The Notebooks

I am going to go at this very selectively, as I have very little time to spend on this, but the books contain so much wisdom that it is a shame to leave all of it untranslated. It may occasionally happen that I unknowingly translate an aphorism that has already been published in the Will to Power.

Nice, November 1887
11[1]

Take "just accept" [fürlieb nehmen] people and to keep open house with ones heart: that is liberal, but not noble. One recognizes those hearts that are used to the noble hospitality by the many covered windows and closed quarters: they keep at least their best spaces empty, they expect guests who one does not "just accept".

11[3]

One is an artist for this price, that one encounters that which all non-artists call "form", as content, as "the thing itself". With that one is part of a reversed* world: henceforth content becomes for one something almost formal - our life included.



*verkehrt, usual translation: wrong

Fixed Cross wrote:

11[3]

One is an artist for this price, that one encounters that which all non-artists call "form", as content, as "the thing itself". With that one is part of a reversed* world: henceforth content becomes for one something almost formal - our life included.



*verkehrt, usual translation: wrong

I have written a section in one of my books that is incredibly similar to this idea. I will post it here:






" The natural range of man's affinities is very impoverished and rarely does beauty or virtue glint over his sorrowful brow. However, the few moments of aesthetic pleasure that happen to ray in upon his life he is able to extrapolate into an entire theory of the beautiful and the few moments of inspired feeling, bravery, and virtuousness which he has known he is capable of generalizing in the canon of some morality, for his eye is very well fashioned for finding out the similarity between things and the various states of the soul, and for extracting from such similarity the essence behind these things, the "knowledge." Yet, it is just this eye that makes it difficult for him to find the beautiful or the virtuous in his life and the world of living things, as opposed to his theory and morality, for greatness in all of its forms, be they the forms of the good or the beautiful, is always distinct, different, a rarity. The philosopher, on the other hand, possesses an eye attuned to the differences between things and finds in everything to which he sets this eye only so many points of distinction so that, instead of reading his knowledge into man and world, he relinquishes it as it were to the marvelous play of appearances in which they consist, which is to say he gives his spirit free reign to take each phantom for what it is and to therefor fully engage and question it. The eye of the philosopher is very much opposed to extracting that popular kind of knowledge from the images upon which it is exercised, for it cannot easily find out the point of commonality between things, and what knowledge the philosopher does have, if it can be a kind of knowledge, is by no means knowledge of the essence. Contrary to the opinion of many, it is the essence which is knowable and the appearance that is enigmatic and hard to find out, that is- the rarity, the different, and the distinct, that defy man's cunning, in which the "knowledge" of the philosopher consists, in which the philosopher finds a reversed kind of essentiality. "


Also, here:



" Because the premises of mankind's morality and philosophy have been rooted in concepts like God, the prime cause, or freedom, one cannot negate these concepts without at the same time negating the conceptual understanding from which this negation, as an act of reason, draws its potency and claim to validity. To negate them is to negate reason, to close the circle of skepsis and transform it into a dogma, as Hamman says. Thus the rise of empiricists, with the devaluation of knowledge, which at this point is a mere picture of the world drawn from the reconciliation of experiential datums intended to familiarize the strange, and organized in accordance to the logical grammar of a merely descriptive language. What have we explained? To even speak of causality in this context is fundamentally impossible: we only describe the particular effect which follows a particular cause, namely by producing a series of phenomena from an irreducible totality in relation to which our language of cause and effect, temporal succession, and physicality can have no meaning. This totality Spinoza named "substance," a conception no less deceptive than our descriptive language. Ultimately, philosophy was never used, insofar as we regard the ancients, as an instrument for “explaining,” and even less as an instrument for describing; it was never intended to make one series of phenomena understandable in terms of another, but rather to extrapolate what was given, what was obvious, into the strange, unknown orders of the nature, to decontextualize the object of discussion with respect to the discourse of conventional language and subjective impression, with respect to the sphere of mere phenomenal appearance. This is the meaning of the Platonic aporia, and the silence into which the Socratic dialogues resolved themselves. Depending on what was intended to be submit to philosophical analysis, certain concepts such as God, the soul, or the freedom of the will were used to facilitate this process of “decontextualization” whose validity was never questioned because they were only posited in order to give reason a point of departure for mystifying, for making the familiar strange, not serving of themselves as positive expressions of knowledge, but merely as representations of this unknown order, or living revelations of the inscrutable, as Goethe said. All the ancient symbols of myth stand as so many analogies to them. These concepts are what moderns would brand with the category, “the poetic.” The method of primitive reasoning was a kind of exalted poetry wherein a particular was given to represent some universal which lied far beyond man's immediate experience. Thales discovered this method of reasoning. The particular did not depict the drama of mythopoeic forces, as in the primeval religions, but rather a momentary and living revelation of the inscrutable, to use Goethe's phrase once again. One must wonder as to which theory of knowledge, as to which idea of philosophy- the ancient or modern one, is most valuable, most worthy of the name. "





