‘man’) originates, one ought not to yield to any humanitarian illusions: truth is hard. Let us admit to ourselves unflinchingly how every higher culture on earth has hitherto begun! Men of a still natural nature, barbarians in every fearful sense of the word, men of prey still in possession of an unbroken strength of will and lust for power, threw themselves upon weaker, more civilised, more peaceful, perhaps trading or cattle-raising races, or upon old mellow cultures, the last vital forces in which were even then flickering out in a glittering firework display of spirit and corruption. The noble caste was in the beginning always the barbarian caste: their superiority lay, not in their physical strength, but primarily in the psychical- they were more complete human beings (which, on every level, also means as much as ‘more complete beasts’ – (p192)

To refrain from mutual injury, mutual violence, mutual exploitation, to equate one’s own will with that of another: this may in a certain rough sense become good manners between individuals if the conditions for it are present (namely if their strength and value standards are in fact similar and they both belong to one body). As soon as there is a desire to take this principle further, however, and it possible even as the fundamental principle of society, it at once reveals itself for what it is: as the will to the denial of life, as the principle of dissolution and decay. One has to think this matter thoroughly through to the bottom and resist all sentimental weakness: life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of the strange and the weaker, suppression, severity, imposition of one’s own forms, incorporation and, at the least and mildest, exploitation- but why should one always have to employ precisely those words which have from of old been stamped with a slanderous intention?
Even that body within which, as was previously assumed, individuals treat one another as equals- this happens in every healthy aristocracy- must, if it is living and not a decaying body, itself do all that to other bodies which the individuals within it refrain from doing to one another: it will have to be the will to power incarnate, it will want to grow, expand, draw to itself, gain ascendancy- not out of any morality or immorality, but because it lives, and because life is will to power. On no point, however, is the common European consciousness more reluctant to learn than it is here; everywhere one enthuses, even under scientific disguises, about coming states of society in which there will be ‘no more exploitation’- that sounds to my ears like promising a life in which there will be no organic functions. ‘Exploitation’ does not pertain to a corrupt or imperfect or primitive society: it pertains to the essence of the living thing as a fundamental organic function, it is a consequence of the intrinsic will to power which is precisely the will of life. –Granted this is a novelty as a theory – as a result it is the primordial fact of all history: let is be at least that honest with ourselves! (p193-4)

Danger is again present, the mother of all morality, great danger, only this time it comes from the individual, from neighbour and friend, from the street, from one’s own personal and secret recesses of wish and will: what will the moral philosophers who come up in this age now have to preach? They discover, these acute observers and idlers, that the end is fast approaching, that everything around them is corrupt and corrupting, that nothing can last beyond the day after tomorrow, one species of man excepted, the incurably mediocre. The mediocre alone have the prospect of continuing on and propagating themselves – they are the men of the future, the sole survivors; ‘be like them! become mediocre!’ is henceforth the only morality that has any meaning left, that still finds ears to hear it. –But is is difficult to preach, this morality of mediocrity! –for it can never admit what it is and what it wants! it has to speak of moderation and dignity and duty and love of one’s neighbour- it will scarcely be able to conceal its irony!- (p201-2)

That which his ancestors most liked to do and most constantly did cannot be erased from a man’s soul.. (p203)

The more similar, more ordinary human beings have had and still have the advantage, the more select, subtle, rare and harder to understand are liable to remain alone, succumb to accidents in their isolation and seldom propagate themselves. Tremendous counterforces have to be called upon to cross this natural, all to natural progressus in simile, the continuing development of mankind into the similar, ordinary, average, herdlike- into the common! (p206)

A human being who strives for something great regards everybody he meets on his way either as a means or as a delay and hindrance- or as a temporary resting-place. The lofty goodness towards his fellow men which is proper to him becomes possible only when he has reached his height and he rules. Impatience and his consciousness that until that time he is condemned to comedy- for even war is a comedy and a concealment, just as every means conceals the end- spoil all his association with others: this kind of man knows solitude and what is poisonous in it. (p210)

The problem of those who wait- It requires luck and much that is incalculable if a higher human being in whom there slumbers the solution of a problem is to act- ‘break out’ one might say – at the right time. Usually it does not happen, and in every corner of the earth there are people waiting but even less that they are waiting in vain. Sometimes the awakening call, that chance event which gives ‘permission’ to act, comes but too late- when the best part of youth and the strength to act has already been used up in sitting still; and how many a man has discovered to his horror when he ‘rose up’ that his limbs had gone to sleep and his spirit was already too heavy! ‘It is too late’ – he has said to himself, having lost faith in himself and henceforth for ever useless. (p211)

-Annoying! The same old story! When one has finished one’s house one realises that while doing so one has learnt unawares something one absolutely had to know before one- began to build. The everlasting pitiful ‘too late!’ – The melancholy of everything finished!… (p212)

The greatest events and thoughts – but the greatest thoughts are the greatest events- are comprehended last: the generations which are their contemporaries do not experience such events- they live past them. What happens here is similar to what happens in the realm of the stars. The light of the furthest stars comes to men last; and before it has arrived man denies that there are- stars there. ‘How many centuries does a spirit need to be comprehended?’ –that too is a standard, with that too there is created an order of rank and etiquette such as is needed: for spirit and star. (p214-5)

One always hears in the writings of a hermit something of the echo of the desert, something of the whisper and shy vigilance of solitude; in his strongest words, even in his cry, there still resounds a new and more dangerous kind of silence and concealment. He who has sat alone with his soul day and night, year in year out, in confidential discord and discourse, and in his cave- it may be labyrinth, but it may be a goldmine- become a cave-bear or treasure-hunter or a treasure-guardian and dragon, finds that his concepts themselves at last acquire a characteristic twilight colour, a smell of the depths and of must, something incommunicable and reluctant which blows cold on every passer-by. (p216)

A philosopher: a man who constantly experiences, sees, hears, suspects, hopes, dreams extraordinary things; who is struck by his own thoughts as if from without, as if from above and below, as by his kind of events and thunder-claps; who is himself perhaps a storm and pregnant with new lightnings; a fateful man around whom snarling, quarrelling, discord and uncanniness is always going on. A philosopher: alas, a creature which often runs away from itself, is often afraid of itself- but which is too inquisitive not to keep ‘coming to itself’ again.. (p217)

Alas, and yet what are you, my written and painted thoughts! It is not long ago that you were still so many-coloured, young and malicious, so full of thorns and hidden spices you made me sneeze and laugh- and now? You have already taken off your novelty and some of you, I fear, are on the point of becoming truths: they already look immortal, so pathetically righteous, so boring! And has it ever been otherwise? For what things do we write and paint, we mandarins with Chinese brushes, we immortalisers of things which let themselves be written, what alone are we capable of painting? Alas, only that which is about to wither and is beginning to lose its fragrance! Alas, only storms departing exhausted and feelings grown old and yellow! Alas, only birds strayed and grown weary in flight who now let themselves be caught in the hand- in our hand! We immortalise that which cannot live and fly much longer, weary and mellow things alone! And it is only your afternoon, my written and painted thoughts, for which alone I have the colour, many colours perhaps, many many-coloured tendernesses and fifty yellows and browns and greens and reds: - but no one will divine from these how you looked in your morning, you sudden sparks and wonders of my solitude, you my old beloved- wicked thoughts! (p221)

From High Mountains: Epode

Oh Lifes midday! Oh festival! Oh garden of summer! I wait in restless ecstasy, I stand and watch and wait- where are you, friends? It is you I await, in readiness day and night. Come now! It is time you were here!

Was it not for you the glacier today exchanged its grey for roses? The brook seeks you; and wind and clouds press higher in the blue, longingly they crowd aloft to look for you.

For you have I prepared my table in the highest height- who lives so near the stars as I, or so near the depths of the abyss? My empire- has an empire ever reached so far? And my honey- who has tasted the sweetness of it?

-And there you are, friends! – But, alas, am I not he you came to visit? You hesitate, you stare- no, be angry rather! Is it no longer- I? Are hand, step, face transformed? And what I am, to you my friends- I am not?

Am I another? A stranger to myself? Sprung from myself? A wrestler who subdued himself too often? Turning his own strength against himself too often, checked and wounded by his own victory?

Did I seek where the wind bites keenest, learn to live where no one lives, in the desert where only the polar bear lives, unlearn to pray and curse, unlearn man and god, became a ghost flitting across the glaciers?

-Old friends! How pale you look, how full of love and terror! No- be gone! Be not angry! Here- you could not be at home: here in this far domain of ice and rocks – here you must be a huntsman, and like to Alpine goat.

A wicked huntsman is what I have become! – See how bent my bow! He who drew that bow, surely he was the mightiest of men-: but the arrow, alas- ah, no arrow is dangerous as that arrow is dangerous- away! Be gone! For your own preservation!

You turn away? – O heart, you have borne up well, your hopes stayed strong: now keep your door open to new friends! Let the old go! Let memories go! If once you were young, now- you are younger!

What once united us, the bond of one hope- who can still read the signs love once inscribed therein, now faint and faded? It is like a parchment – discoloured, scorched- from which the hand shrinks back.

No longer friends, but- what shall I call them? –they are the ghosts of friends which at my heart and window knock at night, which gaze on me and say: ‘were we once friends?’ –oh faded word, once fragrant as the rose!

Oh longing of youth, which did not know itself! Those I longed for, those I deemed changed into kin of mine –that they have aged is what has banished them: only he who changes remains akin to me.

Oh lifes midday! Oh second youth! Oh garden of summer! I wait in restless ecstasy, I stand and watch and wait – it is friends I await, in readiness day and night, new friends. Come now! It was time you were here!

This song is done – desire’s sweet cry died on the lips: a sorcerer did it, the timely friend, the midday friend- no! ask not who he is – at midday it happened, a midday one became two..

