110 ideas
| 7170 | 'Wisdom' attempts to get beyond perspectives, making it hostile to life [Nietzsche] |
| 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 [Nietzsche] |
| 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 [Nietzsche] |
| 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? [Nietzsche] |
| 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 [Nietzsche] |
| 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 [Nietzsche] |
| 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 [Nietzsche] |
| 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 [Nietzsche] |
| 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?? |
| 7207 | Counting needs unities, but that doesn't mean they exist; we borrowed it from the concept of 'I' [Nietzsche] |
| 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. |
| 7153 | We can't be realists, because we don't know what being is [Nietzsche] |
| 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 [Nietzsche] |
| 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 [Nietzsche] |
| 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 [Nietzsche] |
| 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. |
| 7161 | The essence of a thing is only an opinion about the 'thing' [Nietzsche] |
| 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 [Nietzsche] |
| 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 [Nietzsche] |
| 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! [Nietzsche] |
| 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 [Nietzsche] |
| 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. |
| 22167 | Our images of bodies are not produced by the bodies, but by our own minds [Augustine, by Aquinas] |
| Full Idea: Augustine says bodies don't form images in our spirit; our spirit does that itself with amazing quickness. ...So the appearances under which mind knows things aren't drawn from the things themselves. | |
| From: report of Augustine (works [c.415]) by Thomas Aquinas - Quodlibeta 8.2.1 | |
| A reaction: This is Augustine's theory of 'illumination' - that God creates experience within us. His theory was soon discarded by the early scholastics. |
| 7156 | Sense perceptions contain values (useful, so pleasant) [Nietzsche] |
| 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: An 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 the values from the perceptions. Facts and values. |
| 7181 | Pain shows the value of the damage, not what has been damaged [Nietzsche] |
| 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 [Nietzsche] |
| 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. |
| 22117 | Our minds grasp reality by direct illumination (rather than abstraction from experience) [Augustine, by Matthews] |
| Full Idea: Instead of supposing that what we know can be abstracted from sensible particulars that instantiate such knowledge, Augustine insists that our mind is so constituted as to see 'intelligible realities' directly by inner illumination. | |
| From: report of Augustine (works [c.415]) by Gareth B. Matthews - Augustine p.74 | |
| A reaction: His 'theory of illumination'. This seems to be a sort of super-rationalism. This doesn't make clear the role of sensations. Surely he doesn't thing that we just bypass them? |
| 7149 | Comprehending everything is impossible, because it abolishes perspectives [Nietzsche] |
| 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? [Nietzsche] |
| 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 [Nietzsche] |
| 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 [Nietzsche] |
| 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 | It is tempting to think many eyes means many truths - so not truth [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: The tempter: 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: First time around I failed to notice his heading of 'the tempter' before this idea. Out of context, it can make him a total relativist - but that contradicts almost everything else he said about truth. He was not a relativist! |
| 7139 | Explanation is just showing the succession of things ever more clearly [Nietzsche] |
| 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 [Nietzsche] |
| 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 ½+½=2, so the soul is not an indivisible monad [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: Along the guiding thread of the body. When protoplasm divides ½ + ½ 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 [Nietzsche] |
| 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 [Nietzsche] |
| 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 [Nietzsche] |
| 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 [Nietzsche] |
| 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 [Nietzsche] |
| 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' [Nietzsche] |
| 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: Ah. I have always defended the Self, the thing that is in charge when the mind is directed to something. I suddenly see that this is compatible with the Self not being the thinker! It is just the willer, and the controller of the searchlight. Self = will? |
| 7135 | 'Freedom of will' is the feeling of having a dominating force [Nietzsche] |
| 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 [Nietzsche] |
| 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. |
