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| 7170 | 'Wisdom' attempts to get beyond perspectives, making it hostile to life |
| Full Idea: 'Wisdom' is an attempt to get beyond perspectival appraisals (i.e. beyond the 'wills to power'), a principle that is disintegratory and hostile to life. | |||
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 05[14]) | |||
| A reaction: I just don't accept that there are no general truths, which are true beyond any 'perspectives'. One sensible person amidst a group of fools should not bow to their misguided perspectives. |
| 7167 | Words such as 'I' and 'do' and 'done to' are placed at the point where our ignorance begins |
| Full Idea: We place a word at the point where our ignorance begins - where we can't see any further, e.g. the word 'I', the words 'do' and 'done to': these may be the horizons of our knowledge, but they are not 'truths'. | |||
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 05[3]) | |||
| A reaction: A nice contribution to the debate over whether our understanding is restricted to what we can say. Compare Ideas 2937 and 6870. Nietzsche seems to support Wittgenstein. I prefer Keith Ansell Pearson. |
| 7196 | Pessimism is laughable, because the world cannot be evaluated |
| Full Idea: The total value of the world is unevaluable, consequently philosophical pessimism is among the comical things. | |||
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 11[72]) | |||
| A reaction: Nietzsche always has Schopenhauer in mind when he laughs at pessimism. Presumably, by the same token, optimism would be equally ridiculous. But how can Nietzsche's dynamic hopes for the future operate without optimism? |
| 7137 | Is a 'philosopher' now impossible, because knowledge is too vast for an overview? |
| Full Idea: Is the 'philosopher' still possible today? Is not the extent of what is known too large? Is it not very unlikely that he will be able to reach an overview, the less so the more conscientious he is? | |||
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 35[24]) | |||
| A reaction: If Aristotle had a wonderful overview because knowledge was limited, presumably the overview was inaccurate - not an idea that would appeal to Nietzsche, with his relativism. I'd rather have too much knowledge, and struggle towards an overview. |
| 7132 | Philosophers should create and fight for their concepts, not just clean and clarify them |
| Full Idea: The last thing to dawn on philosophers is that they must no longer merely let themselves be given concepts, no longer just clean and clarify them, but first of all must make them, create them, present them and persuade in their favour. | |||
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 34[195]) | |||
| A reaction: Compare the disagreement between Wittgenstein (Idea 2937) and Keith Ansell Pearson (Idea 6870). The trouble is that now every book you read is creating new concepts, which usually fail to catch on. I agree, though, with Nietzsche. |
| 7188 | Logic tries to understand the world according to a man-made scheme |
| Full Idea: Logic is the attempt to understand the real world according to a scheme of being that we have posited. | |||
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 09[97]) | |||
| A reaction: This is the ruthless relativist trying to relativise the holy-of-holies, pure logic. I don't believe it. Once you allow counting, identity and sets, based on types, (and why not?) then logic follows. |
| 7145 | Logic is not driven by truth, but desire for a simple single viewpoint |
| Full Idea: In logic a drive rules, first of falsifying, and then of implementing a single viewpoint: logic does not originate in the will to truth. | |||
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 40[13]) | |||
| A reaction: Presumably logic derives from a will to simplify rather than a will for truth. Ockham's Razor describes the essence of human thinking. Even if Nietzsche is right, there is still a desire that the simplified view should be true. |
| 7144 | Logic must falsely assume that identical cases exist |
| Full Idea: Logic assumes identical cases exist; to think and conclude logically, the fulfilment of this condition must first be feigned. That is: the will to logical truth cannot realise itself until a fundamental falsification of all events has been undertaken. | |||
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 40[13]) | |||
| A reaction: Interesting. This implies that the particularism espoused by virtue theorists (there are no principles, as each case is slightly different) should be extended to other branches of human understanding. So arithmetic is impossible?? |
| 7153 | We can't be realists, because we don't know what being is |
| Full Idea: One would have to know what being is in order to decide whether this or that is real - but we don't know that. | |||
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 02[87]) | |||
| A reaction: Nietzsche is a genius - he puts his finger on something which has always bothered me about realism, even though I call myself a 'realist'. Being and existence are utterly indefinable, and even incomprehensible, so what do we realists believe in? |
| 7174 | Categories are not metaphysical truths, but inventions in the service of needs |
