Eternally returning to Friedrich Nietzsche.
‘The Case of Wagner’:
Paralysis everywhere, exhaustion, numbness or hostility and chaos: both becoming increasingly obvious the higher you climb in the forms of organization. The whole does not live at all any more: it is cobbled together, calculated, synthetic, an artifact.
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‘The Utility and Liability of History’:
Certainly, you climb on the sunbeams of your knowledge up to the heavens, but also down into chaos. Your manner of traveling namely, climbing as a person of knowledge - is your doom; for you, solid ground crumbles away into uncertainty; your life is no longer supported by pillars, but only by spiderwebs that are torn apart by every new grasp of your knowledge.
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‘Skirmishes of an Untimely Man’, aphorism 44:
Great human beings are like the dynamite of great ages, representing the accumulation of enormous force; they always presuppose, historically and physiologically, that extensive protection, collection, accumulation, and storage procedures have taken place on their behalf, that an explosion has not taken place for a long time. If the tension has reached too high a level, the most accidental stimulus will be enough to bring a 'genius', a 'deed', a great destiny into the world. And the environment, the age, the 'Zeitgeist', 'public opinion' - none of these matter!
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‘The Utility and Liability of History’:
… human beings or ages that serve life by passing judgment on and destroying a past are always dangerous and endangered human beings and ages. For since we are, after all, the products of earlier generations, we are also the products of their aberrations, passions, and errors indeed, of their crimes; it is impossible to free ourselves completely from this chain. If we condemn these aberrations and regard ourselves as free of them, this does not alter the fact that we are descended from them.
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‘What the Germans Lack’:
We need educators who are themselves educated, thoughtful, noble spirits, proven at every moment, proven by words and silences, the products of cultures that have grown ripe and sweet, - not the scholarly morons that schools and universities offer young people…
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‘Skirmishes of an Untimely Man’, aphorism 18:
Nothing seems rarer to me these days than genuine hypocrisy… Hypocrisy belongs to an age of strong faith: where people do not give up their faith even when they are forced into pretending to adopt another…
How do you compromise yourself these days? By having consistency. By walking in a straight line. By meaning fewer than five things at once. By being genuine…
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‘The Case of Wagner’:
But it is taken to be true: so everything is fine.
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‘What the Germans Lack’:
This is the first preliminary schooling for spirituality: not to react immediately to a stimulus, but instead to take control of the inhibiting, excluding instincts. Learning to see, as I understand it, is close to what an unphilosophical way of speaking calls a strong will: the essential thing here is precisely not 'to will', to be able to suspend the decision. Every characteristic absence of spirituality, every piece of common vulgarity, is due to an inability to resist a stimulus - you have to react, you follow every impulse. In many cases this sort of compulsion is already a pathology, a decline, a symptom of exhaustion…
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Edvard Munch, ‘Friedrich Nietzsche’:
