I don't think you need other people to justify your actions for you.

Although he critiqued Christianity, one of the lesser understood aspects of Nietzsche's philosophy is that he was a bit of a "fan" of the primative Christianity of Christ, prior to the church and the disciples take. In fact Nietzsche subsumes the framework of Christ into the detaila of his noble time. Not the teachings of Christ but the way he operated. We can see from AC 33 and 39 what he subsumes from Christ's framework. Which allows for one to "feel blessed," in the moment.

An 1881 Fragment of Nietzsche's:

The society [die Gesellschaft] first educates the single being [das Einzelwesen], forms him into a half or full individual [Individuum]; it does NOT form itself from single beings, not from contracts of such beings! At most an individual is necessary as a central point [Kernpunkt] (a leader), and this individual is only "free" in relation to the lower or higher level of the others. So: the state [der Staat] does not originally suppress individuals: they do not yet exist! The state makes it possible for humans [Menschen] to exist in the first place, as herd animals [Heerdenthieren]. We are only then taught our drives and affects: they are not original [Ursprüngliches]! There is no "state of nature" [Naturzustand] for them! As parts of a whole, we participate in its living conditions [Existenzbedingungen] and its functions, and incorporate the experiences and judgments we have gained in the process.These later come into conflict [Kampf] and relationship [Relation] with one another when the bonds of the society disintegrate: within himself he must bear out [ausleiden] the after-effects of the social organism, he must atone [abbüßen] for the unsuitability of judgments, experiences, and living conditions that were suitable for a whole, and finally he comes to create his possibility of existence as an individual [Existenzmöglichkeit als Individuum] through reorganization and assimilation (excretion) of the drives within himself.

, I should point out that Nietzsche's philosophy was quite a balancing act, and there are all sorts of aphorisms about living in the here and now, in the "gateway of this moment," by understanding the riddle of eternal recurrence and Amor Fati. One could make several tomes on this from his works and fragments. That's why her refers to systematizers as backworlds men.

still toying with Platontic representations of a "True Nietzschean?" Cute, hehe.

Where as I do enjoy a good joust with Nietzsche's philosophy, I also don't desire to leave an overly bitter aftertaste with Badenusthra on the lesson Nietzsche teaches in the 65th Aphorism of Beyond Good and Evil... that is that "the charm of knowledge would be slight were there not so much embarrassment to overcome on the route to knowledge!"

But if you desire...

Banning "Hate Speech" is just another version of "woke." Banning Hate Speech means the government ought to ban most religious denominations too.

It’s more of a metaphor I suppose ...
Humans have a wide range of instincts. Left unchecked many of these more aggressive instincts could destroy you like the scorpion that stings itself—recklessness, violence, generalized hostility, pride, domination etc. Though to be certain so too can many of the "selfless" instincts, by giving too much of you away such that you have nothing.

Let's put that aside for a moment, because I want to bring up a point... men like Hobbes, Rousseau, and Locke, have it all wrong. There is no individual before society. Society crestes the individuals. There is no such thing as self-contained individual who come together to form society. Humans always have been social animals.

Organized society/the state doesn't start out with the conception or aim to supress the individual because there simply aren't any individuals. A state produces herd mentality from the get go, humans who can live together, coordinate, and share values and practices. We are not born with fully original drives, but rather we learn them socially. When the bonds of society come into conflict with each other, they begin to disintegrate, this is when individuals become possible through inheriting contradictory impulses, judgements, and experiences that were once coherent in the larger social body. This could be due to various reasons, like witnessing something from another culture/society/nation that seems profound to you, books from other cultures, though also there could be an inclination born of strength, something like skepticism that keeps you from fully integrated within society... these days there is so much "bleeding" through the boundaries with technology this is why some nations attempt to put up a national filter on certain technologies that requires a VPN to bypass. This is why many Americans want that border wall so badly for example to stop the "corruption" that occurs from this culture "bleed through."

Since no culture is really pure-bred anymore we begin to see more and more individuals appearimg on the stage with a variety of values that come from all over the world. But this process of differentiation is a painful process, it creates a certain style of suffering within the individual through the internalized conflict. One either attempts to integrate back into societ and quiet the war within, or one takes to the task of reorganizing and reassimilating to their new individual drives. One who loves freedom, is a warrior. Freedom is the will to be responsible for our "idios." To be ready and willing to sacrifice one’s self for one's "idios." Even at the expense of happiness.