| Full Idea: The inventive force that thought up categories was working in the service of needs - security, quick comprehensibility using signs and sounds, means of abbreviation - 'substance', 'subject', 'being' etc are not metaphysical truths. | |||
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 06[11]) | |||
| A reaction: This is a relativism going right to the heart of thinking and planting bombs. And yet we happily translate Confucius, and they can translate Aristotle. I bet the aliens could translate and understand our philosophy. How, without similar categories? |
| 7175 | Philosophers find it particularly hard to shake off belief in necessary categories |
| Full Idea: Philosophers, in particular, have the greatest difficulty in freeing themselves from the belief that the basic concepts and categories of reason belong without further ado to the realm of metaphysical certainties. | |||
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 06[13]) | |||
| A reaction: As usual with Nietzsche, if you make any attempt to disagree with this, you are merely proving his point. All of Nietzsche's philosophy is couched in traditional categories, even when he criticises them. Is 'will to power' a new category? |
| 7189 | Maybe there are only subjects, and 'objects' result from relations between subjects |
| Full Idea: The subject alone is demonstrable: hypothesis - that there are only subjects - that 'object' is only a kind of effect of subject upon subject...a mode of the subject. | |||
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 09[106]) | |||
| A reaction: This is an ultimate implication of 'perspectivism'. Elsewhere, though, (Idea 7183) he challenges the ontological status of 'subjects', suggesting that even they are purely fictional. Nietzsche wanted to relativism everything, but kept clutching lifebelts. |
| 7207 | Counting needs unities, but that doesn't mean they exist; we borrowed it from the concept of 'I' |
| Full Idea: We need unities in order to be able to count: we should not therefore assume that such unities exist. We have borrowed the concept of unity from our concept of 'I' - our oldest article of faith. | |||
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 14[79]) | |||
| A reaction: Personally I think that counting derives from patterns, and that all creatures can discern patterns in their environment, which means discriminating the parts of the pattern, which are therefore real and existing entities. |
| 7161 | The essence of a thing is only an opinion about the 'thing' |
| Full Idea: The essence of a thing is only an opinion about the 'thing'. | |||
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 02[150]) | |||
| A reaction: Nietzsche seems sympathetic to essentialism about natural laws (based on 'power'), but this is the classic rejection of Aristotelian essences, because they are unknowable or unprovable. Personally I think scientists are revealing essences. |
| 7134 | Something can be irrefutable; that doesn't make it true |
| Full Idea: Something can be irrefutable; that doesn't make it true. | |||
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 34[247]) | |||
| A reaction: This is a warning to rationalists who are looking for strategies to demonstrate necessities a priori. |
| 7186 | There are no necessary truths, but something must be held to be true |
| Full Idea: What's necessary is that something must be held to be true; not that something is true. | |||
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 09[38]) | |||
| A reaction: This may be right, but it doesn't follow that the truths we label as 'necessary' are the ones that we have to believe, or even that we have to believe that our chosen beliefs are necessary rather than contingent. Why did we pick those beliefs? |
| 7154 | We can't use our own self to criticise our own capacity for knowledge! |
| Full Idea: A critique of our capacity to know is nonsensical: how should the tool be able to criticise itself when it can, precisely, only use itself for the critique? It can't even define itself! | |||
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 02[87]) | |||
| A reaction: I am inclined to answer that it seems impossible, but it happens. Thinking about ourselves is the hardest part of philosophy, but phenomenologists and others (starting with Descartes) have had an impressive crack at it. Nietzsche was good at it. |
| 7146 | Belief in the body is better established than belief in the mind |
| Full Idea: Belief in the body is better established than belief in the mind. | |||
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 40[15]) | |||
| A reaction: Compare Spinoza in Idea 4833. Hawking says he thinks better because he is largely paralysed. Externalism about mind makes it necessarily a part of the world and hence physical. I am inclined to agree with Nietzsche. |
| 7156 | Sense perceptions contain values (useful, so pleasant) |
| Full Idea: All sensory perceptions are entirely suffused with value judgements (useful or harmful - consequently pleasant or unpleasant). | |||
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 02[95]) | |||
| A reaction: This seems like a wonderful anticipation of modern neuroscience findings about emotion. It is a nice challenge to Hume's 'impressions' and Russell's 'logical atoms'. But knowledge is power, and we can strip off the values from the perceptions. |