Now, sure of victory together, we celebrate the feast of feasts: friend Zarathrustra has come, the guest of guests! Now the world is laughing, the dread curtain is rent, the wedding day has come for light and darkness..
(p222)

Quotations Friedrich Nietzsche 'The Greeks'
Greek philosophy seems to begin with a preposterous fancy, with the proposition that water is the origin and mother-womb of all things. Is it really necessary to stop there and become serious? Yes, and for three reasons: firstly, because the preposition does enunciate something about the origin of things; secondly, because it does so without figure and fable; thirdly and lastly, because it contained, although only in the chrysalis state, the idea :everything is one. ..That which drove him (Thales) to this generalization was a metaphysical dogma, which had its origin in a mystic intuition and which together with the ever renewed endeavors to express it better, we find in all philosophies- the proposition: everything is one! (p159)
The Greeks among whom Thales became so suddenly conspicuous were the antitype of all realists by only believing essentially in the reality of men and gods, and by contemplating the whole of nature as if it were only a disguise, masquerade, and metamorphosis of these god-men. Man was to them the truth and essence of things; everything else mere phenomenon and deceiving play. (p160-1)
Aristotle rightly says: "that which Thales and Anaxagoras know, people will call unusual, astounding, difficult, divine but- useless, since human possessions were of no concern to those two." (p161)
When Thales says, "Everything is water", man is startled up out of his wormlike mauling of and crawling about among the individual sciences; he divines the last solution of things and masters through this divination the common perplexity of the lower grades of knowledge. The philosopher tries to make the total-chord of the universe re-echo within himself and then to project it into ideas outside himself: whilst he is contemplative like the creating artist, sympathetic like the religionist, looking out for ends and causalities like the scientific man, whilst he feels himself swell up to the macrocosm, he still retains the circumspection to contemplate himself coldly as the reflex of the world; (p162)
What the verse is to the poet, dialectical thinking is to the philosopher; he snatches at it in order to hold fast his enchantment, in order to petrify it. And just as words and verse to the dramatist are only stammerings in a foreign language, to tell in it what he lived, what he saw, and what he can directly promulgate by gesture and music only, thus the expression of every deep philosophical intuition by means of dialectics and scientific reflection is, it is true, on the one hand the only means to communicate what has been seen, but on the other hand it is a paltry means, and at the bottom a metaphorical, absolutely inexact translation into a different sphere and language. Thus Thales saw the Unity of the "Existent," and when he wanted to communicate this idea he talked of water. (p162)
Everything that has once come into existence also perishes, whether we think of human life or of water or of heat and cold; everywhere where definite qualities are to be noticed, we are allowed to prophesy the extinction of these qualities- according to the all-embracing proof of experience. Thus a being that possesses definite qualities and consists of them can never be the origin and principle of things; the veritable ens, the "Existent," Anaximander concluded, cannot posses any definite qualities, otherwise, like all other things, it would necessarily have originated and perished. (p164)
The immortality and eternity of the Primordial-being lies not in an infiniteness and inexhaustibility- as usually the expounders of Anaximander presuppose- but in this, that it lacks the definite qualities which lead to destruction, for which reason it bears also its name: The Indefinite. The thus labeled Primordial-being is superior to all Becoming and for this very reason it guarantees the eternity and unimpeded course of Becoming. This last unity is that Indefinite, the mother-womb of all things, can, it is true, be designated only negatively by man, as something to which no predicate out of the existing world of Becoming can be allotted, and might be considered a peer to the Kantian "Thing-in-itself". (p164)
Thales shows the need of simplifying the empire of plurality, and of reducing it to a mere expansion or disguise of the one single existing quality, water. Anaximander goes beyond him with two steps. Firstly he puts the question to himself: how, if there exists an eternal Unity at all, is that Plurality possible? And he takes the answer out of the contradictory, self-devouring, and denying character of this Plurality. The existence of this Plurality becomes a moral phenomenon to him; it is not justified, it expiates itself continually through destruction. But then the question occurs to him: yet why has not everything that has become perished long ago, since, indeed, quite an eternity of time has already gone by? Whence the ceaseless current of the River of Becoming? (p165)
..the constellation of things cannot help itself being thus fashioned, that no end is to be seen of that stepping forth of the individual being out of the lap of the "Indefinite." At this Anaximander stayed; that is, he remained within the deep shadows which like gigantic specters were lying on the mountain range of such a world-perception. The more one wanted to approach the problem of solving how out of the Indefinite the Definite, out of the Eternal the Temporal, out of the Just the Unjust could by succession ever originate, the darker the night became. (p166)
Toward the mist of this mystic night, in which Anaximander's problem of the Becoming was wrapped up, Heraclitus of Ephesus approached and illuminated it by a divine flash of lightening. "I contemplate the Becoming," he exclaimed,- "and nobody has so attentively watched this eternal wave-surging and rhythm of things. And what do I behold? Lawfulness, infallible certainty..
Where injustice sways, there is caprice, disorder, irregularity, contradiction; (p166)
Firstly, he denied the duality of two quite diverse worlds, into the assumption of which Anaximander had been pushed; he no longer distinguished a physical world from a metaphysical, a realm of definite qualities from a realm of indefinable indefiniteness. (p166)
For this one world which was left to him- shielded all round by eternal, unwritten laws, floating up and down in the brazen beat of rhythm- shows nowhere persistence, indestructibility, a bulwark in the stream. Louder than Anaximander, Heraclitus exclaimed: "I see nothing but Becoming. Be not deceived! It is the fault of your limited outlook and not the fault of the essence of things if you believe that you see firm land anywhere in the ocean of Becoming and Passing.You need names for things, just as if they had a rigid permanence, but the very river in which you bathe a second time is no longer the same one which you entered before." (p166-7)
Heraclitus has as his royal property the highest power of intuitive conception, whereas toward the other mode of conception which is consummated by ideas and logical combinations, that is toward reason, he shows himself cool, apathetic, even hostile, and he seems to derive a pleasure when he is able to contradict reason by means of a truth gained intuitively, and this he does in such propositions as : "Everything has always its opposite within itself" (p167)
Intuitive representation, however, embraces two things: firstly, the present, motley, changing world, pressing on us in all experiences; secondly, the conditions by means of which alone any experience of this world becomes possible: time and space. For these are able to be intuitively apprehended. purely in themselves and independent of any experience, i.e, they can be perceived, although they are without definite contents. (p167)
Just as he conceived time, so also for instance did Schopenhauer, who repeatedly says of it that in it every instant exists only in so far as it has annihilated the preceding one, its father, in order to be itself effaced equally quickly; that past and future are as unreal as any dream; that the present is only the dimensionless and unstable boundary between the two; that, however, like time, so space and again like the latter, so also everything that is simultaneously in space and time, has only a relative existence, only through and for the sake of a something else, of the same kind as itself, i.e., existing only under the same limitations. This truth is in the highest degree self-evident, accessible to everyone, and just for that very reason, abstractly and rationally, it is only attained with great difficulty. Whoever has this truth before his eyes must, however, also proceed at once to the next Heraclitean consequence and say that the whole essence of actuality is in fact activity, and that for actuality there is no other kind of existence and reality, as Schopenhauer has likewise expounded (The World as Will and Idea, Vol.1, sect.4): "Only as active does it fill space and time: its action upon the immediate object determines the perception in which alone it exists: the effect of the action of any material object upon any other is known only in so far as the latter acts upon the immediate object in a different way from that in which it acted before; it consists in this alone. Cause and effect thus constitute the whole nature of matter; its true being is its action. The totality of everything material is therefore very appropriately called in German Wirklichkeit [actuality]- a word which is far more expressive then Realitat [reality]. That upon which actuality acts is always matter; actuality's whole 'Being' and essence therefore consist only in the orderly change, which one part of it causes in another, and is therefore wholly relative, according to a relation which is valid only within the boundary of actuality, as in the case of time and space." (p167-8)
The Eternal and exclusive Becoming, the total instability of all reality and actuality, which continually works and becomes and never is, as Heraclitus teaches- is an awful and appalling conception, and its effects most nearly related to that sensation by which during an earthquake one loses confidence in the firmly grounded earth. (p168)
..which he (Herclitus) conceived of under the form of polarity, as the divergence of a force into two qualitatively different, opposite actions, striving after reunion. (p168)
Out of the war of the opposites all Becoming originates; the definite and to us seemingly persistent qualities express only the momentary predominance of the one fighter, but with that the war is not as an end; the wrestling continues to all eternity. Everything happens according to this struggle, and this very struggle manifests eternal justice. It is a wonderful conception, drawn from the purest source of Hellenism, which considers the struggle as the continual sway of a homogeneous, severe justice bound by eternal laws. Only a Greek was able to consider this conception as the fundament of a Cosmodicy; it is Hesiod's good Eris transfigured into the cosmic principle, it is the idea of a contest,an idea held by individual Greeks and by their State, and translated out of the gymnasiums and palaestra, out of the artistic agonistics, out of the struggle of the political parties and out of the towns into the most general principle, so that the machinery of the universe is regulated by it. (p169)
The Things themselves in the permanency of which the limited intellect if man and animal believes do not "exist" at all; they are as the fierce flashing and fiery sparkling of drawn swords, as the stars of Victory rising with a radiant resplendence in the battle of the opposite qualities. (p169)
"The permanent matter must constantly change its form; for under the guidance of causality, mechanical, physical, chemical and organic phenomena, eagerly striving to appear, wrestling the matter from each other, for each desires to reveal its own Idea. This strife may be followed up through the whole of nature; indeed nature exists only through it." (Schopenhauer The World as Will and Idea, Vol,1, Bk.2, sec.27) (p169)
The arena and the object of this struggle is Matter- which some natural forces alternately endeavor to disintegrate and build up again at the expense of other natural forces- as also Space and Time, the union of which through causality is this very matter. (p169)
When we speak of the Becoming, should not the original cause of this be sought in the peculiar feebleness of human cognition- whereas in the nature of things there is perhaps no Becoming, but only a coexisting of many true increate indestructible realities? (p170)
..for if everything is to be fire, then, however many possibilities of its transformation might be assumed, nothing can exist that would be the absolute antithesis to fire; he has, therefore, probably interpretated only as a degree of the "Warm" that which is called the "Cold," and he could justify this interpretation without difficulty. Much more important than this deviation from the doctrine of Anaximander is a further agreement; he, like the latter, believes in an end of the world periodically repeating itself and in an ever-renewed emerging of another world out of the all-destroying world-fire. The period during which the world hastens toward that world-fire and the dissolution into pure fire is characterized by him most strikingly as a demand and a need; the state of being completely swallowed up by the fire as satiety; (p172)
-if by freedom one understands the foolish claim to be able to change at will one's essentia like a garment, a claim, which up to the present every serious philosophy has rejected with due scorn. That so few human beings live with consciousness in the Logos and in accordance with the all-overlooking artist's eye originates from their souls being wet and from the fact that men's eyes and ears, their intellect in general is a bad witness when "moist ooze fills their souls." (p173)
"Dogs bark at anything they do not know," or, "To the ass chaff is preferable to gold." With such discontented persons also originate the numerous complaints as to the obscurity of the Heraclitean style; probably no man has ever written clearer and more illuminatingly; of course, very abruptly, and therefore naturally obscure to the racing readers. (p174)
One is, as Schopenhauer says, indeed compelled by lucid expression to prevent misunderstandings even in affairs of practical everyday life, how then should one be allowed to express oneself indistinctly, indeed puzzlingly in the most difficult, most abtruse, scarcely attainable object of thinking, the tasks of philosophy? With respect to brevity, however, Jean Paul gives a good precet: "On the whole it is right that everything great-of deep meaning to a rare mind- should be uttered with brevity and (therefore) obscurely so that the paltry mind would rather proclaim it to be nonsense than translate it into the realm of his empty-headedness. For common minds have an ugly ability to perceive in the deepest and richest saying nothing but their own everyday opinion." Moreover and in spite of it Heraclitus has not escaped the "paltry minds"; already the Stoics have "re-expounded" him into the shallow and dragged down his aesthetic fundamental-perception as to play of the world to the miserable level of the common regard for the practical ends of the world and more explicitly for the advantages of man, so that out of his Physics has arisen in those heads a crude optimism, with the continual invitation to Dick, Tom and Harry, "Plaudite amici!" (p175)
