Aphorists

"The philosopher John Searle once told me that reading Nietzsche was like drinking cognac — a sip was good, but you didn't want to drink the whole bottle."

"The realization that our mental functioning is largely irrational was arrived at by several thinkers at the same time, including Friedrich Nietzsche, ... Freud, who was much influenced by both Darwin and Nietzsche ... was its most profound and articulate exponent."

"If you try to put yourself into the mood of someone who is always alone, as Nietzsche was, you realize that your own consciousness then begins to stare into your own face. You are always your own speaker and your own listener; you are always looking into your own light, into your own eyes. And then you can well personify consciousness as your daily partner."

"Nietzsche, the eloquent and menacing prophet of an impending catastrophe whose exact nature he did not quite define, expressed this crisis of expectations better than anyone else. His very mode of literary exposition, by means of a succession of poetic and prophetic aphorisms containing visionary intuitions or unargued truths, seemed a contradiction of the rationalist system-building discourse of philosophy which he claimed to practise. His enthusiastic admirers multiplied among middle-class (male) youth from 1890. For Nietzsche, the avant garde decadence, pessimism and nihilism of the 1880s was more than a fashion. They were 'the logical end-product of our great values and ideals'. Natural science, he argued, produced its own internal disintegration, its own enemies, an anti-science. The consequences of the modes of thought accepted by nineteenth-century politics and economics were nihilist. The culture of the age was threatened by its own cultural products. Democracy produced socialism, the fatal swamping of genius by mediocrity, strength by weakness - a note also struck, in a more pedestrian and positivistic key, by the eugenists. In that case was it not essential to reconsider all these values and ideals and the system of ideas of which they formed a part, for in any case the 'revaluation of all values' was taking place? Such reflections multiplied as the old century drew to its end. The only ideology of serious calibre which remained firmly committed to the nineteenth-century belief in science, reason and progress was Marxism, which was unaffected by disillusion about the present because it looked forward to the future triumph of precisely those 'masses' whose rise created so much uneasiness among middle-class thinkers."

"One indication of the importance of Nietzsche is the pantheon of major twentieth century intellectuals whom he influenced. He was an influence on Jean-Paul Sartre and Hermann Hesse, major writers, both of whom won Nobel Prizes. He was an influence on thinkers as diverse in their outlooks as Ayn Rand and Michel Foucault. Rand's politics are classically liberal -- while Foucault's are far Left, including a stint as a member of the French Communist Party. There is the striking fact that Nietzsche was an atheist, but he was an influence on Martin Buber, one of the most widely-read theologians of the twentieth century. And Nietzsche said harsh things about the Jews ... but he was nonetheless admired by Chaim Weizmann, a leader of the Zionist movement and first president of Israel."

"Nietzsche ... does not shy from conscious exaggeration and one-sided formulations of his thought, believing that in this way he can most clearly set in relief what in his vision and in his inquiry is different from the run-of-the-mill."

"If in Nietzsche's thinking the prior tradition of Western thought is gathered and completed in a decisive respect, then the confrontation with Nietzsche becomes one with all Western thought hitherto."

"The theory of a will to power operating in every event provides the framework within which Nietzsche explains how the fictions of a world comprised of entities and of goods arise, as well as the illusory identities of knowing and morally acting subjects; how, with the soul and self-consciousness, a sphere of inwardness is constituted; how metaphysics, science, and the ascetic ideal achieved dominance ― and, finally, how subject-centered reason owes this entire inventory to the occurrence of an unsalutary, masochistic inversion of the very core of the will to power. The nihilistic domination of subject-centered reason is conceived as the result and expression of a perversion of the will to power."

"Nietzsche wanted to explode the framework of Occidental rationalism within which the competitors of Left and Right Hegelianism still moved. His antihumanism, continued by Heidegger and Bataille in two variations, is the real challenge for the discourse of modernity."

"The most disheartening tendency common among readers is to tear out one sentence from a work, as a criterion of the writer's ideas or personality. Friedrich Nietzsche, for instance, is decried as a hater of the weak because he believed in the Uebermensch. It does not occur to the shallow interpreters of that giant mind that this vision of the Uebermensch also called for a state of society which will not give birth to a race of weaklings and slaves."

"In Vienna one could hear interesting lectures on modern German prose and poetry. One could read the works of the young iconoclasts in art and letters, the most daring among them being Nietzsche. The magic of his language, the beauty of his vision, carried me to undreamed-of heights. [...] I had to do my reading at the expense of much-needed sleep; but what was physical strain in view of my raptures over Nietzsche? The fire of his soul, the rhythm of his song, made life richer, fuller, and more wonderful for me."

"Nietzsche was not a social theorist, but a poet, a rebel, and innovator. His aristocracy was neither of birth nor of purse; it was of the spirit. In that respect Nietzsche was an anarchist, and all true anarchists were aristocrats."

"The degree of introspection achieved by Nietzsche had never been achieved by anyone, nor is it ever likely to be achieved again."

"Nietzsche was the first to release the desire to know from the sovereignty of knowledge itself: to re-establish the distance and exteriority that Aristotle cancelled."

"Nietzsche sought a new sort of aristocracy of super- or above-men, which would be the ultimate goal of civilized existence. The sources of this Nietzschean idea were several. Darwin's theory of evolution suggested to Nietzsche the notion of humanity as an evolving species, although Nietzsche emphatically rejected the concept of the superman or above-man as the outcome of a biological process; in a sense, the superman or above-man is a spiritualized form of Darwinism."

"In Nietzsche's view, the death of God must also spell the death of Man—that is to say, the end of a certain lordly, overweening humanism—if absolute power is not simply to be transplanted from the one to the other. Otherwise humanism will always be secretly theological. It will be a continuation of God by other means."

"Only a professor of paradox could rank the obscure and dogmatic fragments of Heraclitus above the mellowed wisdom and the developed art of Plato. With all his philology, Nietzsche never quite penetrated to the spirit of the Greeks; never learned the lesson that moderation and self-knowledge (as taught by the Delphic inscriptions and the greater· philosophers) must bank, without extinguishing, the fires of passion and desire; that Apollo must limit Dionysus. Some have described Nietzsche as a pagan; but he was not that: neither Greek pagan like Pericles nor German pagan like Goethe; he lacked the balance and restraint that made these men strong. “I shall give back to men the serenity which is the condition of all culture,” he writes, but alas, how can one give what one has not? ...Foiled in his search for love, he turned upon woman with a bitterness unworthy of a philosopher, and unnatural in a man; missing parentage and losing friendship, he never knew that the finest moments of life come through mutuality and comradeship, rather than from domination and war. He did not live long enough, or widely enough, to mature his half-truths into wisdom. Perhaps if he had lived longer he would have turned his strident chaos into a harmonious philosophy. Truer of him than of the Jesus to whom he applied them, were his own words: “He died too early; he himself would have revoked his doctrine had he Teached” a riper age; “noble enough to revoke he was!” But death had other plans...He spoke with bitterness, but with invaluable sincerity; and his thought went through the clouds and cobwebs of the modern mind like cleansing lightning and a-rushing wind. The air of European philosophy is clearer and fresher now because Nietzsche wrote."

"Nietzsche's Just So Stories are terrific (old-style and new-style). They are a mixture of brilliant and crazy, sublime and ignoble, devastatingly acute history and untrammeled fantasy. If Darwin's imagination was to some degree handicapped by his English mercantile heritage, Nietzsche's was even more handicapped by his German intellectual heritage, but those biographical facts (whatever they are) have no bearing on the current value of the memes whose birth each attended so brilliantly."

"Friedrich Nietzsche saw—through the mists of his contempt for all things English—an even more cosmic message in Darwin: God is dead. If Nietzsche is the father of existentialism, then perhaps Darwin deserves the title of grandfather."

"The spirit of scientific investigation never ceased to impress [Nietzsche] as uniquely favorable not only for achieving knowledge but also for furnishing an atmosphere of dryness and clarity within which a man of genuinely intellectual conscience might function."

"Nietzsche was a man with a noble vision of man's future. His own delicacy, integrity, and courage shine through his writing. He was also free of the crude racism which was to be an important element of fascism, and he had only contempt for political anti-Semitism. But the fact remains that in various ways Nietzsche influenced fascism. Fascism may have abused the words of Nietzsche, but his words are singularly easy to abuse."

"Socrates was the plebeian dissector of an aristocratic society; Nietzsche is the aristocratic dissector of a plebeian society."

"Since Nietzsche frequently intends to shock his readers, they may be in a position to learn from him—providing they admit that what is shocking may also be true, and that one has not refuted a thinker by recognizing the shocking consequences of his thought."

"Nothing is more irritating than those works which “coordinate” the luxuriant products of a mind that has focused on just about everything except a system. What is the use of giving a so-called coherence to Nietzsche’s ideas, for example, on the pretext that they revolve around a central motif? Nietzsche is a sum of attitudes, and it only diminishes him to comb his work for a will to order, a thirst for unity. A captive of his moods, he has recorded their variations. His philosophy, a meditation on his whims, is mistakenly searched by the scholars for the constants it rejects."