| 7181 | Pain shows the value of the damage, not what has been damaged |
| Full Idea: Intellectuality of pain: pain does not indicate what is momentarily damaged but what value the damage has with regard to the individual as a whole. | |||
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 07[48]) | |||
| A reaction: An interesting claim, but rather hard to substantiate. Boiling water on the back of a hand might be very painful, but not of huge consequence in terms of damage. The palm of the hand is much more important to us than the back. |
| 7129 | Perception is unconscious, and we are only conscious of processed perceptions |
| Full Idea: Sense-perception happens without our awareness: whatever we become conscious of is a perception that has already been processed. | |||
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 34[30]) | |||
| A reaction: This seems to me wonderfully perceptive for its date, and a crucial truth, because we have the delusion that we are our consciousness, whereas that is only a tiny part of what we are. |
| 7149 | Comprehending everything is impossible, because it abolishes perspectives |
| Full Idea: 'Comprehending everything' - that would mean abolishing all perspectival relations, that would mean comprehending nothing, mistaking the nature of the knower. | |||
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 01[114]) | |||
| A reaction: The point here, I take it, is not just that there is too much to comprehend, but that comprehending is partly a subjective matter. Personally I am drawn to the opposite pole, expressed by Spinoza (Idea 4840). |
| 7169 | Is the perspectival part of the essence, or just a relation between beings? |
| Full Idea: Fundamental question: whether the perspectival is part of the essence, and not just a form of regarding, a relation between various beings? | |||
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 05[12]) | |||
| A reaction: I don't personally understand how the perspectival could be part of the essence of anything. If everything is perspectival, then perspectives are limits, and essences are unknowable. It seems to me that we have learned a lot about essences. |
| 7182 | 'Perspectivism': the world has no meaning, but various interpretations give it countless meanings |
| Full Idea: Inasmuch as the word 'knowledge' has any meaning at all, the world is knowable: but it is variously interpretable; it has no meaning behind it, but countless meanings. 'Perspectivism'. | |||
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 07[60]) | |||
| A reaction: This account sounds like Humean 'projectivism', espoused by Simon Blackburn - meanings are projected onto a meaningless world. If nearly all of our perspectives agreed, might that not be because they were all true? |
| 7183 | 'Subjectivity' is an interpretation, since subjects (and interpreters) are fictions |
| Full Idea: 'Everything is subjective', you say: but that itself is an interpretation, for the 'subject' is not something given but a fiction added on, tucked behind. Even the interpreter behind the interpretation is a fiction, hypothesis. | |||
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 07[60]) | |||
| A reaction: How glorious to even suggest that the subjective account of knowledge is making too many assumptions! If modern students of philosophy were to meet Nietzsche, they would be reduced to the response of Cratylus (Idea 578). |
| 7133 | There are different eyes, so different 'truths', so there is no truth |
| Full Idea: There are many different eyes, .... and consequently there are many different 'truths', and consequently there is no truth. | |||
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 34[230]) | |||
| A reaction: Sorry, I just don't follow this. Most people see the same things with their eyes, even if the perspective is subtly different. If we are puzzled by what we see, we swap places to check it. Nietzsche's life was too solitary. Some 'truths' are wrong. |
| 7139 | Explanation is just showing the succession of things ever more clearly |
| Full Idea: Showing the succession of things ever more clearly is what's named 'explanation': no more than that! | |||
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 35[52]) | |||
| A reaction: If you lay bare all causal sequences, you may not have explained anything until you have pointed out a pattern in the events. Explanations must partly depend on the interests of the enquirer, so pure catalogues of events won't do. |
| 7131 | The intellect and senses are a simplifying apparatus |
| Full Idea: The intellect and the senses are, above all, a simplifying apparatus. | |||
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 34[46]) | |||
| A reaction: This seems like a profound truth to me. The world, and our own bodies, are of almost infinite complexity, such that only a god could grasp it. In order to teach, we have to simplify even further. We choose a level of simplification for contexts. |
| 7152 | With protoplasm ˝+˝=2, so the soul is not an indivisible monad |
| Full Idea: Along the guiding thread of the body. When protoplasm divides ˝ + ˝ does not = 1, but = 2. Thus the belief in the soul as monad becomes untenable. | |||
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 02[68]) | |||