| 22118 | Augustine created the modern concept of the will [Augustine, by Matthews] |
| Full Idea: The modern concept of the will is often said to originate with Augustine. | |
| From: report of Augustine (works [c.415]) by Gareth B. Matthews - Augustine p.74 | |
| A reaction: I'm beginning to think that this is the source of the trouble. How can a thing be intrinsically free? Surely freedom is always a contextual concept? |
| 7209 | There is no will; weakness of will is splitting of impulses, strong will is coordination under one impulse [Nietzsche] |
| 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 [Nietzsche] |
| 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 [Nietzsche] |
| 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], 34[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 [Nietzsche] |
| 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. |
| 7222 | It is a crime for someone with a violent disposition to get drunk [Mill] |
| Full Idea: The making himself drunk, in a person whom drunkenness excites to do harm to others, is a crime against others. | |
| From: John Stuart Mill (On Liberty [1857], Ch.5) | |
| A reaction: This principle (based on knowing your own dispositions) is a very good account of the ethics drunkenness. We have a moral duty to know and remember our own dispositions. Violent people should avoid arguments as well as alcohol. |
| 7147 | Values are innate and inherited [Nietzsche] |
| 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 [Nietzsche] |
| 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 [Nietzsche] |
| 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 [Nietzsche] |
| 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. |
| 4348 | Love, and do what you will [Augustine] |
| Full Idea: Love, and do what you will. | |
| From: Augustine (works [c.415]) | |
| A reaction: This sounds libertarian, but Augustine had a stern concept of what love required. It nicely captures one of the essential ideas of virtue ethics. |
| 7141 | A living being is totally 'egoistic' [Nietzsche] |
| 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'? |
| 7821 | Pagans produced three hundred definitions of the highest good [Augustine, by Grayling] |
| Full Idea: Augustine claimed that the pagan schools between them had produced nearly three hundred different definitions of the highest good. | |
| From: report of Augustine (works [c.415]) by A.C. Grayling - What is Good? Ch.5 | |
| A reaction: I would expect the right definition to be in there somewhere, but no doubt Augustine's definition made it 301. Perhaps the biggest problem of human life is that (as with the Kennedy assassination) proliferating stories obscure the true story. |
| 7168 | Modest people express happiness as 'Not bad' [Nietzsche] |
| 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 [Nietzsche] |
| 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 [Nietzsche] |
| 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 [Nietzsche] |
| 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 bête 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 [Nietzsche] |
| 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 - its 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 [Nietzsche] |
| 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 [Nietzsche] |
| 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 [Nietzsche] |
| 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. |
| 22119 | Augustine said (unusually) that 'ought' does not imply 'can' [Augustine, by Matthews] |
| Full Idea: Augustine insisted that 'ought' does not, in any straightforward way, imply 'can' - which distinguishes him from most modern ethicists. | |
| From: report of Augustine (works [c.415]) by Gareth B. Matthews - Augustine p.74 | |
| A reaction: Not unreasonable. I ought to help my ailing friend who lives abroad, but I haven't the time or money to do it. We can experience impossibilities as duties. Impossibilities are just excuses. Augustine is opposing the Pelagian heresy. |
| 7214 | Ethics rests on utility, which is the permanent progressive interests of people [Mill] |
| Full Idea: I regard utility as the ultimate appeal on all ethical questions; but it must be utility in the largest sense, grounded on the permanent interests of a man as a progressive being. | |
| From: John Stuart Mill (On Liberty [1857], Ch.1) | |
| A reaction: Mill, writing in praise of personal liberty, is desperate to introduce a paternalistic element into his politics, and the 'maximisation of happiness' will justify such paternalism, while his basic liberal principle (Idea 7211) won't. Mill's Dilemma. |
| 7164 | Not feeling harnessed to a system of 'ends' is a wonderful feeling of freedom [Nietzsche] |
| 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 [Nietzsche] |
| 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 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' [Nietzsche] |
| 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 [Nietzsche] |
| 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 [Nietzsche] |
| 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 [Nietzsche] |
| 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. |
| 7212 | Individuals have sovereignty over their own bodies and minds [Mill] |
| Full Idea: Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign. | |