What I mean by the tyrant within are those inexorable and terrible instincts of an individual which challenges the authority of the state/society through their own great discipline. The tyrant, although terrible, like the uncouth barbarian, reigns in their most destructive instincts.

As to the "eternal" consider this passage from Julian Jaynes book on the origin of consciousness, which details this Tyrant within across different ages:

The deep voice was so loud and so clear, everyone must have heard it. He got up and walked slowly away, down the stairs of the boardwalk to the stretch of sand below. He waited to see if the voice came back. It did, its words pounding in this time, not the way you hear any words, but deeper,

. . . as though all parts of me had become ears, with my fingers hearing the words, and my legs, and my head too. “You’re no good,” the voice said slowly, in the same deep tones. “You’ve never been any good or use on earth. There is the ocean. You might just as well drown yourself. Just walk in, and keep walking.” As soon as the voice was through, I knew by its cold command, I had to obey it. . .

The patient walking the pounded sands of Coney Island heard his pounding voices as clearly as Achilles heard Thetis along the misted shores of the Aegean. And even as Agamemnon “had to obey” the “cold command” of Zeus, or Paul the command of Jesus before Damascus, so Mr. Jayson waded into the Atlantic Ocean to drown. — Julian Jaynes, Origin of Consciousness

Speaking from my own experience with this tyramt within, the most effed up part about it all is that the free man, in the here and now, is always a few steps shy of being possessed by this tyrant within. One wars against the tyrant within from allowing it to take completely control, but utilizes him to control and organize the chaos within. In this way, we always are our own worst enemy. But these are the very instincts which creates a warrior, and molds and shapes the free individual. How does this free individual fight what he loves and what he hates (the tyrant)? By accepting all of who he is, in all of his beauty and in all of his horror, by overcoming one's self in their opposite...

I suppose that's enough to answer your question, at least from my perspective.

there is a tyrant within you...that in todays world is seen as despicable...but I say embrace who you are in all of your beauty and in all of your horror, accept yourself wholly. But obviously dont give in to the tyrant. But rather channel that mother effr into your passions.

I don’t disagree with you to a certain point I suppose what you're getting at is that there are a large number of certain things determined about us that are out of our control. Though, dare I say that, simply on account of you being here, and engaging with philosophy, that there is some inclination born of strength, to ask forbidden questions, and to know yourself, to understand, and to overcome certain traits about yourself that you may not agree with outright, but that you could find a way to sublimate any of those "evils" you find within yourself into something less destructive, and into your own more creative drives that you do agree with? As a way of accepting all of who you are?

All your thoughts are your own responsibility, and thus due to you.

This "Science of Happiness" seems like a petty book written by an ignorant author who cannot understand that they simply hate who they are... Like Paul Ree.

1st: All production within the body is product of our desire.

2nd: Happiness is achieved as a byproduct from overcoming that which prevents us from achieving our desires.

3rd: Killing off ones desires causes a low strength of will, as the drives at the summit of ones rank ordering of drives have that many less desires to overcome. Thus they're not very strong desires.

4th: There is no right or wrong action in the gateway of this moment even if it be looking back or looking forward. Not doing either or would be a folly, and only Fortune's fool would benefit from such a life style.

5th: We can always step back and not make it a chronic habit to stagnate and languish in the past or be anxious over our future. And although aiming at a goal is often ineffective, as @Outlander points out in a recent shoutbox comment. One can still aim at the future by DOING in the here and now. Find something you enjoy doing, throw yourself into it, and build a habit into the muscle memory. Whether or not you're recognized in life, posthumously, or never at all, well, so be it. But there's no harm in aspiring to be something you're not currently. Transfigure suffering through sublation into a higher affirmation of life, where the very negation becomes the motor of creation.

Ye be a necromancer, reviving dead threads! Or perhaps you're a God?(Which I will come to address after rubutting Baden's posthumous betrayal in slighting and slandering Nietzsche as only a literary artist, something very common for Platonists to do as they cannot go beyond their generic representations of what a philosopher is)

Your quite dated, and common all too common, veiled insult aside: Nietzsche was a philosopher, but more importantly, Nietzsche was a psychologist, the first modern psychologist before Freud. This is what differentiates Nietzsche above and beyond all other philosophers before him.

