There is definitely much value inherent in this process. It exercises many things; one's discipline, one's ability to comprehend and reason, one's ability to fluidly shift between semiotic mappings, etc. — Ø implies everything
Must a philosophical mind remove the ego? — TiredThinker
205
Need.- Need is considered the cause why something came to be; but in truth it is often merely an effect of what has come to be.
217
Cause and effect.- Before the effect one believes in different causes than one does afterward. — ibid, The Gay Science.
We glimpse that milieu from within the terms of our own milieu. — Joshs
In any discussion of a philosopher’s work, what is just as important as what they ‘actually’ said is what we would like them to mean. — Joshs
Let us beware of thinking that the world eternally creates new things. There are no eternally enduring substances; matter is as much of an error as the God of the Eleatics. But when shall we ever be done with our caution and care? When will these shadows of God cease to darken our minds? When will we complete our de-deification of nature? When may we begin to "naturalize" humanity in terms of a pure. newly discovered, newly redeemed nature? — ibid. 109
Thus knowledge became a piece of life itself, and hence a continually growing power-until eventually knowledge collided with those primeval basic errors: two lives, two powers both in the same human being. A thinker is now that being in whom the impulse for truth and those life-preserving errors clash for their first fight, after the impulse for truth has proved to be also a life-preserving power. Compared to the significance of this fight, everything else is a matter of indifference: — Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 110, translated by Walter Kaufman
My idea is, as you see, that consciousness does not really belong to man's individual existence but rather to his social or herd nature; that, as follows from this, it has developed subtlety only insofar as this is required by social or herd utility. Consequently, given the best will in the world to understand ourselves as individually as possible, "to know ourselves," each of us will always succeed in becoming conscious only of what is not individual but "'average." Our thoughts themselves are continually governed by the character of consciousness, by the "genius of the species" that commands it--and translated back into the perspective of the herd. Fundamentally, all our actions are altogether incomparably personal, unique. and infinitely individual; there is no doubt of that. But as soon as we translate them into consciousness they no longer seem to be.
This is the essence of phenomenalism and perspectivism as I understand them: Owing to the nature of animal consciousness, the world of which we can become conscious is only a surface and sign world, a world that is made common and meaner; whatever becomes conscious becomes by the same token shallow, thin, relatively stupid, general, sign, herd signal; all becoming conscious involves a great and thorough corruption, falsification, reduction to superficialities. and generalization. Ultimately, the growth of consciousness becomes a danger; and anyone who lives among the most conscious Europeans even knows that it is a disease.
You will guess that it is not the opposition of subject and object that concerns me here: This distinction I leave to the epistemologists who have become entangled in the snares of grammar (the metaphysics of the people). It is even less the opposition of "thing-in-itself" and appearance; for we do not "know" nearly enough to be entitled to any such distinction. We simply lack any organ for knowledge, for "truth": we "know" (or believe or imagine) just as much as may be useful in the interests of the human herd, the species; and even what is here called "utility" is ultimately also a mere belief, something imaginary, and perhaps precisely that most calamitous stupidity of which we shall perish some day. — ibid. halfway through 354
Even the most cautious among them suppose that what is familiar is at least more easily knowable than what is strange, and that, for example, sound method demands that we start from the "inner world, from the "facts of consciousness"... because this world is more familiar to us. Error of errors! What is familiar is what we are used to; and what we are used to is most difficult to "know" - that is. to see as a problem; that is, to see as strange, as distant, as "outside us." The great certainty of the natural sciences in comparison with psychology and the critique of the elements of consciousness-one might almost say, with the unnatural sciences - is due precisely to the fact that they choose for their object what is strange, while it is almost contradictory and absurd to even try to choose for an object what is not-strange. — ibid. half of 355
