1.+Nietzsche 

(p. 375)
 * Let us break from every flower **
 * one fine blossom for our power **
 * and two leaves to wind a wreath! **
 * Let us dance like troubadours **
 * between holy men and whores, **
 * between god and world beneath! **

**So many retroactive forces are still needed!**
( §34, p. 104)

"God is dead; but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown." (p. 167)

...Within sentences, we read: "Let us even beware of believing that the universe is a machine: it is certainly not constructed for one purpose, and calling it a 'machine' does it far too much honor." (p. 167)

And again: "Let us beware of saying that there are laws in nature. There are only necessities: there is nobody who commands, nobody who obeys, nobody who trespasses." (p. 168)

And among my favorite sentences Nietzsche penned: "When will we complete our de-deification of nature? When may we begin to 'naturalize' humanity in terms of a pure, newly discovered, newly redeemed nature?" (p. 169)

On metaphysics: "Metaphysics is still needed by some; but so is that impetuous //demand for certainty// that today discharges itself among large numbers of people in a scientific-positivistic form. The demand that one //wants// by all means that something should be firm(while on account of the ardor of this demand one is easier and more negligent about the demonstration of this certainty) -- this, too, is still the demand for a support, a prop, in short, that //instinct of weakness// which, to be sure, does not create religious, metaphysical systems, and convictions of all kinds but -- conserves them." (p. 288)

The articulation of humanism as exceptionalism, and identification of those exceptional features of humanity:

"I love to lose myself for a good while, Like animals in forests and the sea,..." (§33, p. 55)

"Gradually, man has become a fantastic animal that has to fulfill one more condition of existence than any other animal: man //has to// believe, to know, from time to time //why// he exists; his race cannot flourish without a periodic trust in life -- without faith in reason //in life//." (§1, p. 75)

Nietzsche clearly stealing from Stirner: "Morality trains the individual to be a function of the herd and to ascribe value to himself only as a function." (p. 174)

"Joy and desire appear together in the stronger that wants to transform something into a function; joy and the wish to be desired appear together in the weaker that wants to become a function. "Pity is essentially of the former type: an agreeable impulse of the instinct for appropriation at the sign of what is weaker. But it should be kept in mind that 'strong' and 'weak' are relative concepts." (p. 176)

"If someone cannot defend himself and therefore does not want to, we do not consider this a disgrace; but we have little respect for anyone who lacks both the capacity and the good will for revenge -- regardless of whether it is a man or a woman." (p. 126)


 * "I'd sooner have people steal from me than be surrounded by scarecrows and hungry looks; that is my taste. And this is by all means a matter of taste, nothing more." ** (p. 204) This metaphor is intended to be extended a bit... after all, the title of the aphorism is "Justice."

"I welcome all signs that a more virile, warlike age is about to begin, which will restore honor to courage above all. For this age shale prepare the way for one yet higher, and it shall gather the strength that this higher age will require some day -- the age that will carry heroism into the search for knowledge and that will // wage wars // for the sake of ideas and their consequences. To this end we now need many preparatory courageous human beings who cannot very well leap out of nothing, any more than out of the sand and slime of present-day civilization and metropolitanism -- human beings who know how to be silent, lonely, resolute, and content and constant in invisible activities; human beings who are bend on seeking in all things for what in them must be // overcome // ; human beings distinguished as much by cheerfulness, patience, unpretentiousness, and contempt for all great vanities as by magnanimity in victory and forbearance regarding the small vanities of the vanquished; human beings whose judgment concerning all victors and the share of chance in every victory and fame is sharp and free; human beings with their own festivals, their own working days, and their own periods of mourning, accustomed to command with assurance but instantly ready to obey when that is called for -- equally proud, equally serving their own cause in both cases; more endangered human beings, more fruitful human beings, happier beings! For believe me: ** the sacred for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment is -- to //live dangerously//! Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius! Send your ships into uncharted seas! Live at war with your peers and yourselves! Be robbers and conquerors as long as you cannot be rulers and possessors, you seekers of knowledge! ** Soon the age will be past when you could be content to live hidden in forests like shy deer. At long last the search for knowledge will reach out for its due; it will want to // rule // and // possess //, and you with it!" (p. 228)

A fundamental paradox for Nietzsche, who wants to love, but can only love the abstraction from the actual ... while simultaneously rejecting the move to abstraction! This is Nietzsche's great tragedy, the will to love and yet nothing worthy of his love but the Ideas that he refuses.