Heraclitus was proud; and if it comes to pride with a philosopher then it is a great pride. His work never refers him to a "public", the applause of the masses, and the hailing chorus of contemporaries. To wander lonely along his path belongs to the nature of the philosopher. His talents are the most rare, in a certain sense the most unnatural and at the same time exclusive and hostile even toward kindred talents. The wall of his self-sufficiency must be of diamond, if it is not to be demolished and broken, for everything is in motion against him. His journey to immortality is more cumbersome and impeded than any other and yet nobody can believe more firmly than the philosopher that he will attain the goal by that journey-because he does not know where he is to stand if not on the widely spread wings of all time; for the disregard of everything present and momentary lies in the essence of the great philosophical nature. He has truth; the wheel of time may roll whither it pleases, never can it escape from truth. It is important to hear that such men have lived. Never, for example, would one be able to imagine the pride of Heraclitus as an idle possibility. (p175)
Such men live in their own solar system- one has to look for them there. (p175)
[men men men men men all the great philosophers are men- puh! KH]
He is a star without an atmosphere. His eye, directed blazingly inward, looks outward, for appearance's sake only, extinct and icy. All around him, immediately upon the citadel of his pride beat the waves of folly and perversity; with loathing he turns away from them. (p176)
As man among men Heraclitus was incredible; and though he was seen paying attention to the play of noisy children, even then he was reflecting upon what never man thought of on such an occasion: the play of the great world-child, Zeus. ..."I sought and investigated myself," he said, with a word by which one designates the investigation of an oracle; as if he and no one else were the true fulfiller and achiever of the Delphic precept: "Know thyself". (p176)
That which he beheld, the doctrine of the Law in the Becoming, and of the Play in the Necessity, must henceforth be beheld eternally; he has raised the curtain of this greatest stage play. (p176)
Whereas in every word of Heraclitus are expressed the pride and the majesty of truth, but of truth caught by institutions, not scaled by the rope ladder of Logic, whereas insublime ecstasy he beholds but does not espy, discerns but does not reckon, he is contrasted with his contemporary Parmenides, a man likewise with the type of a prophet of truth, but formed, as it were, out of ice and not out of fire, and shedding around himself cold, piercing light. (p177)
..had the same distrust for the complete separation of a world which is, and a world which only becomes, (p177)
..he placed the earth in opposition to the fire, the "cold" in opposite to the "warm", the "dense" in opposition to the "rare", the "female" in opposition to the "male", the "passive" in opposition to the "active", merely as negations: so that before his gaze our empiric world divided itself into two separate spheres, into that of the positive qualities- with a bright, fiery, warm, light, rare, active-masculine character- and into that of the negative qualities. The latter express really only the lack, the absence of the others, the positive ones. He therefore described the sphere in which the positive qualities are absent as dark, earthy, cold, heavy, dense and altogether as of feminine-passive character. (p178-9) (puh!- KH)
..the "Existent" is always there and could not of itself first originate and it could not explain any Originating, any Becoming. (p179)
Here Paramenides appeals to a qualitas occulta, to a mystic tendency of the antithetical pairs to approach and attract one another, and he allegorizes that peculiar contrariety by the name of Aphrodite, and by the empirically known relation of the male and female principle. (p179)
He was suddenly caught up, mistrusting, by the idea of negative quality, of the "Nonexistent." For can something which does not exist be a quality? Or to put the question in a broader sense: can anything indeed which does not exist, exist? The only form of knowledge in which we at once put unconditional trust and the disapproval of which amounts to madness is the tautology A=A. (p181)
..he has found, apart from all human illusion, a principle, the key to the world-secret; he now descends into the abyss of things, guided by the firm and fearful hand of the tautological truth as to "Being". (p182)
That which is true must exist in eternal presence; about it cannot be said "it was," "it will be." The "Existent" cannot have become; for out of what should it have become? Out of the "Nonexistent"? But that does not exist and can produce nothing. Out of the "Existent"? This would not produce anything but itself. The same applies to the Passing; it is just as impossible as the Becoming, as any change, any increase, any decrease. (p182)
"Existent" is indivisible, for where is the second power, which should divide it? It is immovable, for whither should it move itself? It cannot be infinitely great nor infinitely small, for it is perfect and a perfectly given infinitude is a contradiction. Thus the "Existent" is suspended, delimited, perfect, immovable, everywhere equally balanced and such equilibrium equally perfect at any point, like a globe, but not in a space, for otherwise this space would be a second "Existent". But there cannot exist several "Existents," for in order to separate them, something would have to exist which was not existing, an assumption which neutralizes itself. Thus there exists only the eternal Unity. (p182)
By tearing entirely asunder the senses and the ability to think in abstractions, i.e. reason, just as if they were two thoroughly separate capacities, he demolished the intellect itself, and incited people to that wholly erroneous separation of "mind" and "body" which, especially since Plato, lies like a curse on philosophy. All sense perceptions, Parmenides judges, cause only illusions, and their chief illusion is their deluding us to believe that even the "Nonexistent" exists, that even the Becoming has a "Being". (p183)
But Socrates divined still more. He saw right through his noble Athenians; he perceived that his case, his peculiar case, was no exception even in his time. The same kind of degeneracy was silently preparing itself everywhere: ancient Athens was dying out. And Socrates understood that the whole world needed him- his means, his remedy, his special artifice for self-preservation. Everywhere the instincts were in a state of anarchy; everywhere people were within an ace of excess: the monstrum in animo was the general danger. "The instincts would play the tyrant; we must discover a countertyrant who is stronger than they." (p190)
Reason was then discovered as a saviour; neither Socrates nor his "patients" were at liberty to be rational or not, as they pleased; at that time it was de riguer, it had become a last shift. (p190)
To be obliged to fight the instincts- this is the formula of degeneration: as long as life is in the ascending line, happiness is the same as instinct. (p191)