Nietzsche understood that the desolation of the real world offers little to no consolation to man. He details this fact quite succinctly in the opening aphorisms of Birth of Tragedy where man is confronted by the Titans, aka those titanic forces of nature that reign hell down upon a people before they have developed a way to contest these titanic forces. This contesting of the titanic forces of nature was achieved through the very same impulses which calls art into being. This allowed the Greeks to overturn that life denying Silenian wisdom that they suffered from for so long. Furthermore, we see this time and again throughout Nietzsche's philosophy that it is through suffering and long obedience in the same direction that one begins to transfigure nihilism into something always worth living for:

that out of the original Titan thearchy of terror the Olympian thearchy of joy was evolved, by slow transitions, through the Apollonian impulse to beauty, even as roses break forth from thorny bushes. How else could this so sensitive people, so vehement in its desires, so singularly qualified for sufferings have endured existence, if it had not been exhibited to them in their gods, surrounded with a higher glory? The same impulse which calls art into being, as the complement and consummation of existence, seducing to a continuation of life, caused also the Olympian world to arise, in which the Hellenic "will" held up before itself a transfiguring mirror. Thus do the gods justify the life of man, in that they themselves live it—the only satisfactory Theodicy! Existence under the bright sunshine of such gods is regarded as that which is desirable in itself, and the real grief of the Homeric men has reference to parting from it, especially to early parting: so that we might now say of them, with a reversion of the Silenian wisdom, that "to die early is worst of all for them, the second worst is—some day to die at all." — Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy § 3

Reflect the above passage with the below passage and you'll come to understand why Nietzsche actually lamented the concept that "Gott ist tot."

The essential thing "in heaven and in earth" is, apparently (to repeat it once more), that there should be long OBEDIENCE in the same direction, there thereby results, and has always resulted in the long run, something which has made life worth living; for instance, virtue, art, music, dancing, reason, spirituality—anything whatever that is transfiguring, refined, foolish, or divine. The long bondage of the spirit, the distrustful constraint in the communicability of ideas, the discipline which the thinker imposed on himself to think in accordance with the rules of a church or a court, or conformable to Aristotelian premises, the persistent spiritual will to interpret everything that happened according to a Christian scheme, and in every occurrence to rediscover and justify the Christian God:—all this violence, arbitrariness, severity, dreadfulness, and unreasonableness, has proved itself the disciplinary means whereby the European spirit has attained its strength, its remorseless curiosity and subtle mobility; granted also that much irrecoverable strength and spirit had to be stifled, suffocated, and spoilt in the process (for here, as everywhere, "nature" shows herself as she is, in all her extravagant and INDIFFERENT magnificence, which is shocking, but nevertheless noble). — Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil § 188

That said, what this means is that man turns away from the world, to find consolation and comfort within their systematic modalities which merely occult the world and betrays it.

If one gives philosophy and philosophers half a chance, they almost invariably tend toward the worst excesses. More specifically, the probability is very high that they will devise an approach to reality and the world which in fact turns away from the world, occults it, and replaces it with a representation that supplants it and supposedly expresses its higher truth. This is a betrayal of the real world. — David F. Bell, Translator's Intro to Clément Rosset's Joyful Cruelty

Nietzsche was interested in the approbation of life OUTISDE of these systems, that's why Birth of Tragedy details that ART is the proper metaphysical activity of man. Because art springs forth from nature itself....

It was through psychology that Nietzsche discovered that all philosophers and priests before him had it ass backwards (except maybe Spinoza, and Montaigne [yeah, I know I know, "Montainge only wrote essays!" :nerd: —settle down]).

Nietzsche shows this fatal error in their thinking by detailing man creates the values of opposition and is inextricably intertwined with and fundamentally one in the same as any two heterogeneous and parallel values that bridge over their mutual term. When we apply this to the archaic psychology of yestermillenias the value of the Beast and the value of Gods is bridged over by their mutual term "man." Because they come from man's valuations which are all internalizations; God(s) being an ideal version of man's desires. However, the fatality occurs with the archaic psychology that projects God(s) outwardly and demands subordination to their ideal(s). In this sense, man creates a false antithesis of values by destroying the bridge for one to cross over into "becoming."

But for Nietzsche, as stated a moment ago, the opposition of values comes from within, this is why "man is the rope between the animal and the superman" and is fundamentally one in the same as these two values. Nietzsche's new psychology brings God inside of us such that we may now aim towards our ideal self without the idolatry of "whorshipping" ourselves out to external values that necessarily deny the fundamental condition of life: perspective.