And one connecting the former two:



" While the artist wants to stamp the eternal with the image of time, to extend the sphere of the living and perishing consciousness so as to encompass all the breadth of creation, mainly by way of realizing harmonies within the order of nature in which all essential reality is abandoned to semblance and phenomena, the philosopher wants to stamp time with the image of the eternal, to reduce his consciousness to a single point, to the ego, so as to encompass it by thought, mainly by dissolving those harmonies and relations, by introducing contrariety and antithesis into the orders of nature and thereby unriddling the impassioned and bodily existence in which he feels himself condemned back into the mute regions of thought. In this way he is afforded objectivity, a view beyond himself and the narrow bound of his egoic consciousness, so that he might comprehend the idea behind phenomenal appearance. True morality, on the other hand, which has been only profaned by the mocking idols of merely human happiness and virtue, in comparison to whose ardor the truths of man are only velleity and convenience, wants neither to extend the border of the egoic consciousness or to reduce that consciousness to a mere object that can be suborned by thought to repudiate its significance as the rich symbolism of the forces of nature and creation, but rather to reduce the creation itself to its substratum and fundament by realizing the “principium individuationis”, the essence of the will, by means of the will. Stimulated by the ideal ego through philosophy, by the thought of the eternal soul, the real ego aims to lay into that ideal its fullness and life, and realizes a morality. All moral realities thereby inevitably create their own objects, as love creates beauty, hope creates happiness, and freedom creates justice. The moral problem is the problem of realizing in the image of the eternal the meaning of the struggle of time and mortality and, in turn, realizing in mortality the promise of the eternal. When beheld with this hopeless and yet necessary question in one's mind, all the virtues and the sins of man become equally insufferable and petty folly."

Parodites wrote:

" The natural range of man's affinities is very impoverished and rarely does beauty or virtue glint over his sorrowful brow. However, the few moments of aesthetic pleasure that happen to ray in upon his life he is able to extrapolate into an entire theory of the beautiful and the few moments of inspired feeling, bravery, and virtuousness which he has known he is capable of generalizing in the canon of some morality, for his eye is very well fashioned for finding out the similarity between things and the various states of the soul, and for extracting from such similarity the essence behind these things, the "knowledge." Yet, it is just this eye that makes it difficult for him to find the beautiful or the virtuous in his life and the world of living things, as opposed to his theory and morality, for greatness in all of its forms, be they the forms of the good or the beautiful, is always distinct, different, a rarity. The philosopher, on the other hand, possesses an eye attuned to the differences between things and finds in everything to which he sets this eye only so many points of distinction so that, instead of reading his knowledge into man and world, he relinquishes it as it were to the marvelous play of appearances in which they consist, which is to say he gives his spirit free reign to take each phantom for what it is and to therefor fully engage and question it. The eye of the philosopher is very much opposed to extracting that popular kind of knowledge from the images upon which it is exercised, for it cannot easily find out the point of commonality between things, and what knowledge the philosopher does have, if it can be a kind of knowledge, is by no means knowledge of the essence. Contrary to the opinion of many, it is the essence which is knowable and the appearance that is enigmatic and hard to find out, that is- the rarity, the different, and the distinct, that defy man's cunning, in which the "knowledge" of the philosopher consists, in which the philosopher finds a reversed kind of essentiality. "

This sheds the needed light on the obscured hiatus between language as the philosopher uses it, and language whereby the mind naturally (instrumentally) reasons.
The currently emerging challenges on this site can be seen in this light.

It seems like I may want to start reading The Republic and further pursue Ethica.

Quote :

" Because the premises of mankind's morality and philosophy have been rooted in concepts like God, the prime cause, or freedom, one cannot negate these concepts without at the same time negating the conceptual understanding from which this negation, as an act of reason, draws its potency and claim to validity. To negate them is to negate reason, to close the circle of skepsis and transform it into a dogma, as Hamman says.

As the postmodernists have done - indeed, the stagnation of reason seems to directly result from removing the 'lie' so that no truths could be derived from it anymore. Reason itself can only speak in concepts, and concepts are by definition not the same as the phenomena they represent. The concept "phenomenon" is the last beacon of one wants to take this desperate road - postmodernism - but the concept "value" is isolated before one sets out on a certainly fatal quest to 'do away with falsehood' in the sense of dismissing the claim of language to truth by representation.

"Phenomenon" is entirely meaningless. "Value" is essential to both science (measuring phenomena) and philosophy (attributing meaning) - this is strictly due to the quality of the word, which had to be identified in the philosophical universe by a philologer, and could not have been derived in a scientific one.

Quote :

"Thus the rise of empiricists, with the devaluation of knowledge, which at this point is a mere picture of the world drawn from the reconciliation of experiential datums intended to familiarize the strange, and organized in accordance to the logical grammar of a merely descriptive language. What have we explained? To even speak of causality in this context is fundamentally impossible: we only describe the particular effect which follows a particular cause, namely by producing a series of phenomena from an irreducible totality in relation to which our language of cause and effect, temporal succession, and physicality can have no meaning.