"If Nietzsche had not ended in imbecility, Nietzscheism would end in imbecility. Thinking in isolation and with pride ends in being an idiot. Every man who will not have softening of the heart must at last have softening of the brain."

"Nietzsche's man of noble soul is an egoist (the very type whom Kant's philosophy of morals would seek to rule out a priori), not in the sense that he is "selfish", but in the sense that he feels himself to be a standard, and creator of values. Nietzsche buttresses his idea of the noble soul with an account of what we might call the natural satisfactions of an aristocrat. He describes the "aristocratic value equation" as "good = noble = powerful = happy = beloved of God". The noble morality, with its aggression, cunning, strong drives, its pride, is something to be feared. Nietzsche is not describing the "good" man, at least in any sense which Kant would recognize, but rather the superior specimen, the "great man". He is not a good man because he obeys the moral law, but is a source of values, a superior man, a man born to command, to inspire fear and awe, a man whose sense of his own power is a cause of both pride and nobility."

"Nietzsche follows the path till he reaches a complete and absolute nihilism never perhaps achieved before or since in human thinking. Human action is deprived not merely of any rational motive but of any super-rational motive. It becomes simply the expression of a biological urge to self-assertion ; the will to power. Standing beyond good and evil, and recognizing no conscious ultimate purpose, Nietzsche's superman is the perfect animal. Nietzsche is at the opposite pole to those who subordinate means to ends and hold that the end sanctifies the means. He believes only in action as a good in itself without reference to ends."

"Our conjecture that metaphysics is a substitute, albeit an inadequate one, for art, seems to be further confirmed by the fact that the metaphysician who perhaps had artistic talent to the highest degree, viz Nietzsche, almost entirely avoided the error of that of confusion. A large part of his work has predominantly empirical content. We find there, for instance, historical analyses of specific artistic phenomena, or an historical psychological analysis of morals, In the work, however, in which he expresses most strongly that which others express through metaphysics or ethics, in Thus Spake Zarathustra, he does not choose the misleading theoretical form, but openly form of art, of poetry."

"Nietzsche's philosophy, undoubtedly, revolves around the problem of rebellion. More precisely, it begins by being a rebellion. But we sense the change of position that Nietzsche makes. With him, rebellion begins with “God is dead,” which is assumed as an established fact; then it turns against everything that aims at falsely replacing the vanished deity and reflects dishonor on a world which doubtless has no direction but which remains nevertheless the only proving-ground of the gods. Contrary to the opinion of certain of his Christian critics, Nietzsche did not form a project to kill God. He found Him dead in the soul of his contemporaries. He was the first to understand the immense importance of the event and to decide that this rebellion on the part of men could not lead to a renaissance unless it was controlled and directed. Any other attitude toward it, whether regret or complacency, must lead to the apocalypse. Thus Nietzsche did not formulate a philosophy of rebellion, but constructed a philosophy on rebellion."

"The more exciting life is, the more absurd is the idea of losing it. This is perhaps the secret of that proud aridity felt in Nietzsche's work. In this connection, Nietzsche appears to be the only artist to have derived the extreme consequences of an aesthetic of the Absurd, inasmuch as his final message lies in a sterile and conquering lucidity and an obstinate negation of any supernatural consolation."

"It is Nietzsche's merit to have critically placed the problem of the relationship between life and truth and to have denounced the confusion between truth and what sustains, justifies, and legitimizes. However, the Nietzschean chant to life, the cry for the intensification of life to the detriment of “truth” etc., are simply Nietzsche's choice, not a part of his scientific (specifically, psychological) results. ... The way of truth, if it is really undertaken — and not only “proclaimed” in the apologetic discourse of the philosopher as a “seeker of truth” — must necessarily — so is the goal of my argument — lead to the non-being. ... If Nietzsche frightens you, then take your moral ideas to their last consequences, which will lead one to embrace a negative ethic, that is, an ethic in which truth will have absolute primacy over life."

"Kierkegaard's criticism of actual Christianity is an inner one; he does not confront Christianity, as, for example, Nietzsche does, with an alleged higher value, and test it by that and reject it."

"Who knew that if you merely represent the thought of Nietzsche or Schopenhauer in a fun way it would find such an audience? Some things, it seems, are always green."

