Wednesday, July 4, 2012

Nietzsche: the Uses and Abuses of History

"Schiller speaks of the understanding of the intelligent person: he does not see some things which even the child sees; he does not hear some things which even the child hears; these “things” are precisely the most important thing. Because he does not understand this, his understanding is more childish than the child and more simplistic than simple mindedness, in spite of the many shrewd wrinkles on his parchment-like features and the virtuoso practice of his fingers unraveling complexities. The reason is that he has destroyed and lost his instinct. Now he can no longer let the reins hang loose, trusting the “divine animal,” when his understanding wavers and his road leads through deserts." http://records.viu.ca/~johnstoi/nietzsche/history.htm

"...no one has a higher claim on our veneration than the man who possesses the drive and the power for justice. For in justice are united and hidden the highest and rarest virtues, as in a bottomless sea that receives streams from all sides and absorbs them into itself."

"...he wants truth, not merely as cold knowledge without consequences, but as the ordering and punishing judge, truth not as a selfish possession of the individual but as the sacred entitlement to shift all the boundary stones of egotistical possessions, in a word, truth as the Last Judgment and not at all as something like the captured trophy desired by the individual hunter." 

"And thus I hope history can realize that its significance is not in universal ideas, like some sort of blossom or fruit, but that its value comes directly from reworking a well-known, perhaps habitual theme, a daily melody, in a stimulating way, elevating it, intensifying it to an inclusive symbol, and thus allowing one to make out in the original theme an entire world of profundity, power, and beauty."

"...a religion which is to be turned into historical knowledge under the power of pure justice, a religion which is to be scientifically understood through and through, is by the end of this process immediately destroyed."


  

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