Existence understood as quantized; understanding understood as quantification; ignorance of all that can not be quantized, equalized, fit to a predetermined, inscrutable yet, in terms of meaning (experiential differentiation), unreal standard.

Science can only bring us further away from something like 'truth' unless it is willing to completely subsume itself in its humanity - completely affirm itself as teleological, and draw all the consequences for its implications, its directives, from that quality, which separates it from science as we've known it since Newton.

Newton 'took God away from man' - it takes a very stubbornly human, yet brilliantly Mercurial mind to bend the Newtonean, causality, so as to pertain to man, to signify in terms of man, or experience in general.

Quote :

This totality Spinoza named "substance," a conception no less deceptive than our descriptive language. Ultimately, philosophy was never used, insofar as we regard the ancients, as an instrument for “explaining,” and even less as an instrument for describing; it was never intended to make one series of phenomena understandable in terms of another, but rather to extrapolate what was given, what was obvious, into the strange, unknown orders of the nature, to decontextualize the object of discussion with respect to the discourse of conventional language and subjective impression, with respect to the sphere of mere phenomenal appearance.

This is why philosophy has the justified name of being dangerous in cultures bent on preserving order - it makes the world larger. But at least it does so knowingly - as the world grows larger, as possibilities increase, mans perspectival scope widens as well.
Science has a way of increasing possibilities while narrowing the scope of the actor.

Quote :

This is the meaning of the Platonic aporia, and the silence into which the Socratic dialogues resolved themselves. Depending on what was intended to be submit to philosophical analysis, certain concepts such as God, the soul, or the freedom of the will were used to facilitate this process of “decontextualization” whose validity was never questioned because they were only posited in order to give reason a point of departure for mystifying, for making the familiar strange, not serving of themselves as positive expressions of knowledge, but merely as representations of this unknown order, or living revelations of the inscrutable, as Goethe said. All the ancient symbols of myth stand as so many analogies to them. These concepts are what moderns would brand with the category, “the poetic.” The method of primitive reasoning was a kind of exalted poetry wherein a particular was given to represent some universal which lied far beyond man's immediate experience. Thales discovered this method of reasoning.

It sounds like I should know more about Thales than I do (virtually nothing). In what work was this method first used?

Quote :

The particular did not depict the drama of mythopoeic forces, as in the primeval religions, but rather a momentary and living revelation of the inscrutable, to use Goethe's phrase once again. One must wonder as to which theory of knowledge, as to which idea of philosophy- the ancient or modern one, is most valuable, most worthy of the name. "

To put it very roughly; in science, "value" designates equality (for example, action equals - reaction), in philosophy, inequality (for example, good does not equal bad). In science there is no good or bad, and in philosophy there is no hermetic truth. Where the two meet can only be where the hermetic and the moral are manifested in one form of truth.

Quote :

" While the artist wants to stamp the eternal with the image of time, to extend the sphere of the living and perishing consciousness so as to encompass all the breadth of creation, mainly by way of realizing harmonies within the order of nature in which all essential reality is abandoned to semblance and phenomena, the philosopher wants to stamp time with the image of the eternal, to reduce his consciousness to a single point, to the ego, so as to encompass it by thought, mainly by dissolving those harmonies and relations, by introducing contrariety and antithesis into the orders of nature and thereby unriddling the impassioned and bodily existence in which he feels himself condemned back into the mute regions of thought. In this way he is afforded objectivity, a view beyond himself and the narrow bound of his egoic consciousness, so that he might comprehend the idea behind phenomenal appearance. True morality, on the other hand, which has been only profaned by the mocking idols of merely human happiness and virtue, in comparison to whose ardor the truths of man are only velleity and convenience, wants neither to extend the border of the egoic consciousness or to reduce that consciousness to a mere object that can be suborned by thought to repudiate its significance as the rich symbolism of the forces of nature and creation, but rather to reduce the creation itself to its substratum and fundament by realizing the “principium individuationis”, the essence of the will, by means of the will. Stimulated by the ideal ego through philosophy, by the thought of the eternal soul, the real ego aims to lay into that ideal its fullness and life, and realizes a morality. All moral realities thereby inevitably create their own objects, as love creates beauty, hope creates happiness, and freedom creates justice. The moral problem is the problem of realizing in the image of the eternal the meaning of the struggle of time and mortality and, in turn, realizing in mortality the promise of the eternal. When beheld with this hopeless and yet necessary question in one's mind, all the virtues and the sins of man become equally insufferable and petty folly."

This is why a morality must be "Great", if it is to make any claims to Truth. And this is the aforementioned challenge we're encountering where we want to forge the logic of value ontology into a morality - we can't do it by merely drawing logical implications - the implications must derive not only from the equality-requiring abstract but also from the equality-defying experiential - from what, observing an emergent and commanding species of man, we can only identify as "soul".