| A reaction: This is presumably an anticipatory remark about the cutting of the corpus callosum (in the brain), which seems to cut a physical person into two people. Personally I always found the absolute unity of the mind or person implausible. |
| 7130 | Unity is not in the conscious 'I', but in the organism, which uses the self as a tool |
| Full Idea: If I have anything of a unity within me, it certainly doesn't lie in the conscious 'I' and in feeling, willing, thinking, but somewhere else: in the ... prudence of my whole organism, of which my conscious self is only a tool. | |||
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 34[46]) | |||
| A reaction: What an interesting thinker Nietzsche was! I think I agree with this. I think the self is built on the necessary internalised body-map all animals must have. The body requires the map, not the map needing the body. |
| 7155 | Consciousness exists to the extent that consciousness is useful |
| Full Idea: Consciousness exists to the extent that consciousness is useful. | |||
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 02[95]) | |||
| A reaction: This strikes me as being a great truth, first because it emphasises the necessity of giving an evolutionary (survival) explanation of consciousness, and also because it invites us to consider the 'extent' to which we are conscious of brain activity. |
| 7143 | Consciousness is a 'tool' - just as the stomach is a tool |
| Full Idea: Consciousness is just a 'tool' and nothing more - in the same sense that the stomach is a tool. | |||
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 37[4]) | |||
| A reaction: Nietzsche was very critical of Darwin, but he absorbed his teachings quicker than anyone. I agree with this, and with Fodor (Idea 2508), that to understand a mind you must think about why we have minds. |
| 7157 | We think each thought causes the next, unaware of the hidden struggle beneath |
| Full Idea: On the table of our consciousness there appears a succession of thoughts, as if one thought were the cause of the next. But in fact we don't see the struggle going on under the table -- | |||
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 02[103]) | |||
| A reaction: A brilliant thought. I am increasingly struck by my own lack of control over my 'trains' of thought. I am a slave to my own thinking. |
| 7148 | The 'I' is a conceptual synthesis, not the governor of our being |
| Full Idea: The 'I' (which is not the same thing as the unitary government of our being!) is, after all, only a conceptual synthesis - thus there is no acting from 'egoism'. | |||
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 01[87]) | |||
| A reaction: Compare Sartre in Idea 7116. Since I am inclined to define the self as the controller of the brain, I am intrigued by the remark in brackets. Presumably he considers the self to be a fiction, and that animals don't have one. I think, probably, animals do. |
| 7138 | The 'I' is a fiction used to make the world of becoming 'knowable' |
| Full Idea: I take the 'I' itself to be a construction of thinking, of the same rank as matter, thing, substance, individual, purpose, number: that is, only a regulative fiction used to insert a kind of 'knowability' into a world of becoming. | |||
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 35[35]) | |||
| A reaction: Personally I consider the 'I' to be a very real brain structure, which controls the multitude of brain operations, and focuses them on the survival and success of the organism. |
| 7135 | 'Freedom of will' is the feeling of having a dominating force |
| Full Idea: It is our feeling of having more force that we call 'freedom of will', the consciousness of our force compelling in relation to a force that is compelled. | |||
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 34[250]) | |||
| A reaction: I don't agree. That describes well how we experience the will, and develop the concept of a will, but the idea that the will is 'free' seems to me to be totally theoretical (and false), and doesn't derive from experience at all. |
| 7171 | Rationality is a scheme we cannot cast away |
| Full Idea: Thinking rationally is interpreting according to a scheme we cannot cast away. | |||
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 05[22]) | |||
| A reaction: We can turn the tables on this one: how could Nietzsche know that this is the case if he cannot criticise his own rationality? The brain is a truth machine, and truth is (mostly) vital for survival. |
| 7209 | There is no will; weakness of will is splitting of impulses, strong will is coordination under one impulse |
| Full Idea: Weakness of will is misleading, for there is no will, and hence neither a strong will nor a weak one. Multiplicity and disaggregation of the impulses results as 'weak will'; coordination under the dominance of a single one results as 'strong will'. | |||
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 14[219]) | |||
| A reaction: That Nietzsche seems to be right is clearer if we remember that the Greek terms are 'control' (enkrateia) and 'lack of control' (akrasia), with no reference to anything called the will. |
| 7194 | Experiencing a thing as beautiful is to experience it wrongly |
| Full Idea: To experience a thing as beautiful necessarily means experiencing it wrongly. | |||
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 10[167]) | |||
