display all the ideas for this combination of texts
10 ideas
| 20248 | People do nothing for their real ego, but only for a phantom ego created by other people [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: Whatever they say about their 'egotism', people nevertheless do nothing their whole life long for their ego, but instead for the phantom ego that has formed in the heads around them and been communicated to them. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Dawn (Daybreak) [1881], 105) | |
| A reaction: Nietzsche has a vision of true devotion to the ego as healthy, and so (I would say) does Aristotle, though the two might disagree about the details. I want to live among people who work on themselves, not those who always sacrifice themselves. |
| 20246 | If you feel to others as they feel to themselves, you must hate a self-hater [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: Supposing we felt toward someone else as that person feels about himself, then we would have to hate him if he (like Pascal) found himself hateful. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Dawn (Daybreak) [1881], 063) | |
| A reaction: And how does the Golden Rule work if the other people feel suicidal (as groups sometimes do)? |
| 20272 | Honesty is a new young virtue, and we can promote it, or not [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: Among neither the Socratic nor the Christian virtues does honesty appear: it is one of the youngest virtues, still quite immature. ...We can advance it or retard it, as we see fit. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Dawn (Daybreak) [1881], 456) | |
| A reaction: I associate the virtue of honesty with the cult of sincerity of feelings which arose in the romantic movement. |
| 20240 | The Jews treated great anger as holy, and were in awe of those who expressed it [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: The Jews felt differently about wrath than we do and decreed it holy; in return, they, as a people, viewed the foreboding majesty of the individual with whom wrath showed itself connected, at a height at which a European is incapable of imagining. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Dawn (Daybreak) [1881], 038) | |
| A reaction: If you thought wrath was really wonderful then presumably you would aspire to partake of it, but I see no signs of the Jews having been an especially wrathful people. It sounds like the tantrums of Tudor monarchs, which was their royal privilege. |
| 20244 | Christianity replaces rational philosophical virtues with great passions focused on God [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: Christianity disallows all moral value to the virtue of philosophers - the triumph of reason over affects - and demands that affects reveal themselves in splendour, as love of God, fear before God, fanatical faith in God, and blindest hope in God. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Dawn (Daybreak) [1881], 058) | |
| A reaction: Faith, hope and charity are the three great Christian virtues that were added to the four cardinal virtues of the Greeks. |
| 20274 | The cardinal virtues want us to be honest, brave, magnanimous and polite [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: Honest towards ourselves and whatever else is our friend; courageous toward the enemy; magnanimous toward the defeated; polite - always. This is how the four cardinal virtues want us to be. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Dawn (Daybreak) [1881], 556) | |
| A reaction: I take this to be Nietzsche genuinely asserting his four cardinal virtues, rather than being ironic. He certainly asserts politeness as the fourth virtue earlier in the book. Cf a different list in Idea 20382 |
| 20257 | Cool courage and feverish bravery have one name, but are two very different virtues [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: Courage as cold bravery and imperturbability, and courage as feverish, half-blind bravura - one calls both of these things by the same name! How different are the cold virtues from the warm ones! | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Dawn (Daybreak) [1881], 277) | |
| A reaction: How few philosophers are capable of making a subtle but accurate observation like this! How many other virtues should be subdivided? |
| 20259 | Teach youth to respect people who differ with them, not people who agree with them [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: The surest way to ruin a youth is by teaching him to respect those who think like him more highly than those who think differently. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Dawn (Daybreak) [1881], 297) | |
| A reaction: On the whole I prefer to read the philosophers who seem to be on my side, because I am trying to strengthen my explanation of the world, and opponents aren't much help. I do read opponents, if they explicitly challenge what I defend. |
| 20267 | Seeing duty as a burden makes it a bit cruel, and it can thus never become a habit [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: To require that duty always be somewhat burdensome - as Kant does - amounts to acquiring that it never become habit and custom: in this requirement there linger a tiny remnant of ascetic cruelty. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Dawn (Daybreak) [1881], 339) | |
| A reaction: Habit, of course, is the ideal of Aristotelian virtue. |
| 20275 | Most people think they are already complete, but we can cultivate ourselves [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: We are free to handle and cultivate our drives like a gardener ...but how many people know we are free to do this? Don't most people believe in themselves as completed, full grown up facts? | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Dawn (Daybreak) [1881], 560) | |
| A reaction: I see Nietzsche as an existentialist philosopher. He is much more than that, but this quotation endorses what I take to be the central idea of existentialism. |