It might even be possible that whatever creates the value of those fine and respected things exists in such a way that it is, in some duplicitous way, related to, tied to, intertwined with, perhaps even essentially the same as those undesirable, apparently contrasting things. Perhaps! — Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil § 2

This is why the Noble typeology for Nietzsche doesn't whore themselves out to others. Because all noble types affirm the demands of their life, rather than play a subordinate back seat role that sickens on lazy peace and cowardly compromise. The Noble type understands that freedom comes at the cost of laying down their own lives for their own cause.

Wagner contributes to nihilism by advancing the motif of the death of God, hence Nietzsche slaps a B. Wagner also whores himself out to ascetic values because he himself hated who he was in his later years. His ascetic ideals were idolatry in worshipping the antithesis to himself, "the antithesis to ruined swine."



All humans experience resentment, Nietzsche details this. The Noble type simply doesn't dwell within their resentment to the point of it becoming venomous and turning around on the self.

When the resentment of the noble type manifests itself, it fulfils and exhausts itself in an immediate reaction, and consequently instills no venom: on the other hand, it never manifests itself at all in countless instances, when in the case of the feeble and weak it would be inevitable. An inability to take seriously for any length of time their enemies, their disasters, their misdeeds—that is the sign of the full strong natures who possess a superfluity of moulding plastic force, that heals completely and produces forgetfulness: a good example of this in the modern world is Mirabeau, who had no memory for any insults and meannesses which were practised on him, and who was only incapable of forgiving because he forgot. Such a man indeed shakes off with a shrug many a worm which would have buried itself in another; it is only in characters like these that we see the possibility (supposing, of course, that there is such a possibility in the world) of the real "love of one's enemies." What respect for his enemies is found, forsooth, in an aristocratic man—and such a reverence is already a bridge to love! He insists on having his enemy to himself as his distinction. He tolerates no other enemy but a man in whose character there is nothing to despise and much to honour! On the other hand, imagine the "enemy" as the resentful man conceives him—and it is here exactly that we see his work, his creativeness; he has conceived "the evil enemy," the "evil one," and indeed that is the root idea from which he now evolves as a contrasting and corresponding figure a "good one," himself—his very self!

11

The method of this man is quite contrary to that of the aristocratic man, who conceives the root idea "good" spontaneously and straight away, that is to say, out of himself, and from that material then creates for himself a concept of "bad"! This "bad" of aristocratic origin and that "evil" out of the cauldron of unsatisfied hatred—the former an imitation, an "extra," an additional nuance; the latter, on the other hand, the original, the beginning, the essential act in the conception of a slave-morality — Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals § 10, First Essay

Keep up lads, I know it's hard to follow along when you're so used to being told how you ought to think in straightforward, but ever so awkward, platonic representations. And to be fair, our language is used in such a way that it is irreducibly platonic. So I get why you're so glued to Platonism. But Nietzsche's not a Platonist so you'll have to scrap that method of thinking to see beyond your Mayan veil and into Nietzsche's.

That is, after all, one of the great powers of the Dionysian: to be able to don the masks of other great minds.

Other people would never of had the pleasure or displeasure of meeting me! What a shame that would be. :cool: I wear sunglasses even inside, cause when you're cool the sun shines on you 24 hours a day!

Well, it tends to be hot in your part of the world, which increases pore size, which allows more dirt to get in and cause boils. It is a cheap and effective way to protect health which means it's a cheap and effective way to protect beauty and serves to highlight beauty also. Changing genders is mostly people listening to their instincts (thus may not be a completely intelligible thing) combined with a certain need for autonomy over themselves.

Funny thing about hijabs is your people forget why it's worn, and it's not for religious reasons. The girl saying "this is how I express myself, was a defense mechanism because she knew no other way, and no other expression. Everyone loses sight of meta over time. Because the ontological is more potent. They realize that the values don't match their expectations, they find more likeness online, or they stick closer to their nationalism. In the past 10-15 internet has exploded in your part of the world. So the complacent "dream" is distorted back into the desolation of the real.

to that, I'd say that the subjective has always been the objectivity of the subject in question.

I find asymmetry even in the human to be beautiful at times, especially when it's worn well. I even prefer it over symmetry as far as fashion details.
Example:
https://www.demobaza.com/pages/collections

I have a few pieces of art I enjoy wearing from this designer.

it would seem the majoroty need such a dream. That doesn't mean it has to be your truth(s).

Shakespeare was based at times. You know what is bad by understanding what is injurious to you. You know what is good by understanding what revitalizes you.

proof for my own personal opinions? I think that's baked into me spewing them out.