| A reaction: So much for 'beauty is truth' (Keats). I suppose I agree, for example, about a face. If you don't experience the beauty of a good melody, there is nothing else left to experience - no mundane truth that needs reporting. |
| 7136 | Morality is a system of values which accompanies a being's life |
| Full Idea: By morality, I understand a system of valuations which is contiguous with a being's conditions of life. | |||
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 36[264]) | |||
| A reaction: It needs to be added that the values influence and control the life. Note that this defines morality as neither the qualities of character of virtue theory, nor the rules for conduct of deontology and utilitarianism. Morality MUST be rooted in values. |
| 7163 | Morality is merely interpretations, which are extra-moral in origin |
| Full Idea: My main proposition: there are no moral phenomena, there is only a moral interpretation of those phenomena. This interpretation itself is of extra-moral origin. | |||
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 02[165]) | |||
| A reaction: The origin will, of course, be the 'will to power', which is the drive for survival, linking Nietzsche with sociobiology or evolutionary psychology. |
| 7147 | Values are innate and inherited |
| Full Idea: Valuations are innate (despite Locke!), inherited. | |||
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 01[21]) | |||
| A reaction: This would conform with Charles Taylor's views (e.g. Idea 4002). But how are we sheep ever going to fall in with the values of our Superman when he arrives, if we are stuck with our own innate values? |
| 7190 | Our values express an earlier era's conditions for survival and growth |
| Full Idea: The feeling of value is always antiquated, it expresses a much earlier era's conditions for survival and growth. | |||
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 10[23]) | |||
| A reaction: Nice. I myself grew up in the aftermath of the Second World War. Have I ingested values that were created for that era, and are no longer required? |
| 7201 | Knowledge, wisdom and goodness only have value relative to a goal |
| Full Idea: Knowledge and wisdom have no value as such; nor does goodness: one must always first have a goal that confers value or disvalue on these qualities. | |||
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 11[122]) | |||
| A reaction: So what goals should we have? Nietzsche talks about the 'enhancement of life', but what is that, and why should we want it? There may be an ecological cost to enhancing human life. |
| 7205 | Altruism is praised by the egoism of the weak, who want everyone to be looked after |
| Full Idea: Behind the general praise for 'altruism' is the instinct that the individual will be best safeguarded if everyone looks after each other....it's the egoism of the weak that created the praise, the exclusive praise for altruism. | |||
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 14[5]) | |||
| A reaction: I don't understand why Nietzsche so strongly despises the weak. Callicles (in Plato's 'Gorgias') embodies the strong, but he is utterly unlovable, and appears to be motivated mainly by a desire to have fun at other people's expense. |
| 7141 | A living being is totally 'egoistic' |
| Full Idea: A living being is 'egoistic' through and through. | |||
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 36[20]) | |||
| A reaction: Can't I even fight against my own dominating egoism? I just don't accept that this generalisation applies necessarily to all human beings at all times. How can a totally egoistic creature have 'low self-esteem'? |
| 7168 | Modest people express happiness as 'Not bad' |
| Full Idea: The happiness whose proper name on earth the modest believe is: 'Well, not bad'. | |||
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 05[7]) | |||
| A reaction: Alexei Sayle expresses it in the English slogan 'Mustn't grumble'. Nietzsche certainly had the English in mind. Nietzsche seems to have the romantic tendency to think that only something completely new and original can bring happiness. |
| 7159 | The only happiness is happiness with illusion |
| Full Idea: Happiness with existence is only possible as happiness with illusion. | |||
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 02[110]) | |||
| A reaction: A characteristically tough remark! It is, of course, indefeasible, because if you claim to have happiness without illusion, Nietzsche brands you as another fool. But why should a gradual stripping of illusion totally destroy happiness? |
| 7197 | Pleasure needs dissatisfaction, boundaries and resistances |
| Full Idea: The feeling of pleasure lies precisely in the unsatisfaction of the will, in the way it is not yet satiated unless it has boundaries and resistances... | |||
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 11[75]) | |||
| A reaction: This sounds like a 'higher' sort of pleasure, preferred by Nietzsche and Mill and clever chaps like that. Personally I like sunbathing and listening to music, and I float along very comfortably, like a cork on the stream of indulgence... |
| 7165 | Virtue is wasteful, as it reduces us all to being one another's nurse |
| Full Idea: Nothing would be more expensive than virtue: for in the end it would give us the earth as an infirmary, and 'Everyone to be everyone else's nurse' would be the pinnacle of wisdom. | |||