In the horizon of the infinite.-- We have left the land and have embarked. We have burned our bridges behind us indeed, we have gone farther and destroyed the land behind us. Now. little ship, look out! Beside you is the ocean: to be sure, it does not always roar, and at times it lies spread out like silk and gold and reveries of graciousness. But hours will come when you will realize that it is infinite and that there is nothing more awesome than infinity. Oh, the poor bird that felt free and now strikes the walls of this cage! Woe, when you feel homesick for the land as if it had offered more freedom and there is no longer any "land." — ibid. 124
Sounds like you have fun with Nietzsche ahead of you. — frank
Origin of knowledge.- Over immense periods of time the intellect produced nothing but errors. A few of these proved to be useful and helped to preserve the species: those who hit upon or inherited these had better luck in their struggle for themselves and their progeny. Such erroneous articles of faith* which were continually inherited. until they became almost part of the basic endowment of the species. include the following: that there are enduring things; that there are equal things; that there are things, substances, bodies; that a thing is what it appears to be; that our will is free; that what is good for me is also good in itself. It was only very late that such propositions were denied and doubted; it was only very late that truth emerged-as the weakest form of knowledge. It seemed that one was unable to live with it: our organism was prepared for the opposite; all its higher functions. sense perception and every kind of sensation worked with those basic errors which had been incorporated since time immemorial. Indeed, even in the realm of knowledge these propositions became the norms according to which "true and "untrue,. were determined down to the most remote regions of logic. Thus the strength of knowledge does not depend on its degree of truth but on its age, on the degree to which it has been incorporated, on its character as a condition of life. Where life and knowledge seemed to be at odds there was never any real fight. but denial and doubt were simply considered madness. Those exceptional thinkers, like the Eleatics. who nevertheless posited and clung to the opposites of the natural errors believed that it was possible to live in accordance with these opposites: they invented the sage as the man who was unchangeable and impersonal, the man of the universality of intuition who was One and All at the same time, with a special capacity for his inverted knowledge: they had the faith that their knowledge was also the principle of life. But in order to claim all of this, they had to deceive themselves about their own state: they had to attribute to themselves, fictitiously, impersonality and changeless duration; they had to misapprehend the nature of the knower; they had to deny the role of the impulses in knowledge; and quite generally they had to conceive of reason: as a completely free and spontaneous activity. They shut their eyes to the fact that they. too, had arrived at their propositions through opposition to common sense. or owing to a desire for tranquility, for sole possession. or for dominion. The subtler development of honesty and skepticism eventually made these people. too, impossible; their ways of living and judging were seen to be also dependent upon the primeval impulses and basic errors of all sentient existence.
This subtler honesty and skepticism came into being wherever two contradictory sentences appeared to be applicable to life because both were compatible with the basic errors. and it was therefore possible to argue about the higher or lower degree of utility for life; also wherever new propositions. though not useful for life, were also evidently not harmful to life: in such cases there was room for the expression of an intellectual play impulse, and honest~ and skepticism were imminent and happy like all play. Gradually, the human brain became full of such judgments and convictions. and a ferment, struggle, and 'lust for power' developed in this tangle. Not only utility and delight but every kind of impulse took sides in this fight about "truths". The intellectual fight became an occupation, an attraction, a profession, a duty, something dignified-and eventually knowledge and the striving for the: truths" found their place as a need among other needs. Henceforth not only faith and conviction but also scrutiny, denial, mistrust, and contradiction became a power; all "evil" instincts were subordinated to knowledge, employed in her service, and acquired the splendor of what is permitted, honored, and useful and eventually even the eye and innocence of the good.
Thus knowledge became a piece of life itself, and hence a continually growing power-until eventually knowledge collided with those primeval basic errors: two lives, two powers both in the same human being. A thinker is now that being in whom the impulse for truth and those life-preserving errors clash for their first fight, after the impulse for truth has proved to be also a life-preserving power. Compared to the significance of this fight, everything else is a matter of indifference: the ultimate question about the conditions of life has been posed here, and we confront the first attempt to answer this question by experiment. To what extent can truth endure incorporation?