"I do not love my neighbor near, but wish he were high up and far. How else could he become my star?" (§53, p. 53)

Nietzsche addresses boredom as motivating "the craving to do something", and yet this is "a craving to suffer and to find in their suffering a probable reason for action, for deed." p. 117

p. 118
 * "Pardon me, my friends, I have ventured to paint my //happiness // on the wall." **



"...there are, if only rarely, men who would rather perish than work without any // pleasure // in their work. [...] They do not fear boredom as much as work without pleasure; they actually require a lot of boredom if // their // work is to succeed. For thinkers and all sensitive spirits, boredom is that disagreeable 'windless calm' of the soul that precedes a happy voyage and cheerful winds. They have to bear it and must wait for its effect on them. [...] To ward off boredom at any cost is vulgar, no less than work without pleasure." (p. 108)

Nietzsche acknowledges in Freudian fashion that one does not "**suppress the passions**" but rather "forbids oneself the expression of the passions", "their language and gestures..." (p. 112)

Nietzsche's problem with science is in its pretensions of vulgar realism and certification of Truth. It's science's **experimentation** which he can appreciate. A clarification: "I favor any //skepsis// to which I may reply: 'Let us try it!' But I no longer wish to hear anything of all those things and questions that do not permit any experiment. This is the limit of my 'truthfulness'; for there courage has lost its right." This suggests Feyerabend's epistemological anarchism. (p. 115)

Related: "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. As if reality stood unveiled before you only, and you yourselves were perhaps the best part of it ... But in your unveiled state are not even you still very passionate and dark creatures compared to fish, and still far too similar to an artist in love? And what is 'reality' for an artist in love? You are still burdened with those estimates of things that have their origin in the passions and loves of former centuries. Your sobriety still contains a secret and inextinguishable drunkenness. Your love of 'reality,' for example -- oh, that is a primeval 'love.' Every feeling and sensation contains a piece of this old love; and some fantasy some prejudice, some unreason, some ignorance, some fear, and ever so much else has contributed to it and worked on it. That mountain there! That cloud there! What is 'real' in that? Subtract the phantasm and every human contribution from it, my sober friends! If you can! If you can forget your descent, your past, your training -- all of 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 intoxication is as respetable as your faith that you are altogether incapable of intoxication." (p. 121)

The natural scientists have a faith of their own that they rest on: "**the faith in a world that is supposed to have its equivalent and its measure in human thought and human valuations -- a 'world of truth' that can be mastered completely and forever with the aid of our square little reason. What? Do we really want to permit existence to be degraded for us like this -- reduced to a mere exercise for a calculator and an indoor diversion for mathematicians?** Above all, one should not wish to divest existence of its rich ambiguity: that is a dictate of good taste, gentlemen, the taste of reference for everything that lies beyond your horizon. That is the only justifiable interpretation of the world should be one in which you are justified because one can continue to work and do research scientifically in your sense (you really man, mechanistically?) -- an interpretation that permits counting, calculating, weighing, seeing, and touching, and nothing more -- that is a crudity and naiveté, assuming that it is not a mental illness, an idiocy." (p. 335)

"It is easier to cope with a bad conscience than to cope with a bad reputation." (p. 115)

**On nobility:** "What makes a person 'nobel'? Certainly not making sacrifices, for those frantic with lust also make sacrifices. Certainly not following some passion, for there are contemptible passions. Certainly not doing something for others, without selfishness: perhaps nobody is more consistently selfish than those who are noble. Rather: the passion that attacks those who are noble is peculiar, and they fail to realize this. It involves the use of a rare and singular standard and almost a madness: the feeling of heat in things that feel cold to everybody else; the discovery of values for which no scales have been invented yet; offering sacrifices on altars that are dedicated to an unknown god; a courage without any desire for honors; a self-sufficiency that overflows and gives to men and things." (p. 117)