Nietzsche, Friedrich 'Beyond Good and Evil'
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 'The Greeks'

Friedrich Nietzsche Quotations
"..all company is bad company except the company of one's equals - this constitutes a necessary part of the life story of every philosopher, perhaps the most unpleasant and malodorous part and the part most full of disappointment."

"Every superior human being will instinctively aspire after a secret citadel where he is set free from the crowd, the many, the majority, where, as its exception, he may forget the rule 'man' - except in the one case in which, as a man of knowledge in the great and exceptional sense, he will be impelled by an even stronger instinct to make straight for this rule.
He who, when trafficking with men, does not occasionally glisten with all the shades of distress, green and grey with disgust, satiety, sympathy, gloom and loneliness, is certainly not a man of an elevated taste; but if he does not voluntarily assume this burden and displeasure, if he continually avoids it and, as aforesaid, remains hidden quietly and proudly away in his citadel, then one thing is for sure: he is not made, not predestined for knowledge."

One is, as Schopenhauer says, indeed compelled by lucid expression to prevent misunderstandings even in affairs of practical everyday life, how then should one be allowed to express oneself indistinctly, indeed puzzlingly in the most difficult, most abstruse, scarcely attainable object of thinking, the tasks of philosophy? With respect to brevity, however, Jean Paul gives a good precept: "On the whole it is right that everything great-of deep meaning to a rare mind- should be uttered with brevity and (therefore) obscurely so that the paltry mind would rather proclaim it to be nonsense than translate it into the realm of his empty-headedness. For common minds have an ugly ability to perceive in the deepest and richest saying nothing but their own everyday opinion." Moreover and in spite of it Heraclitus has not escaped the "paltry minds"; already the Stoics have "re-expounded" him into the shallow and dragged down his aesthetic fundamental-perception as to play of the world to the miserable level of the common regard for the practical ends of the world and more explicitly for the advantages of man, so that out of his Physics has arisen in those heads a crude optimism, with the continual invitation to Dick, Tom and Harry, "Plaudite amici!" (p175)

Heraclitus was proud; and if it comes to pride with a philosopher then it is a great pride. His work never refers him to a "public", the applause of the masses, and the hailing chorus of contemporaries. To wander lonely along his path belongs to the nature of the philosopher. His talents are the most rare, in a certain sense the most unnatural and at the same time exclusive and hostile even toward kindred talents. The wall of his self-sufficiency must be of diamond, if it is not to be demolished and broken, for everything is in motion against him. His journey to immortality is more cumbersome and impeded than any other and yet nobody can believe more firmly than the philosopher that he will attain the goal by that journey-because he does not know where he is to stand if not on the widely spread wings of all time; for the disregard of everything present and momentary lies in the essence of the great philosophical nature. He has truth; the wheel of time may roll whither it pleases, never can it escape from truth. It is important to hear that such men have lived. Never, for example, would one be able to imagine the pride of Heraclitus as an idle possibility. (p175)

Such men live in their own solar system- one has to look for them there. (p175)

He is a star without an atmosphere. His eye, directed blazingly inward, looks outward, for appearance's sake only, extinct and icy. All around him, immediately upon the citadel of his pride beat the waves of folly and perversity; with loathing he turns away from them. (p176)

"THE CHIEF DEFICIENCY OF ACTIVE PEOPLE."
Active people are usually deficient in the higher activity, I mean the individual activity. They are active as officials, merchants, scholars, that is, as a species, but not as quite distinct separate and SINGLE individuals; in this respect they are idle. It is the misfortune of the active that their activity is almost always a little senseless. For instance, we must not ask the money making banker the reason for his restless activity, it is foolish. The active roll as the stone rolls, according to the stupidity of mechanics. All mankind is divided, as it was at all times, and is still, into slaves and free men; for whoever has NOT two thirds of his day for himself is a slave, be he otherwise whatever he likes, statesmen, merchant,..'

