Monday, February 10, 2003

 
Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, text prepared and translated by Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale, 1895.

From introductory remarks:

“Maintaining cheerfulness in the midst of a gloomy task, fraught with immeasurable responsibility, is no small feat; and yet what is needed more than cheerfulness?”

From “Maxims and Arrows”:

“10: Not to perpetuate cowardice against one’s own acts! Not to leave them in the lurch afterward! The bit of conscience is indecent.”

“21: To venture into many situations where one cannot get by with sham virtues, but where, like the tightrope walker on his rope, one either stands or falls—or gets away.”

“24: By searching out origins, one becomes a crab. The historian looks backward; eventually he also believes backward.” That is, where you look is how you believe.

“37: You run ahead? Are you doing it as a shepherd? Or as an exception? A third case would be as a fugitive. First question of conscience.” That is, avant-garde as leading a herd of sheep, or as an exception from sheep, or as a fugitive from sheep. This question of position becomes a question of conscience.

From “The Problem of Socrates”:

2: “One must stretch out one’s hands and attempt to grasp this amazing subtlety, that the value of life cannot be estimated. Not by the living, for they are an interested party, even a bone of contention, and not impartial judges; not by the dead, for a different reason.”

5: “Honest things, like honest men, do not have to explain themselves so openly.”

6: “One chooses logical argument only when one has no other means.” “Unless one has to insist on what is already one’s right, there is no use for it.”

From “ ‘Reason’ in Philosophy”:

5: “I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar.”

6: “It will be appreciated if I condense so essential and so new an insight into four theses. In that way I facilitate comprehension; in that way I provoke contradiction.”

From “Morality as Anti-Nature”:

3: “The price of fruitfulness is to be rich in internal opposition; one remains young only as long as the soul does not stretch itself and desire peace.”

“One has renounced the great life when one renounces war.”

From “The Four Great Errors”:
1. “The error of confusing cause and effect.”
Ends with “Effort is a failing: the god is typically different from the hero. (In my language: light feet are the first attribute of divinity.)”
2. “The error of a false causality.”
That is, interpreting the world with a “multiplicity of wills; an agent (a ‘subject’) was slipped under the surface of events.”
3. “The error of imaginary causes.”
“We are never satisfied merely to state the fact that we feel this way or that: we admit this fact only—become conscious of it only—when we have fabricated some kind of explanation for it. Memory, which swings into action in such cases without our awareness, brings up earlier states of the same kind, together with the causal interpretations associated with them—not their actual causes. Of course, the faith that such representations or accompanying conscious processes are the causes is also brought forth by memory. Thus originates a habitual acceptance of a particular causal interpretation, which, as a matter of fact, inhibits any investigation into the real cause—it even excludes it.” That is, we have an explanation, a justification, perhaps a point of origin, for all sensations and states, which regenerates through memory.
4. “The error of free will.”
“That no one gives a man his qualities—neither God, nor society, nor his parents and ancestors, nor he himself.”

From “The ‘Improvers’ of Mankind”:

1: “Moral judgments are therefore never to be taken literally: so understood, they are always merely absurd. Semiotically, however, they remain invaluable: they reveal, at least for those who can interpret them, the most valuable realities of cultures and psychologies that did not know how to ‘understand’ themselves. Morality is only a language of signs, a group of symptoms: one must know how to interpret them correctly to be able to profit from them.”

From “What the Germans Lack”:

5: “A higher kind of human being, if I may say so, does not like ‘callings,’ precisely because he knows himself to be called. He has time, he takes time, he does not even think of ‘finishing’: at thirty one is, in the sense of high culture, a beginner, a child.”

6: “I put forward at once—lest I break with my style, which is affirmative and deals with contradiction and criticism only as a means, only involuntarily—the three tasks for which educators are required. One must learn to see, one must learn to think, one must learn to speak and write: the goal in all three is a noble culture. Learning to see—accustoming the eye to calmness, to patience, to letting things come up to it; postponing judgment, learning to go around and grasp each individual case from all sides. That is the first preliminary schooling for spirituality: not to react at once to a stimulus, but to gain control of all the inhibiting, excluding instincts. Learning to see, as I understand it, is almost what, unphilosophically speaking, is called a strong will: the essential feature is precisely not to ‘will’—to be able to suspend decision.” “A practical application of having learned to see: as a learner, one will have become altogether slow, mistrustful, recalcitrant. One will let strange, new things of every kind come up to oneself, inspecting them with hostile calm and withdrawing one’s hand. To have all doors standing open, to lie servilely on one’s stomach before every little fact, always to be prepared for the leap of putting oneself into the place of, or of plunging into, others and other things—in short, the famous modern ‘objectivity’—is bad taste, is ignoble par excellence.” Bold print, my emphasis. How to reconcile this withdrawing of one’s hand with remaining open, my ethical decision to remain open, to imagine myself in the place of others?