That is the question; that is the experiment. — Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 110, translated by Walter Kaufman
Describing it as a thought experiment is too detached. It is without the struggle: — Fooloso4
‘This life, as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live again, and innumerable times again, and there will be nothing new in it; but rather every pain and joy, every thought and sigh, and all the unutterably trivial or great things in your life will have to happen to you again, with everything in the same series and sequence – and likewise this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and likewise this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence will be turned over again and again, and you with it, you speck of dust!’ — The Gay Science, §341
We are thrown into ways of thinking, a cage of concepts that can only be question from within, using those very concepts. — green flag
I think it would be more accurate if he said that this is how he thinks they thought that thought. But I think he would think that I am not thinking historically:
...until philosophy is forced to think historically-in a still more essential and original sense of that word-taking its own most grounding question as its point of departure. (186) — Fooloso4
Thinking Being, will to power, as eternal return, thinking the most difficult thought of philosophy, means thinking Being as Time. Nietzsche thinks that thought but does not think it as the question of Being and Time. Plato and Aristotle also think that thought when they conceive Being as ousia (presence), but just as little as Nietzsche do they think it as a question.
If we do ask the question, we do not mean to suggest that we are cleverer than both Nietzsche and Western philosophy, which Nietzsche "only" thinks to its end. We know that the most difficult thought of philosophy has only become more difficult, that the peak of the meditation has not yet been conquered and perhaps not yet even discovered at all. — Heidegger, Lectures on Nietzsche, Vol 1, page 20e
Plato and Aristotle also think that thought when they conceive Being as ousia (presence), but just as little as Nietzsche do they think it as a question.
What are the decisive fundamental positions of the commencement (of Greek thought)? In other words, what sorts of answers are given to the as yet undeveloped guiding question, the question as to what being is?
The one answer-roughly speaking, it is the answer of Parmenides-tells us that being is. An odd sort of answer, no doubt, yet a very deep one, since that very response determines for the first time and for all thinkers to come, including Nietzsche, the meaning of is and Being - permanence and presence, that is, the eternal present.
The other answer-roughly speaking, that of Heraclitus-tells us that being becomes. The being is in being by virtue of its permanent becoming, its self-unfolding and eventual dissolution.
To what extent is Nietzsche's thinking the end? That is to say, how does it stretch back to both these fundamental determinations of being in such a way that they come to interlock? Precisely to the extent that Nietzsche argues that being is as fixated, as permanent; and that it is in perpetual creation and destruction. Yet being is both of these, not in an extrinsic way, as one beside another; rather, being is in its very ground perpetual creation (Becoming), while as creation it needs what is fixed. Creation needs what is fixed, first, in order to overcome it, and second, in order to have something that has yet to be fixated, something that enables the creative to advance beyond itself and be transfigured. The essence of being is Becoming, but what becomes is and has Being only in creative transfiguration. What is and what becomes are fused in the fundamental thought that what becomes is inasmuch as in creation it becomes being and is becoming. But such becoming-a-being becomes a being that comes-to-be, and does so in the perpetual transformation of what has become firmly fixed and intractable to something made firm in a liberating transfiguration. — ibid. page 200
It would interesting to see where and when the idea of Eternalism originated. — Janus
In the popular view, and according to the common notion, Nietzsche is the revolutionary figure who negated, destroyed, and prophesied. To be sure, all that belongs to the image we have of him. Nor is it merely a role that he played, but an innermost necessity of his time. But what is essential in the revolutionary is not that he overturns as such; it is rather that in overturning he brings to light what is decisive and essential. In philosophy that happens always when those few momentous questions are raised. When he thinks "the most difficult thought" at the "peak of the meditation," Nietzsche thinks and meditates on Being, that is, on will to power as eternal recurrence. What does that mean, taken quite broadly and essentially? Eternity, not as a static "now," nor as a sequence of "nows" rolling off into the infinite, but as the "now" that bends back into itself: what is that if not the concealed essence of Time? Thinking Being, will to power, as eternal return, thinking the most difficult thought of philosophy, means thinking Being as Time. Nietzsche thinks that thought but does not think it as the question of Being and Time. Plato and Aristotle also think that thought when they conceive Being as ousia (presence), but just as little as Nietzsche do they think it as a question.