SCIENCE. To him who works and seeks in her, Science gives much pleasure - to him who learns her facts, very little.

ARROGANCE. The arrogant man - that is to say, he who desires to appear more than he is or passes for - always miscalculates.

NATURE: We are so fond of being out among Nature, because it has no opinions about us.

UNSUITABLE FOR A PARTY MAN. Whoever thinks much is unsuitable for a party man, his thinking leads him too quickly beyond the party.

A BAD MEMORY. The advantage of a bad memory is that one enjoys several times the same good things for the first time.
Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule.

THE SLOW ARROW OF BEAUTY. The noblest kind of beauty is that which does not transport us suddenly, which does not make stormy and intoxicating impressions (such a kind easily arouses disgust) but that which slowly filters into our minds.

THE SUFFERING OF GENIUS AND ITS VALUE. The artistic genius desires to give pleasure, but if his mind is on a very high plane he does not easily find anyone to share his pleasure; he offers entertainment but nobody accepts it. That gives him, in certain circumstances, a comically touching pathos; for he has no right to force pleasure on men. He pipes, but none will dance: can that be tragic?

THE OVERVALUATION OF SELF IN THE BELIEF IN ARTISTS AND PHILOSOPHERS. We are all prone to think that the excellence of a work of art or of an artist is proved when it moves and touches us. But there our own excellence in judgement and sensibility must have been proved first, which is not the case.

WHY SAVANTS ARE NOBLER THAN ARTISTS. Science requires nobler natures than does poetry; natures that are more simple, less ambitious, more restrained, calmer, that think less of posthumous fame and can bury themselves in studies which, in the eye of many, scarcely seem worthy of such a sacrifice of personality. The nature of their occupation weakens their will; the fire is not kept up so vigorously as on the hearths of poetic minds. As such, they often lose their strength and prime earlier than artists do. They seem less gifted because they shine less, and thus they will always be rated below their value.
Man imagines the world itself to be overflowing with beauty - he forgets that he is the cause of it all.
The theory is as clear as sunlight, and yet everyone prefers to go back into the shadow and the untruth, for fear of the consequences.

THE KILL-JOY IN SCIENCE. Philosophy separated from science when it asked the question, "Which is the knowledge of the world and of life which enables man to live most happily?" This happened in the Socratic schools; the veins of scientific investigation were bound up by the point of view of happiness - and are so still.

INHERITED FAULTS OF PHILOSOPHERS. All philosophers have the common fault, that they look upon man as a thing unchangeable in all commotion, as a sure standard of things. But everything that the philosopher says about man is really nothing more than testimony about man of a very limited space of time. A lack of the historical sense is the hereditary fault of all philosophers.
(Haselhurst- Not true for evolutionary philosophers like Nietzsche and myself!)

Do not allow yourselves to be deceived: Great Minds are Skeptical.

The transition from Religion to Scientific contemplation is a violent, dangerous leap, which is not to be recommended.
In order to make this transition, art is far rather to be employed to relieve the mind overburdened with emotions.
Out of the illogical comes much good. It is so firmly rooted in the passions, in language, in art, in religion, and generally in everything which gives value to life.
It is only the naive people who can believe that the nature of man can be changed into a purely logical one.
We have yet to learn that others can suffer, and this can never be completely learned.
(Haselhurst- That seven million children starve to death each year, while the fat of the western world destroy Nature and dwell upon their own misfortunes and unhappiness. And yet I am part of this western world!)

All Morals allow intentional injury in the case of necessity, that is, when it is a matter of self preservation.

We are desirous of obtaining pleasure or avoiding pain.

Socrates and Plato are right: whatever man does he does well, that is, he does that which seems to him good (useful) according to the degree of his intellect, the particular standard of his reasonableness.

The complete irresponsibility of man for his actions and his nature is the bitterest drop which he who understands must swallow.

The single longing of the individual for self gratification (together with the fear of losing it) satisfies itself in all circumstances

All actions are still stupid; for the highest degree of human intelligence (knowledge) which can now be attained will assuredly be yet surpassed, and then, in a retrospect, all our actions and judgements will appear as limited and hasty as the actions and judgements of primitive wild peoples now appear limited and hasty to ourselves. To recognise this may be deeply painful, but consolation comes after: such pains are the pangs of birth. The butterfly wants to break through its chrysalis: it rends and tears it, and is then blinded and confused by the unaccustomed light, the kingdom of liberty. In such people who are capable of such sadness - and how few there are! - the first experiment made is to see whether mankind can change itself from a moral into a wise mankind.

Culture can by no means dispense with passions, vices, and malignities. When the Romans, after having become Imperial, had grown rather tired of war, they attempted to gain new strength by beast baitings, gladiatorial combats, and Christian persecutions.

THE TEACHER AS A NECESSARY EVIL. Let us have as few people as possible between the productive minds and the hungry and recipient minds! The middlemen almost unconsciously adulterate the food which they supply.
It is because of teachers that so little is learned, and that so badly.