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 04[7]) | |||
| A reaction: Once again, I think that Nietzsche does not understand Aristotelian virtue theory. This attacks Christian virtue (his bęte noir), with its emphasis on compassion and humility. A truly virtuous person is more likely to be an artist/politician/philosopher. |
| 7193 | Virtue for everyone removes its charm of being exceptional and aristocratic |
| Full Idea: The preachers of virtue are its worst enemies. For they teach virtue as an ideal for everyone; they take from virtue the charm of the rare, the inimitable, the exceptional and unaverage - it aristocratic magic. | |||
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 10[109]) | |||
| A reaction: At last I think I have found why Nietzsche disliked Aristotle, who makes elementary 'phronesis' (practical reason) a sufficient intellectual endowment to achieve virtue, with no need of more than moderate wealth or power. I prefer Aristotle. |
| 7191 | What does not kill us makes us stronger |
| Full Idea: What does not kill us makes us stronger. | |||
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 10[87]) | |||
| A reaction: A famous remark! Actually, of course, a very stressful human life tends to be much shorter than a comfortable one, but Nietzsche wouldn't equate strength with longevity. Nowadays we are all a bunch of softies. |
| 7151 | Courage, compassion, insight, solitude are the virtues, with courtesy a necessary vice |
| Full Idea: Our four cardinal virtues: courage, compassion, insight and solitude - they would be unbearable to themselves if they hadn't forged an alliance with a cheerful and mischievous vice called 'courtesy'. | |||
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 02[13]) | |||
| A reaction: Nietzsche was wonderfully wicked. I struggle (with Aristotle) to see how a naturally social creature can have solitude as a virtue. It is startling to see Nietzsche naming compassion as a virtue, but how ironic is the whole remark? |
| 7185 | Replace the categorical imperative by the natural imperative |
| Full Idea: Replacement of the categorical imperative by the natural imperative. | |||
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 09[27]) | |||
| A reaction: This places Nietzsche rather firmly with evolutionary psychologists (who see morality in evolutionary terms), which he probably would not like. I just don't believe we are helpless victims of nature, and nor must we endorse what it asks of us. |
| 7164 | Not feeling harnessed to a system of 'ends' is a wonderful feeling of freedom |
| Full Idea: What a sensation of freedom it is to feel, as we freed spirits feel, that we are not harnessed up to a system of 'ends'! | |||
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 02[206]) | |||
| A reaction: Given his view that we are utterly dominated by the 'will to power', I am beginning to wonder in what sense we could ever be 'free'. If my happiness is an 'illusion' (Idea 7159), then I retaliate by saying that his freedom is also an illusion. |
| 7198 | Nihilism results from measuring the world by our categories which are purely invented |
| Full Idea: Belief in the categories of reason is the cause of nihilism - we have measured the value of the world against categories that refer to a purely invented world. | |||
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 11[99]) | |||
| A reaction: What a remarkable thought! He will have Kant especially in mind. The implication is that we might avoid nihilism by creating more accurate categories, but Nietzsche, as relativist, thinks that is impossible (Ideas 7174, 7175). Nihilism is our fate. |
| 7150 | By developing herd virtues man fixes what has up to now been the 'unfixed animal' |
| Full Idea: Men's increasing morality allows them to fancy they can rise to the rank of 'gods', whereas in fact they sink; by cultivating the virtues by which a herd can flourish, they develop the herd animal, and 'fix' what has up to now been the 'unfixed animal'. | |||
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 02[13]) | |||
| A reaction: [compressed] More than any other remark, this explains the sense of distress found in all of later Nietzsche. If he is right, it looks even more true now than in 1886, because of the globalisation of culture. I think he is right. |
| 7177 | Virtues from outside are dangerous, and they should come from within |
| Full Idea: The virtues are as dangerous as the vices, to the extent that one allows them to rule as authority and law from outside instead of generating them from within oneself. | |||
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 07[6]) | |||
| A reaction: Nietzsche was a romantic, who thought things only have worth if they are authentic, individual, autonomous, original. Existentialism is the last fling of romanticism, and expresses an adolescent yearning for 'freedom'. From what? |
| 7172 | Existence without meaning or goal or end, eternally recurring, is a terrible thought |
| Full Idea: Let us think this thought in its most terrible form: existence as it is, without meaning or goal, but inevitably recurring, without any finale into nothingness: 'eternal recurrence'. | |||
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 05[71].6) | |||