"I've come to understand that the quality of memorability and inevitability which I assumed came from intense pleasure may actually have come from a kind of pain. That is to say that one learns from Nietzsche that there is something painful about meaning. Sometimes it is the pain of difficulty, sometimes the pain of being set a standard that one cannot attain."

"It is Nietzsche's merit that he was aware that to philosophize is radically problematic in the cultural, historicist dispensation. He recognized the terrible intellectual and moral risks involved. At the center of his every thought was the question “How is it possible to do what I am doing?” He tried to apply to his own thought the teachings of cultural relativism. This practically nobody else does. For example, Freud says that men are motivated by desire for sex and power, but he did not apply those motives to explain his own science or his own scientific activity. But if he can be a true scientist, i.e., motivated by love of the truth, so can other men, and his description of their motives is thus mortally flawed. Or if he is motivated by sex or power, he is not a scientist, and his science is only one means among many possible to attain those ends. This contradiction runs throughout the natural and social sciences. They give an account of things that cannot possibly explain the conduct of their practitioners."

"It is another matter, and one that objectively considered is to the praise of Nietzsche, that he thus hurled himself against the strongest and not the weakest point in the opposing front. With his discovery of the Crucified and His host he discovered the Gospel itself in a form which was missed even by the majority of its champions, let alone its opponents, in the 19th century. And by having to attack it in this form, he has done us the good office of bringing before us the fact that we have to keep to this form as unconditionally as he rejected it, in self-evident antithesis not only to him, but to the whole tradition on behalf of which he made this final hopeless sally."

"Nietzsche seems to have been unaware of the origin as well as of the modernity of the term “value” when he accepted it as a key notion in his assault on tradition. But when he began to devaluate the current values of society, the implications of the whole enterprise quickly became manifest. Ideas in the sense of absolute units had become identified with social values to such an extent that they simply ceased to exist once their value-character, their social status, was challenged. Nobody knew his way better than Nietzsche through the meandering paths of the modern spiritual labyrinth, where recollections and ideas of the past are hoarded up as though they had always been values which society depreciated whenever it needed better and newer commodities. Also, he was well aware of the profound nonsense of the new “value-free” science which was soon to degenerate into scientism and general scientific superstition and which never, despite all protests to the contrary, had anything in common with the Roman historians' attitude of sine ira et studio."

"Nietzsche's inverted Platonism, his insistence on life and the sensuously and materially given as against the suprasensuous and transcendent ideas which, since Plato, had been supposed to measure, judge, and give meaning to the given, ended in what is commonly called nihilism. Yet Nietzsche was no nihilist but, on the contrary, was the first to try to overcome the nihilism inherent not in the notions of the thinkers but in the reality of modern life. What he discovered in his attempt at “trans-valuation” was that within this categorical framework the sensuous loses its very raison d'être when it is deprived of its background of the suprasensuous and transcendent. “We abolished the true world: which world has remained? perhaps the world of appearances? . . . But no! together with the true world we abolished the world of appearances.” This insight in its elementary simplicity is relevant for all the turning-about operations in which the tradition found its end."

"Only Nietzsche and Blake know a wholly fallen Godhead, a Godhead which is an absolutely alien Nihil, but the full reversal of that Nihil is apocalypse itself, an apocalypse which is an absolute joy, and Blake and Nietzsche are those very writers who have most evoked that joy."

"Absolute nothingness is an ultimate ground of a purely apophatic mysticism, and it is even more primal in Mahayana Buddhism, just as it has been resurrected in the deepest expressions of a uniquely modern imagination. Nietzsche is the only Western thinker who has fully thought an absolute nothingness, although that nothingness is a deep even if elusive ground of Hegelian thinking, and of all of the fullest expressions of modern dialectical thinking and vision."

"They muddy the waters to make them look deep."

"The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself."

"If you crush a cockroach, you're a hero. If you crush a beautiful butterfly, you're a villain. Morals have aesthetic criteria."

"All I need is a sheet of paper and something to write with, and then I can turn the world upside down."

"Those who dance appear insane to those who cannot hear the music."

"Meaning and morality of one's life come from within oneself. Healthy, strong individuals seek self-expansion by experimenting and by living dangerously. Life consists of an infinite number of possibilities, and the healthy person explores as many of them as possible. Religions that teach pity, self-contempt, humility, self-restraint and guilt are incorrect. The good life is ever-changing, challenging, devoid of regret, intense, creative, and risky."

"A moral system valid for all is basically immoral."

"Most people are not seeking truth; they are searching for comfort in illusions."

"All things are subject to interpretation; whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not the truth."

"Nobody is more inferior than those who insist on being equal."