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 * Nietzsche, //The Gay Science//**

27. The Wanderer ‘The path ends! Abyss and deathly silence loom!’ You wanted this! Your will strayed to its doom! Now wanderer, stand! Be keen and cool as frost! Believe in danger now and you – are lost.

61. The Sceptic Speaks Your life is halfway spent, The clock hand moves, your soul now quakes with fear! Long roaming forth it went And searched but nothing found – and wavers here?

Your life is halfway spent: In pain and error how the hours did crawl! Why can you not relent? – Just this I seek – some reason for it all!

To observe how differently the human drives have grown and still could grow depending on the moral climate – that alone involves too much work for even the most industrious; it would require whole generations, and generations of scholars who would collaborate systematically, to exhaust the points of view and the material. The same applies to the demonstration of the reasons for the variety of moral climates (‘why does the sun of one fundamental moral judgement and primary value-standard shine here – and another one there?’). Yet another new project would be to determine the erroneousness of all these reasons and the whole essence of moral judgements to date. If all these jobs were done, the most delicate question of all would emerge in the foreground: whether science is able to furnish goals of action after having proved that it can take such goals away and annihilate them; and then an experimenting would be in order, in which every kind of heroism could find satisfaction – an experimenting that might last for centuries and eclipse all the great projects and sacrifices of history to date. So far, science has not yet built its Cyclops-buildings; but the time for that will come, too. (34-35)

Not predestined for knowledge. – There is a stupid humility that is by no means rare, and those afflicted with it are altogether unfit to become votaries of knowledge. For as soon as a person of this type perceives something striking, he turns on his heel, as it were, and say to himself, ‘You have made a mistake! Where were your senses? This cannot be the truth!’ And then, instead of looking and listening more keenly again, he runs away, as if intimidated, from the striking thing and tries to shake it from his mind as fast as possible. For his inner canon says: ‘I want to see nothing that contradicts the prevalent opinion. Am I made to discover new truths? There are already too many old ones.’

It is a deep fundamental stroke of luck that science discovers things that stand up under examination and that furnish the basis, again and again, for further discoveries – after all, it could be otherwise! Indeed, we are so convinced of the uncertainty and fantastical quality of our judgements and of the eternal change of human laws and concepts that it actually amazes us how well the results of science stand up! --- To lose firm ground for once! To float! To err! To be mad! – that was part of the paradise and debauchery of former ages, whereas our bliss is like that of the shipwrecked man who has climbed ashore and is standing with both feet on the firm old earth – marveling because it does not bob up and down. (59)


 * Blanchot, Maurice. 1993. “Reflections on Nihilism.” **

Nietzsche possessed a nearly infinite capacity for precise ideas that were separate and rigorously formulable, each one of them alive in the manner of a tiny organism. The very loose unity of all these thoughts resided in the secret gathering intention that remained always present to Nietzsche alone: a hidden and tormenting presence. (138)

even to the point of permitting the simplified interpretations that over time were imposed by the Nietzsche legend. (139)

no one could be less skeptical or more further removed from tranquil negation; because of the terrible seriousness, the constant will of the Yes—this will that goes in search of the true in the depths where truth is no stranger to contradiction—everything must at a certain moment turn around. (140)

never conceive of this whole—which is non-unitary—as a system (141)

Nietzsche is inexhaustible in expressing this happiness in knowing and seeking freely, infinitely, with everything at risk and without having the sky as limit, or even truth, the all-too-human truth, as measure. (145)

On the other hand, he saw no less clearly that when the world no longer has any meaning, or when it becomes the pseudo-meaning of some great possible non-sense, what alone can overcome the disorder of this void is the cautious movement of science; its power to give itself precise rules and to create meaning, but of a sort that is limited, and in this sense operational— thus the power at once to extend to the furthest limits and to restrict most closely its field of application. (145-146)