| A reaction: I take this in a positive spirit - that if you wish to live well you should create a life which you could endure and enjoy, even if it recurred eternally. But that might be rather conservative rather than exciting, if we always avoided giving offence. |
| 7166 | Man is above all a judging animal |
| Full Idea: Man is above all a judging animal. | |||
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 04[8]) | |||
| A reaction: This seems awfully close to Aristotle's supposed claim that we are the 'rational animal' (though see Idea 6559). To me it implies that if judging is our proper function, then judging well is our highest virtue. The highest good for man is understanding. |
| 7204 | The upholding of the military state is needed to maintain the strong human type |
| Full Idea: The upholding of the military state is the ultimate means to either adopt or keep hold of the great tradition respecting the highest human type, the strong type. | |||
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 11[407]) | |||
| A reaction: I do find this kind of thing disappointing, after Nietzsche's wonderful deconstruction of traditional value systems. Is a killing field the only place where human strength can be exhibited? What's the point of human strength if it is displayed in killing? |
| 7173 | Rights arise out of contracts, which need a balance of power |
| Full Idea: Rights originate only where there are contracts; but for there to be contracts, a certain balance of power must exist. | |||
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 05[82]) | |||
| A reaction: It is a notorious problem with contractual ethics that the weak have nothing to bargain with. Nietzsche's view would make the concept of animal rights almost incoherent, but we understand them, even if he would not have done. |
| 7176 | 'Purpose' is like the sun, where most heat is wasted, and a tiny part has 'purpose' |
| Full Idea: The case of every purposive action is like the supposed purposiveness of the sun's heat - the huge mass of it is wasted, and a part barely worth considering has 'purpose', has 'meaning'. | |||
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 07[1]) | |||
| A reaction: A very nice metaphor for human life, where you might discern a purpose in certain large events, but you certainly won't find it in the myriad of small actions that make up nearly all of our existence. |
| 7195 | If the world aimed at an end, it would have reached it by now |
| Full Idea: If the world process were directed towards a final state, that state would have been reached by now. | |||
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 11[72]) | |||
| A reaction: If advanced aliens existed, they would be here by now... I doubt if anyone now believes that the world has an end. However, strictly speaking, how could we possibly assess the time scale for such things? |
| 7206 | Things are strong or weak, and do not behave regularly or according to rules or compulsions |
| Full Idea: 'Things' do not behave regularly, not according to a rule: things are our fiction, and nor do they behave under the compulsion of necessity. That something is as it is, as strong or as weak, is not the consequence of obeying or rules or compulsion. | |||
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 14[79]) | |||
| A reaction: I'm not sure about the denial of 'things', given that they are then said to be strong or weak, but Nietzsche seems to have had the key insight of modern essentialism, that the so-called 'laws' are merely the outcome of the inner natures of things. |
| 7140 | Chemical 'laws' are merely the establishment of power relations between weaker and stronger |
| Full Idea: I take care not to talk of chemical 'laws'. It is rather a matter of the absolute establishment of power relations: the stronger becomes master of the weaker to the extent that the weaker cannot assert its autonomy - there is no respect for 'laws'. | |||
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 36[18]) | |||
| A reaction: This links Nietzsche's will to power with Locke's talk of physical powers, and both point towards an essentialist view of natural laws, rather than seeing laws as something imposed from outside on nature. |
| 7142 | All motions and 'laws' are symptoms of inner events, traceable to the will to power |
| Full Idea: One must understand all motion, all 'appearances', all 'laws' as mere symptoms of inner events. ...all the functions of animal and organic life can be traced back to the will to power. | |||
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 36[31]) | |||
| A reaction: Nietzsche must be the first philosopher to put inverted commas round the word 'law', referring to nature. |
| 7178 | The utility of an organ does not explain its origin, on the contrary! |
| Full Idea: The utility of an organ does not explain its origin, on the contrary! | |||
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 07[25]) | |||
| A reaction: This may be wishful thinking on Nietzsche's part, wanting the human mind to be free of its utility for survival, so that it can be focused on 'higher' things. We can explain by origin and purpose, but also by causal possibilities. |
| 7179 | Survival might undermine an individual's value, or prevent its evolution |