| From: John Stuart Mill (On Liberty [1857], Ch.1) | |
| A reaction: If I should not even think about evil deeds, then neither should you. I would prevent you if I could. I would prevent you from drinking yourself to death, if I could. It is just that intrusions into private lives leads to greater trouble. |
| 7210 | The will of the people is that of the largest or most active part of the people [Mill] |
| Full Idea: The will of the people practically means the will of the most numerous or the most active part of the people. | |
| From: John Stuart Mill (On Liberty [1857], Ch.1) | |
| A reaction: Hence the nicely coined modern phrase 'the silent majority', on whose behalf certain politicians, usually conservative, offer to speak. It is unlikely that the silent majority are actually deeply opposed to the views of the very active part. |
| 7227 | It is evil to give a government any more power than is necessary [Mill] |
| Full Idea: Government interference should be restricted because of the great evil of adding unnecessarily to its power. | |
| From: John Stuart Mill (On Liberty [1857], Ch.5) | |
| A reaction: This would need justification, because it might be replied that individuals should not have unnecessary power either. The main problem is that governments have armies, police and money. |
| 7228 | Individuals often do things better than governments [Mill] |
| Full Idea: Government power should be restricted because things are often done better by individuals. | |
| From: John Stuart Mill (On Liberty [1857], Ch.5) | |
| A reaction: This contains some truth, but it is obvious that innumerable things can be done better by governments, and also (and more importantly) that innumerable other good things might be done by governments which individuals can't be bothered to do. |
| 7204 | The upholding of the military state is needed to maintain the strong human type [Nietzsche] |
| 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? |
| 7230 | Aim for the maximum dissemination of power consistent with efficiency [Mill] |
| Full Idea: The safest practical ideal is to aim for the greatest dissemination of power consistent with efficiency. | |
| From: John Stuart Mill (On Liberty [1857], Ch.5) | |
| A reaction: This is a very nice principle, which I would think desirable within an institution as well as on the scale of the state. I am becoming a fan of Mill's politics. I still say that freedom is an overrated virtue, so efficiency must be underrated. |
| 20515 | Maximise happiness by an area of strict privacy, and an area of utilitarian interventions [Mill, by Wolff,J] |
| Full Idea: For Mill the greatest happiness will be achieved by giving people a private sphere of interests where no intervention is permitted, while allowing a public sphere where intervention is possible, but only on utilitarian grounds. | |
| From: report of John Stuart Mill (On Liberty [1857]) by Jonathan Wolff - An Introduction to Political Philosophy (Rev) 4 'Liberty' | |
| A reaction: This is probably standard liberal practice nowadays. Freely consenting adult sexual activity is agreed to be wholly private. At least some lip-service is paid to increasing happiness when government intervenes. |
| 7229 | People who transact their own business will also have the initiative to control their government [Mill] |
| Full Idea: A people accustomed to transacting their own business is certain to be free; it will never let itself be enslaved by any man or body of men because these are able to seize and pull the reins of the central administration. | |
| From: John Stuart Mill (On Liberty [1857], Ch.5) | |
| A reaction: He makes reference to Americans. This is an important idea, because it shows that democratic control is not just a matter of elections (which can be abolished or suborned), but is also a characteristic of a certain way of life. |
| 7211 | Prevention of harm to others is the only justification for exercising power over people [Mill] |
| Full Idea: The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others; his own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. | |
| From: John Stuart Mill (On Liberty [1857], Ch.1) | |
| A reaction: This is the key idea in Mill's liberalism, though he goes on to offer some qualifications of this absolute prohibition. I don't disagree with this principle, but there may be a lot more indirect harm than we realise (eg. in allowing liberal sex or drugs). |
| 7231 | The worth of a State, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing it [Mill] |
| Full Idea: The worth of a State, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing it. | |
| From: John Stuart Mill (On Liberty [1857], Ch.5) | |
| A reaction: This is a key idea of liberalism, opposed to any idea that we should abandon our own value to that of our state. I agree, but communitarians can subscribe to this too, while disagreeing that maximum freedom is the strategy to follow. |
| 7217 | The main argument for freedom is that interference with it is usually misguided [Mill] |
| Full Idea: The strongest of all the arguments against the interference of the public with purely personal conduct is that, when it does interfere, the odds are that it interferes wrongly, and in the wrong place. | |
| From: John Stuart Mill (On Liberty [1857], Ch.4) | |
| A reaction: This is also a well known objection to capital punishment. Generalised, well established, legal interferences are perhaps more likely to get it right than ad hoc decisions about individuals by individual officials. |
| 7213 | Liberty arises at the point where people can freely and equally discuss things [Mill] |
| Full Idea: Liberty, as a principle, has no application to any state of things anterior to the time when mankind have become capable of being improved by free and equal discussion. | |
| From: John Stuart Mill (On Liberty [1857], Ch.1) | |
| A reaction: There is a Victorian (and Enlightenment) optimism here which a glimpse of the freedoms of the early twenty-first century might dampen. I doubt if Mill expected British tabloid newspapers, or porn on cable TV. Education and freedom connect. |
| 7220 | Restraint for its own sake is an evil [Mill] |
| Full Idea: All restraint, qua restraint, is an evil. | |
| From: John Stuart Mill (On Liberty [1857], Ch.5) | |
| A reaction: The ultimate justification for this is (presumably) utilitarian, but that would mean that there was nothing wrong with restraint if the person did not mind, or was not aware of the restraint. What is intrinsically wrong with restraint? |
| 20517 | Utilitarianism values liberty, but guides us on which ones we should have or not have [Mill, by Wolff,J] |
| Full Idea: Utilitarianism provides an account of what liberties we should and should not have. Mill argues we should be free to compete in trade, but not to use another's property without consent. Thus he sets limits to liberty, while paying it great respect. | |
| From: report of John Stuart Mill (On Liberty [1857]) by Jonathan Wolff - An Introduction to Political Philosophy (Rev) 4 'Intrinsic' |
| 20516 | Mill defends freedom as increasing happiness, but maybe it is an intrinsic good [Wolff,J on Mill] |
| Full Idea: Mill has presented liberty as instrumentally valuable, as a way of achieving the greatest possible happiness in society. But perhaps he should have argued that liberty is an intrinsic good, good in itself. | |
| From: comment on John Stuart Mill (On Liberty [1857]) by Jonathan Wolff - An Introduction to Political Philosophy (Rev) 4 'Intrinsic' | |
| A reaction: If freedom is intrinsically good, does this leave us (as Wolff warned earlier) unable to defend its value? Freedom isn't an intrinsic good for infants, so why should it be so for adults? Good because it brings happiness, or fulfils our nature? |
| 7215 | True freedom is pursuing our own good, while not impeding others [Mill] |
| Full Idea: The only freedom which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it. | |
| From: John Stuart Mill (On Liberty [1857], Ch.1) | |
| A reaction: This principle will probably lead up a Prisoner's Dilemma cul-de-sac. The only freedom which deserves the name is the collective agreed freedom of a whole community to live well, when citizens volunteer to restrict their individual freedoms. |
| 7218 | Individuals are not accountable for actions which only concern themselves [Mill] |
| Full Idea: My first maxim is that the individual is not accountable to society for his actions, in so far as these concern the interests of no person but himself. | |
| From: John Stuart Mill (On Liberty [1857], Ch.5) | |
| A reaction: This is a key idea of liberalism, and one which communitarians have doubts about (because it is almost impossible to perform an action which is of no interest, in the short or long term, to others). I share these doubts. |
| 7221 | Blocking entry to an unsafe bridge does not infringe liberty, since no one wants unsafe bridges [Mill] |
| Full Idea: An official could turn a person back from an unsafe bridge without infringeing their liberty; for liberty consists in doing what one desires, and he does not desire to fall into the river. | |
| From: John Stuart Mill (On Liberty [1857], Ch.5) | |
| A reaction: Seems fair enough, but it justifies paternalist interference. The tricky one is where the official and the citizen disagree over what the citizen 'truly' desires. Asking people may involve too much time, but it could also involve too much effort. |
| 7223 | Pimping and running a gambling-house are on the border between toleration and restraint [Mill] |
| Full Idea: A person being free to be a pimp, or to keep a gambling-house, lies on the exact boundary line between two principles, of toleration and of restraint. | |
| From: John Stuart Mill (On Liberty [1857], Ch.5) | |
| A reaction: Nothing illuminates a philosopher's principles more than for them to specify cases that lie on their borderlines. Both professions seem, unfortunately, to lead people into worse activities, such as violent bullying, or theft. Tricky.. |
| 7173 | Rights arise out of contracts, which need a balance of power [Nietzsche] |
| 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. |
| 7219 | Society can punish actions which it believes to be prejudicial to others [Mill] |
| Full Idea: My second maxim is that for actions that are prejudicial to the interests of others, the individual is accountable, and subject to social or legal punishment, if society believes that this is requisite for its protection. | |
| From: John Stuart Mill (On Liberty [1857], Ch.5) | |
| A reaction: (wording compressed). The trouble with this would seem to be the possible disagreement between the individual and the society over whether the actions actually are prejudicial to others. It would justify a conservative society in being repressive. |