But we must not hasten to disregard this objection, for science is essentially productive: knowing that the world is not to be interpreted, science transforms it, and through this transformation there passes the nihilistic exigency that is proper to it—the power of nothingness that science has made into the most effective of tools, but with which it plays a dangerous game. Knowledge is fundamentally dangerous. --Destruction and creation, when they bear upon the essential, says Nietzsche, are hardly distinguishable: the risk, therefore, is immense. Moreover, with its probity and measured steps, science bears this very contradiction within itself: it can produce a world in which scientists would no longer continue to exist as such, a world in which they would no longer be permitted to work according to the objectivity of knowledge, but rather only according to the arbitrary sense of the new world. In other words, by making science possible, nihilism becomes science's possibility—which means that, by it, the human world can perish. (146)

Until now we thought nihilism was tied to nothingness. How ill-considered this was: nihilism is tied to being. Nihilism is the impossibility of being done with it and of finding a way out even in that end that is nothingness. It says the impotence of nothingness, the false brilliance of its victories; it tells us that when we think nothingness we are still thinking being. Nothing ends, everything begins again; the other is still the same. Midnight is only a dissimulated noon, and the great Noon is the abyss of light from which we can never depart... (149)

The aphorism works as a force that limits, encloses. A form that takes the form of a horizon: its own. We can see from this what is attractive about it, always drawn back into itself and with something somber, concentrated, obscurely violent about it, something that makes it resemble the crimes of Sade. (152)

Speech as fragment has a relation with the fact that man disappears; a fact more enigmatic than one might think, since man is in a sense the eternal or the indestructible and, as indestructible, disappears. Indestructible: disappearance. And this relation, too, is enigmatic. (155)

But the world is more profound. And perhaps one will respond that, when one speaks of the light of being, one is speaking metaphorically. But then why, among all possible metaphors, does the optical metaphor predominate? Why this light that as metaphor has become the source and the resource of all knowing, and thus subordinated all knowledge to the exercise of (a primary) metaphor? Why this imperialism of light? (162)

Light illuminates—this means that light hides itself: this is its malicious trait. Light illuminates: what is illuminated by light presents itself in an immediate presence that discloses itself without disclosing what makes it manifest. (162-163)

From //The Gay Science//

12. To a Friend of Light If you want to spare your eyes and your mind, Follow the sun from the shadows behind (13)

23. Interpretation If I read me, then I read into me: I can’t construe myself objectively. But he who climbs consuming his own might Bears me with him unto the brighter light.


 * Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” **

Moreover, the very question of truth, the right it appropriate to refute error and oppose itself to appearance, the manner in which it developed (initially made available to the wise, then withdrawn by men of piety to an unattainable world where it was given the double role of consolation and imperative, finally rejected as a useless notion, superfluous and contradicted on all sides) – does this not form a history, the history of an error we call truth? (80)

History is the concrete body of a development, with its moments of intensity, its lapses, its extended periods of feverish agitation, its fainting spells; and only a metaphysician would seek its soul in the distant ideality of origin. (80)

Nevertheless, we should not be deceived into thinking that this heritage is an acquisition, a possession that grows and solidifies; rather, it is an unstable assemblage of faults, fissures, and heterogeneous layers that threaten the fragile inheritor from within or from underneath... (82)

The body manifests the stigmata of past experience and also gives rise to desires, failings, and errors. These elements may join in a body where they achieve a sudden expression, but as often, their encounter is an engagement in which they efface each other, where the body becomes the pretext of their insurmountable conflict. (83)

Rather as Nietzsche demonstrates in his analysis of good and evil, it is a “non-place,” a pure distance, which indicates that the adversaries do not belong to a common space. (85)

...always questioned the form of history that reintroduces (and always assumes a suprahistorical perspective: a history whose function is to compose the finally reduced diversity of time into a totality fully closed upon itself; a history that always encourages subjective recognitions and attributes a form of reconciliation to all the displacements of the past; a history whose perspective on all that precedes it implies the end of time, a completed development. (86-87)

Nothing is allowed to stand above [the historian]; and underlying his desire for total knowledge is his search for the secrets that belittle everything: “base curiosity.” (91)

An in each of these souls, history will not discover a forgotten identity, eager to be reborn, but a complex system of distinct multiple elements, unable to be mastered by the powers of synthesis... (94)