| Full Idea: Something useful for maintaining the individual over time might be unfavourable to its strength and magnificence; what preserves the individual might simultaneously hold it fast and bring its evolution to a standstill. | |||
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 07[25]) | |||
| A reaction: He heads this 'Against Darwin', but I think Darwin could accommodate these observations, as he merely points out a mechanism, and makes not value judgements at all. |
| 7180 | Darwin overestimates the influence of 'external circumstances' |
| Full Idea: Darwin absurdly overestimates the influence of 'external circumstances'. | |||
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 07[25]) | |||
| A reaction: In some ways Nietzsche was just as bad as the Christians in his reluctance to face up to Darwin's idea. Does he really think that creatures evolve a certain way because they want to? Even fans of Nietzsche must bite the bullet of natural selection. |
| 7192 | Remove goodness and wisdom from our concept of God. Being the highest power is enough! |
| Full Idea: Let us remove the highest goodness from the concept of God, and likewise remove the highest wisdom, for which the vanity of the philosophers is to blame. No! God the highest power - that is enough! | |||
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 10[90]) | |||
| A reaction: Since everything is, apparently, 'will to power', then power must be the ideal. Why does Nietzsche want such a thing? As far as I can see, the greater seekers of power are idiots who have no idea what to do with it when the achieve it. |
| 7158 | Morality kills religion, because a Christian-moral God is unbelievable |
| Full Idea: Religions perish through belief in morality: the Christian-moral God is not tenable: hence 'atheism' - as if there could be no other kind of god. | |||
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 02[107]) | |||
| A reaction: This remark is mainly aimed at Christianity, which has become progressively more sentimental in its conception of God. When some great earthquake comes, this God is not plausible, where a tougher sort of God might be. |
| 7199 | It is dishonest to invent a being containing our greatest values, thus ignoring why they exist and are valuable |
| Full Idea: It is the pinnacle of man's mendacity to think up a being as a beginning and 'in-itself', according to the yardstick of what he happens to find good, wise, powerful, valuable - and think away the whole causality by which they exist and have value. | |||
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 11[122]) | |||
| A reaction: I think most non-religious people feel that religion completely fails to solve the problems it is meant to address, by just ignoring the problems, or pushing them to another place. |
| 7162 | Morality can only be upheld by belief in God and a 'hereafter' |
| Full Idea: Naivety: as if morality remained when the sanctioning God is gone. The 'hereafter' is absolutely necessary if belief in morality is to be upheld. | |||
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 02[165]) | |||
| A reaction: This is the 'good' and 'evil' of social values, not the natural values which accompany the life of any creature (see Idea 7136). Even with a God, it required the priests to interpret the morality and the sanctions, and they had their thumbs in the scales. |
| 7208 | Paganism is a form of thanking and affirming life? |
| Full Idea: Is the pagan cult not a form of thanking and affirming life? | |||
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 14[89]) | |||
| A reaction: Yes, but it also centres on worries about life, such as potential famine and natural disasters. It is rooted as much in the negative of fear as in the positive of gratitude and appreciation. |
| 7160 | Christian belief is kept alive because it is soothing - the proof based on pleasure |
| Full Idea: It seems that Christian belief is to be kept alive precisely for the sake of its soothing effects; ...this hedonistic turn, the proof based on pleasure, is a symptom of decline. | |||
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 02[144]) | |||
| A reaction: The abolition of hell by the Anglican church in the 1990s is the last stage in this development. To be fair (and why not?), the Christian life demands a rather large effort, if it is to be lived properly, so it is a rather demanding sort of hedonism. |
| 7203 | In heaven all the interesting men are missing |
| Full Idea: Has anyone noticed that in heaven all the interesting men are missing? | |||
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 11[153]) | |||
| A reaction: It does appear that the huge problem with paradise, when it is portrayed as lying around being waited on and revering God forever, is boredom. No charity work will be possible, so only a deadening politeness will remain of the good human life. |
| 7200 | A combination of great power and goodness would mean the disastrous abolition of evil |
| Full Idea: A high degree of power in the hands of the highest goodness would entail the most disastrous consequences ('the abolition of evil'). | |||
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 11[122]) | |||
| A reaction: This goes with Mackie's claim that the actual existence of evil is proof that an omnipotent and benevolent God can't exist (Idea 1472). |