If we do ask the question, we do not mean to suggest that we are cleverer than both Nietzsche and Western philosophy, which Nietzsche "only" thinks to its end. We know that the most difficult thought of philosophy has only become more difficult, that the peak of the meditation has not yet been conquered and perhaps not yet even discovered at all. — Heidegger, Lectures on Nietzsche, Vol 1, page 20e
Dumb question but is Heidegger an important figure in philosophy? — Tom Storm
And we all can make arguments for why any of these figures here shouldn't be as influential. — Manuel
Do you mean that Heidegger is positing the overman as agency? — Joshs
This human being of the future is the proper ruler, the one who has become master of the last man,indeed in such a way that the last man disappears. His disappearance indicates that the ruler is no longer defined in opposition to the last man-which is what always happens as long as future humanity, spawned by what has gone before, has to grasp itself as over-man, — ibid. page 127
For 'punishment' is what revenge calls itself; with a hypocritical lie it creates a good conscience for itself.....
Has he unlearned the spirit of revenge and all gnashing of teeth? And who taught him reconciliation with time and something higher than any reconciliation? For that will which is the will to power must will something higher than any reconciliation; but how shall this be brought about? Who could teach him also to will backwards? — Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, On Redemption, translated by Walter Kaufman
Meanwhile we want to heed the fact that at the time when the thought of eternal return of the same arises Nietzsche is striving most decisively in his thought to dehumanize and de-deify being as a whole. His striving is not a mere echo, as one might suppose, of an ostensible "positivistic period" now in abeyance. It has its own, more profound origin. Only in this way is it possible for Nietzsche to be driven directly from such striving to its apparently incongruous opposite, when in his doctrine of will to power he demands the supreme humanization of beings — Heidegger, Lectures on Nietzsche, Vol II, page 94
If we follow Nietzsche's lead and substitute "the philosopher" for "the knower," "the artist" for "the creator," and "the saint" for "the lover," then the phrase we introduced a moment ago tells us that the philosopher, artist, and saint are one. However, it is not Nietzsche's purpose here to concoct an amalgam that would consist of all the things these words used to mean. On the contrary, he is seeking the figure of a human being who exists simultaneously in the transformed unity of that threefold metamorphosis-the knower, the creator, the giver. This human being of the future is the proper ruler, the one who has become master of the last man, indeed in such a way that the last man disappears. His disappearance indicates that the ruler is no longer defined in opposition to the last man-which is what always happens as long as future humanity, spawned by what has gone before, has to grasp itself as over-man, that is to say, as a transition. The ruler, that is, the designated unity of knower, creator, and lover, is in his own proper grounds altogether an other. — ibid. page 127
Morality as a means of seduction--- "Nature is good, for a wise and good God is its cause. Who, then, is responsible for the 'corruption of mankind'? It tyrants and seducers, the ruling orders---they must be destroyed"---: Rousseau's logic (compare Pascal's logic, which lays the responsibility on original sin).
Compare the related logic of Luther. In both cases a pretext is sought to introduce an insatiable thirst for revenge as a moral-religious duty. Hatred for the ruling order seeks to sanctify itself---(the "sinfulness of Israel": foundation of the power of the priest),
Compare the related logic of Paul. It is always God's cause in which these reactions come forth, the cause of right, of humanity, etc. In the case of Christ, the rejoicing of the people appears as the cause of his execution; an anti-priestly movement from the first. Even in the case of the anti-Semites it is the same artifice: to visit condemnatory judgments upon one's enemies opponent and to reserve to oneself the role of retributive justice. — Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 347, translated by Walter Kaufman