| 7226 | Benefits performed by individuals, not by government, help also to educate them [Mill] |
| Full Idea: It is often desirable that beneficial things should be done by individuals, rather than by the government, as a means to their own mental education. | |
| From: John Stuart Mill (On Liberty [1857], Ch.5) | |
| A reaction: This raises the important danger, which even those on the political left must acknowledge, of the 'nanny state'. It offers a nicely paternalistic, and even patronising reason for giving people freedom, just as a parent might to a child. |
| 7224 | We need individual opinions and conduct, and State education is a means to prevent that [Mill] |
| Full Idea: Individuality of character, and diversity in opinions and modes of conduct, involves diversity of education; a general State education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another. | |
| From: John Stuart Mill (On Liberty [1857], Ch.5) | |
| A reaction: This strikes me as being particularly true with the advent in Britain of the National Curriculum in the early 1990s. However, if there is a pressure towards conformity in state education, private education is dominated by class and money. |
| 7225 | It is a crime to create a being who lacks the ordinary chances of a desirable existence [Mill] |
| Full Idea: To bestow a life on someone which may be either a curse or a blessing, unless the being on whom it is to be bestowed will have at least the ordinary chances of a desirable existence, is a crime against that being. | |
| From: John Stuart Mill (On Liberty [1857], Ch.5) | |
| A reaction: This is the standard utilitarian attitude to engendering people. I think I have to agree. It is no argument against this to say that we value people with poor life prospects, once they have arrived. Altruism towards children may disguise selfish parents. |
| 7176 | 'Purpose' is like the sun, where most heat is wasted, and a tiny part has 'purpose' [Nietzsche] |
| 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 [Nietzsche] |
| 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 [Nietzsche] |
| 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 [Nietzsche] |
| 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 [Nietzsche] |
| 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! [Nietzsche] |
| 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. |
| 7180 | Darwin overestimates the influence of 'external circumstances' [Nietzsche] |
| 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. |
| 7179 | Survival might undermine an individual's value, or prevent its evolution [Nietzsche] |
| 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. |
| 7192 | Remove goodness and wisdom from our concept of God. Being the highest power is enough! [Nietzsche] |
| 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 [Nietzsche] |
| 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 [Nietzsche] |
| 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. |
| 7208 | Paganism is a form of thanking and affirming life? [Nietzsche] |
| 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. |
| 7216 | The ethics of the Gospel has been supplemented by barbarous Old Testament values [Mill] |
| Full Idea: To extract from the Gospel a body of ethical doctrine, has never been possible withouth eking it out from the Old Testament, that is, from a system elaborate indeed, but in many respects barbarous, and intended only for a barbarous people. | |
| From: John Stuart Mill (On Liberty [1857], Ch.2) | |
| A reaction: 'Barbarous' has a quaint Victorian ring to it, but his point is that the surviving teachings of Jesus are very thin and generalised. Christians would do better to expand their implications, than to borrow from the Old Testament. |
| 7160 | Christian belief is kept alive because it is soothing - the proof based on pleasure [Nietzsche] |
| 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. |
| 22116 | Augustine identified Donatism, Pelagianism and Manicheism as the main heresies [Augustine, by Matthews] |
| Full Idea: Augustine did the most to define Christian heresy. The three most prominent were Donatism, Pelagianism (that humans are perfectible), and Manicheism (that good and evil are equally basic metaphysical realities). | |
| From: report of Augustine (works [c.415]) by Gareth B. Matthews - Augustine p.73 | |
| A reaction: Manicheans had presumably been studying Empedocles. (I suppose it's too late to identify Christianity as a heresy?). |
| 7203 | In heaven all the interesting men are missing [Nietzsche] |
| 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 [Nietzsche] |
| 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). |
| 19338 | Augustine said evil does not really exist, and evil is a limitation in goodness [Augustine, by Perkins] |
| Full Idea: Augustine solution to the problem of evil was to say that, strictly speaking, evil does not exist. Human beings are not part evil and part good, but rather just a limited amount of goodness. | |
| From: report of Augustine (works [c.415]) by Franklin Perkins - Leibniz: Guide for the Perplexed 2.III | |
| A reaction: Augustine was rebelling against Manicheanism, which he espoused when young, which proposed a good and an evil force. An apathetic slob seems devoid of goodness, but is not evil. It takes extra effort to perform active evil. |