That Genius is tinctured with Madness instead of good sense.
"All the greatest benefits of Greece have sprung from madness" said Plato.
Let us take a step further: all those superior men, who felt themselves irresistibly urged to throw off the yoke of some morality or other, had no choice - if they were not really mad - than to feign madness, or to actually become insane. And this holds good for innovators in every department of life.
Madness remained a kind of convention in poets.
O ye heavenly powers, grant me madness! Madness, that I at length may believe in myself! Vouchsafe delirium and convulsions, sudden flashes of light and periods of darkness; frighten me with such shivering and feverishness as no mortal ever experienced before, with clanging noises and haunting spectres, let me growl and whine and creep about like a beast, if only I can come to believe in myself!
I am devoured by doubt.

Addiction - "I will not be a slave of any appetite." Wrote Byron

For work uses up an extraordinary proportion of nervous force, withdrawing it from reflection, meditation, dreams, cares, love, and hatred; it dangles unimportant aims before the eyes of the worker and affords easy and regular gratification.
And now, horror of horrors! It is the workman himself who has become dangerous; the whole world is swarming with "dangerous individuals"
One sees that science also rests on a belief: there is no science at all "without Premises"

There is nothing more Necessary than Truth, and in comparison with it everything else has only secondary value. - This absolute will to truth: what is it? Is it the will to not allow ourselves to be deceived? Is it the will not to deceive?
One does not want to be deceived, under the supposition that it is injurious, dangerous, or fatal to be deceived.

For such is man: a Theological Dogma might be refuted to him a thousand times - provided however, that he had need of it, he would again and again accept it as true.
Belief is always most desired, most pressingly needed where there is a lack of will.
Fanaticism is the sole "volitional strength" to which the weak and irresolute can be excited, as a sort of hypnotising of the entire sensory-intellectual system.

What if God were not exactly truth, and if this could be proved? And if he were instead the vanity, the desire for power, the ambitions, the fear, and the enraptured and terrified folly of mankind?

Nietzsche's noriety rests upon such singular doctrines as the will to power, the eternal recurrence, nihilism and the announcement of God's death, iconoclastic expression, mastery of aphoristic form and a deployment of contradiction and inconsistency...
'philosophy without experience is empty and experience without philosophy is blind '

(..from his primary philosophical Leitmotifen) First, reality is an endless Becoming (Werden). Second, as instrumentalist devices language and reason reflect the world not as it is but how our needs require us to perceive it. Third, within religion, ethical codes and scientific practice humanity has institutionalised its values, projected and mistaken them as aspects of being-in-itself. Fourth, the existential predicament is grasped as the imminent risk of having one's belief in reason as a criterion of truth and reality exploded by the unintelligibility of flux and of having, as a consequence, to stare into the presence of nihilism. And, fifth, there is the question of how one can live with a knowledge of the latter abyss.

(The Aristenmetaphysik) : metaphysical truth is vacuous whilst art as living within appearance is understood as the means of suppressing awareness of the futility of existence.

..(experimentalische Denken) criticises religious and moral systems which alienate individuals from actuality by perpetrating the illusion of fixed truths.

(Thus Spoke Zarathustra) notions of existential alienation, willing, becoming and creativity are fused into a unified monistic ontology in which artistic creativity becomes the transforming vehicle of mankind's being as a mode of becoming.

As words can communicate as clearly through the unsaid as through the said, the aphoristic rather than the systematic style is better suited to invoking the unstated realms of thought behind assertions. (p139-43)

As Nietzsche writes on woman;
But she does not want truth: What is truth to a woman! From the very first nothing has been more alien, repugnant, inimical to woman than truth- her great art is the lie, her supreme concern is appearance and beauty.

A human being who strives for something great regards everybody he meets on his way either as a means or as a delay and hindrance- or as a temporary resting place. The lofty goodness towards his fellow men which is proper to him becomes possible only when he has reached his height and he rules. Impatience and his consciousness that until that time he is condemned to comedy- for even war is a comedy and a concealment - spoil all his association with others: this kind of man knows solitude and what is poisonous in it.

The problem of those who wait - It requires luck and much that is incalculable if a higher human being in whom there slumbers the solution of a problem is to act- 'break out' one might say - at the right time. Usually it does not happen, and in every corner of the earth there are people waiting who hardly know to what extent they are waiting but even less that they are waiting in vain. Sometimes the awakening call, that chance event which gives 'permission' to act, comes too late- when the best part of youth and the strength to act has already been used up in sitting still; and how many a man has discovered to his horror when he 'rose up' that his limbs had gone to sleep and his spirit was already too heavy! 'It is too late'- he has said to himself, having lost faith in himself and henceforth forever useless.

He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you.

Something might be true although at the same time harmful and dangerous in the highest degree; indeed, it could pertain to the fundamental nature of existence that a complete knowledge of it would destroy one- so that the strength of the spirit could be measured by how much 'truth' it could take, more clearly, to what degree it needed it attenuated, veiled, sweetened, blunted, falsified.

Was it not for you the glacier today exchanged its grey for roses? The brook seeks you; and wind and clouds press higher in the blue, longingly they crowd aloft to look for you. For you have I prepared my table in the highest height- who lives so near the stars as I, or who so near the depths of the abyss?