21 August 2009

More Nietzsche

57 To the realists – You sober people who feel well armed against passion and fantasies and would like to turn your emptiness into a matter of pride and an ornament: you call yourselves realists and hint that the world really is the way it appears to you ... That mountain there! That cloud there! What is 'real' in that? Subtract the phantasm and and every human contribution from it, my sober friends! If you can! If you can forget your descent, your past, your training – all your humanity and animality. There is no 'reality' for us – not for you either, my sober friends. We are not nearly as different as you think, and perhaps our good will to transcend our intoxication is as respectable as your faith that you are altogether incapable of intoxication.

58 Only as creators! – This has given me the greatest trouble and still does: to realise that what things are called is incomparably more important than what they are. The reputation, name, and appearance, the usual measure and weight of a thing, what it counts for – originally almost always wrong and arbitrary, thrown over things like a dress and altogether foreign to their nature and even to their skin – all this grows from generation unto generation, merely because people believe in it, until it gradually grows to be a part of the thing and turns into its very body. What at first was appearance becomes in the end, almost invariably, the essence and is effective as such. How foolish it would be to suppose that one only needs to point out this origin and this misty shroud of delusion in order to destroy the world that counts for real, so-called 'reality'. We can destroy only as creators. – But let us not forget this either: it is enough to create new names and estimations and probabilities in order to create in the long run new 'things'.


I cannot believe it's taken me this long to read this. Ye gods!

I am an idiot!

Idiot!

Idiot!

1 comment:

Rose said...

The fucking Nietzsche is driving me insane!!! Let's hope the Arthur Ransome phase lasts for a while, eh?

visitors since 29 March 2004.