7: “Thinking requires a technique, a teaching curriculum, a will to mastery—that thinking wants to be learned like dancing, as a kind of dancing.”

“For one cannot subtract dancing in every form from a noble education—to be able to dance with one’s feet, with concepts, with words: need I still add that one must be able to dance with the pen too—that one must learn to write? But at this point I should become completely enigmatic for German readers.” HA!

From “Skirmishes of an Untimely Man”:

3: On “Sainte Beuve”: “As a critic, without any standard, steadiness, and backbone, with the cosmopolitan libertine’s tongue for a medley of things, but without the courage to even to confess his libertinage. As a historian, without philosophy, without the power of the philosophical eye—hence declining the task of judging in all significant matters, hiding behind the mask of “objectivity.” It is different with his attitude to all things in which a fine, well-worn taste is the highest tribunal: there he really has the courage to stand by himself and delight in himself—there he is a master.”

7: “Nature is chance. To study ‘from nature’ seems to me to be a bad sign: it betrays submission, weakness, fatalism; this lying in the dust before petit faits is unworthy of a whole artist. To see what is—that is the mark of another kind of spirit, the anti-artistic, the factual. One must know who one is.”

8: On “frenzy”: “Out of this feeling one lends to things, one forces them to accept from us, one violates them—this process is called idealizing. Let us get rid of a prejudice here: idealizing does not consist, as is commonly held, in subtracting or discounting the petty and inconsequential. What is decisive is rather a tremendous drive to bring out the main features so that the others disappear in the process.”

9: “In this state one enriches everything out of one’s own fullness: whatever one sees, whatever one wills, is seen swelled, taut, strong, overloaded with strength. A man in this state transforms things until they mirror his power—until they are reflections of his perfection. This having to transform into perfection is—art. Even everything that he is not yet, becomes for him an occasion of joy in himself; in art man enjoys himself as perfection.”

11: Power as style: “The power which no longer needs any proof, which spurns pleasing, which does not answer lightly, which feels no witness near, which lives oblivious of all opposition to it, which reposes within itself, fatalistically, a law among laws—that speaks of itself as a grand style.”

18: “On the ‘intellectual conscience.’ ”: “Tolerance toward oneself permits several convictions and they get along with each other: they are careful, like all the rest of the world, not to compromise themselves. How does one compromise oneself today? If one is consistent. If one proceeds in a straight line. If one is not ambiguous enough to permit five conflicting interpretations. If one is genuine.”

20: “Nothing is beautiful, except man alone: all aesthetics rests upon this naïveté, which is its first truth.” Humans judge beauty by its vanity: what reflects the human image is considered beautiful. I concur.

BUT then N. follows this with: “Let us immediately add the second: nothing is ugly except the degenerating man—and with this the realm of aesthetic judgment is circumscribed.” Ugliness and degeneration becomes symbols for each other, so that “A hatred is aroused—but whom does man hate then? There is no doubt: the decline of his type. Here he hates out of the deepest instinct of the species; in this hatred there is a shudder, caution, depth, farsightedness—it is the deepest hatred there is. It is because of this that art is deep.” What a line to end on.

24: “The fight against purpose in art is always a fight against the moralizing tendency in art, against its subordination to morality. L’art pour l’art means, “The devil take morality!” But even this hostility still betrays the overpowering force of the prejudice. When the purpose of moral preaching and of improving man has been excluded from art, it sill does not follow by any means that art is altogether purposeless, aimless, senseless—in short, l’art pour l’art, a worm chewing its own tail.”

25: What does “liberal” mean? What does it mean to be merely liberal in N’s sense? “To put up with people, to keep open house with one’s heart—that is liberal, but that is merely liberal.”

26: “We have already gone beyond whatever we have words for. In all talk there is a grain of contempt. Language, it seems, was invented only for what is average, medium, communicable. By speaking the speaker immediately vulgarizes himself.” Italics in original.
29: “From a doctoral examination.” A series of Q and A that claim men become machines through higher education, via boredom and the concept of duty.

31: Another “machine, working under the highest pressure,” now called “genius.”

34: “Christian and anarchist.” Utopian promise as both Christian and socialist, both weak complainers who want the comfort of revenge beyond.

36: “Morality for physicians.” I yield here when N. speaks about degenerates should choose to die—“It is not in our hands to prevent our birth, but we can correct his mistake—for in some cases it is a mistake.”