**On language:** "The degree of the historical sense of any age may be inferred from the manner in which this age makes translations and tries to absorb former ages and books." (p. 136-7) "Why do you write?" -- "I have not discovered any other way of getting rid of my thoughts." (p. 146)

"...it seems to me as if the subtlety and strength of consciousness always were proportionate to a man's (or animal's) // capacity for communication //, and as if this capacity in turn were proportionate to the // need for communication. // But this last point is not to be understood as if the individual human being who happens to be a master in communicating and making understandable his needs must also be most dependent on others in his needs. But it does seems to me as if it were that way when we consider whole races and chains of generations: Where need and distress have forced men for a long time to communicate and to understand each other quickly and subtly, the ultimate result is an excess of this strength and art of communication -- as it were, a capacity that has gradually been accumulated and now waits for an heir who might squander it... " (p. 298)

"Consciousness is really only a net of communication between human beings; it is only as such that it had to develop; a solitary human being who lived like a beast of prey would not have needed it. That our actions, thoughts, feelings, and movements enter our own consciousness -- at least a part of them -- that is the result of a 'must' that for a terribly long time lorded it over man. As the most endangered animal, he needed help and protection, he needed his peers, he had to learn to express his distress and to make himself understood; and for all of this he needed 'consciousness' first of all, he needed to 'know' himself what distressed him, he needed to 'know' how he felt, he needed to 'know' what he thought. For, to say it once more: Man, like every living being, thinks continually without knowing it; the thinking that rises to consciousness is only the smallest part of all this -- the most superficial and worst part -- for only this conscious thinking takes the form of words, which is to say signs of communication, and this fact uncovers the origin of consciousness." (p. 298-9)

From Karin's selection of Blanchot in seminar: " One can suppose that if, with Nietzsche, thought had need of force conceived as a "play of forces and waves of forces" in order to think both plurality and difference, even if it entails exposure to all the difficulties of an apparent dogmatism, it is because force supports the presentiment that difference is movement; or, more exactly, that difference determines the time and the becoming in which difference is inscribed, just as the Eternal Return will make it be felt that difference is experienced as repetition and that repetition is difference. Difference is not an intemporal rule, it does not have the fixity of law." (p. 162)

Mike points to: "Interpreting myself, I always read Myself into my books. I clearly need  Some help. But all who climb on their own way  Carry my image, too, into the breaking day." (p. 49)

Wynne points to an important piece on language and realism in Blanchot:
 * Nietzsche thinks "the world" //is// "a text"?**

'In thinking the world, Nietzsche thinks it as a text. Is this a metaphor? It is a metaphor. Thinking the world at this depth that is not reached by the light of the day, he substitutes for it a metaphor that seems to restore to the day all its prerogatives. For what is a text? A set of phenomena that hold themselves in view; and what is writing if not bringing into view, making appear, bringing to the surface? Nietzsche does not think highly of language: "Language depends upon the most naive prejudices. If our reading of things discovers problems and disharmonies, this is because we think only in the form of language—and thus believe in the 'eternal truth'of'reason' (for example: subject, attribute, etc.). We cease to think when we refuse to do so under the constraint of language."'

On dialectics, Heather points to an important point Nietzsche makes on cause and effect: "Cause and effect: such a duality probably never exists; in truth we are confronted by a continuum out of which we isolate a couple of pieces, just as we perceive motion only as isolated points and then infer it without ever actually seeing it." (p. 173)

Also on cause and effect: "The propositions, "no effect without a cause," "every effect in turn a cause" appear as generalizations of much more limited propositions: "no effecting without willing"; "one can have an effect only on beings that will"; "no suffering of an effect is ever pure and without consequences, but all suffering consists of an agitation of the will" (toward action, resistance, revenge, retribution). But in the pre-history of humanity both sets of propositions were identical: the former were not generalizations of the latter, but the latter were commentaries on the former." (p. 183)