37: Against “morality of sympathy, “morality of pity,” the “Christian morality,” even “equality” in favor of “The cleavage between man and man, status and status, the plurality of types, the will to be oneself, to stand out—what I call the pathos of distance, that is characteristic of every strong age. The strength to withstand tension, the width of the tensions between extremes, becomes ever smaller today; finally, the extremes themselves become blurred to the point of similarity.”

38: N. contrasts attained reality of liberal institutions with promised ideals of liberalism.
“The value of a thing sometimes does not lie in that which one attains by it, but in what one pays for it—what it costs us.” “Liberal institutions cease to be liberal as soon as they are attained.” “Liberalism: in other words, herd-animalization.” “These same institutions produce quite different effects while they are still being fought for; then they really promote freedom in a powerful way.”

N. links freedom to war, not to a promised ideal, during which illiberal instincts manifest: “On closer inspection it is war that produces these effects, the war for liberal institutions, which, as a war, permits illiberal instincts to continue. And war educates for freedom. For what is freedom? That one has the will to assume responsibility for oneself. That one maintains the distance which separates us.” “The human being who has become free—and how much more the spirit who becomes free—spits on the contemptible type of well-being dreamed of by shopkeepers, Christians, cows, females, Englishmen, and other democrats. The free man is a warrior.”

“The highest type of free men should be sought where the highest resistance is constantly overcome: five steps from tyranny, close to the threshold of the danger of servitude.” “One must need to be strong—otherwise one will never become strong.”

Freedom: “something one has or does not have, something one wants, something one conquers.”

39: Democracy as “the form of the decline of the state,” which is not so bad by me…

“In order that there may be institutions, there must be a kind of will, instinct, or imperative, which is anti-liberal to the point of malice: the will to tradition, to authority, to responsibility for centuries to come, to the solidarity of chains of generations, forward and backward ad infinitum. When this will is present, something like the imperium Romanum is founded; or like Russia, the only power today which has endurance, which can wait, which can still promise something—Russia, the concept that suggests the opposite of the wretched European nervousness and system of small states.” From these instincts “out of which institutions grow,” “a future grows.”

40: I yield strongly before N. on “The Labor question:” “The hope is gone forever that a modest and self-sufficient kind of man, a Chinese type, might here develop as a class.” “If one wants an end, one must also want the means: if one wants slaves, then one is a fool if one educates them to be masters.” This fits into his concepts of being strong and strident, but this example makes me uncomfortable—another example of how easily his words fall into totalitarian hands.

41: modern is “physiological self-contradiction”

44: “Great men, like great ages, are explosives in which a tremendous force is stored up; their precondition is always, historically and physiologically, that for a long time much has been gathered, stored up, saved up, and conserved for them—that there has been no explosion for a long time.” “The genius, in work and deed, is necessarily a squanderer: that he squanders himself, that is his greatness.”

45: “The criminal type is the type of the strong human being under unfavorable circumstances: a strong human being made sick.” “It is society, our tame, mediocre, emasculated society, in which a natural human being, who comes from the mountains or from the adventures of the sea, necessarily degenerates into a criminal.” BUT isn’t N blaming society here, just like a socialist/anarchist/Christian?

BUT almost every genius goes through the “Catilinarian experience”—criminal before genius

47: “Beauty no accident.” “The beauty of a race or a family, their grace and graciousness in all gestures, is won by work: like genius, it is the end result of the accumulated work of generations.” Beauty is only a reflection of what is human; genius is a machine.

51: “To create things on which time tests its teeth in vain; in form, in substance, to strive for a little immortality—I have never yet been modest enough to demand less of myself.”

From “What I Owe to the Ancients”:

1: N. clarifies his Yes/No: “My taste, which may be the opposite of a tolerant taste, is in this case very far from saying Yes indiscriminately: it does not like to say Yes; better to say No, but best of all to say nothing.” Even in his sense of style: “Compact, severe, with as much substance as possible, a cold sarcasm toward ‘beautiful words’ and ‘beautiful sentiments’—here I found myself.” Much like Coetzee’s.

Speaking of Horatian odes: “Every word—as sound, as place, as concept—pours out its strength right and left and over the whole, this minimum in the extent and number of the signs, and the maximum thereby attained in the energy of the signs.”

5: “Saying Yes to life even in its strangest and most painful episodes, the will to life rejoicing in its own inexhaustible vitality even as it witnesses the destruction of its greatest heros…in order to celebrate oneself the eternal joy of becoming, beyond all terror and pity—that tragic joy included even joy in destruction.”

posted by Open Mouth 2:23 AM