Beauty is the great stimulus to life affirmation that transfigures suffering into meaning. Without beauty there is only nihilism.

Beauty is subjective, not objective.

the absence of beauty is never important honestly lol. Surgery makes them all look the same, that doesn't really equate to beauty.

Common Knowledge is generally a granted...

https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/press/ncvs-trans-press-release/#:~:text=Press%20Press%20Releases-,Transgender%20people%20over%20four%20times%20more%20likely%20than%20cisgender%20people,Key%20Findings

Transgender people are over four times more likely than cisgender people to experience violent victimization, including rape, sexual assault, and aggravated or simple assault, according to a new study by the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law. In addition, households with a transgender person had higher rates of property victimization than cisgender households. — From above.

The very heart of the problem of Euripides that ended up in Aesthetic Socratism, which idolizes only the intelligible as "Good."

Though to be certain Joy too is inchoate. In that one cannot fully place a finger on what it is that brings someone to such a state of ecstasy.

The most decisive word, however, for this new and unprecedented esteem of knowledge and insight was spoken by Socrates when he found that he was the only one who acknowledged to himself that he knew nothing while in his critical pilgrimage through Athens, and calling on the greatest statesmen, orators, poets, and artists, he discovered everywhere the conceit of knowledge. He perceived, to his astonishment, that all these celebrities were without a proper and accurate insight, even with regard to their own callings, and practised them only by instinct. "Only by instinct": with this phrase we touch upon the heart and core of the Socratic tendency. Socratism condemns therewith existing art as well as existing ethics; wherever Socratism turns its searching eyes it beholds the lack of insight and the power of illusion; and from this lack infers the inner perversity and objectionableness of existing conditions. From this point onwards, Socrates believed that he was called upon to, correct existence; and, with an air of disregard and superiority, as the precursor of an altogether different culture, art, and morality, he enters single-handed into a world, of which, if we reverently touched the hem, we should count it our greatest happiness. — Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy 13

I couldn't determine that for others. That's all up to the individual and whatever forces drive them. What I know is that whatever is injurious to me, is injurious period.

it does not seem to follow from this alone that it is necessarily better — Count Timothy von Icarus

It's not about better or worse, it's just simply how one becomes who they are, by following what drives them. If one chooses to sublimate a destructive drive through the reconciliation of it's inverse drive then you're getting into Nietzsche's self overcoming... the resentful type choose the onslaught of what is different than itself through defending objective morality. There is no reconciliation, no bridge to their love. That is the problem with binding oneself to objective external values.

The whole point behind Thus Spoke Zarathustra is that it's a Dithyramb, which means you self-abnegate and don the masks of the many characters within, experience the rhyme and rhythm, flow, and tempo of its style, experience the tone of the scene and how they shift throughout the symbolic imagery of the entire constellations of thought throughout it.

The true power of the Dionysian way of life is that it's capable of donning the masks of many through the process of self-abnegation, whereas the Apollonian is the individuation of these masks through a certain tyranny in self-mastery.

Just reading a sterilized analysis of Thus Spoke Zarathustra is missing the point.

All things profound love the mask, and this is why Nietzsche declares the Greeks were Superficial out of their Profundity.

Good, and I ought to keep telling you you'll fail then to push you harder. Thats how a one up attitude works.

sediments of past judgements. Those past judgements being inaccurate.

Aye.

No, meaning your curiosity to learn was limited in comparison with your need to try and one up someone. So you clearly have a limit rather than an interest in learning. At least Learning about Nietzsche. It's quite apparent you're fond of your own inaccuracies on Nietzsche's philosophy. So stick with your inaccuracies, and just know Nietzsche's philosophy isn't for you.

challenges don't mean limits.

that depends on the person. Those who thrive under the compulsions of external values ought to live under a system of external values.

Those with their own strong organizing drive would find living under an external value system to be stifling.

The point being grow into the plant you're meant to be.

Nihilists for example have low organizing drives and want no gods nor masters....

Very Nietzschean of you to encourage quitting. :lol: — praxis

You even saying this shows you think one must create themselves... it's why I harped on that point.

As I posted above, it's painfully obvious you didn't read it, or you failed to understand... Nietzsche's philosophy just isn't in your capacity, it's why you struggle with it so much, attempting to struggle through it is ignoring your higher drives.

In these matters great wisdom, perhaps even the highest wisdom, comes into activity: in these circumstances, in which nosce teipsum would be the sure road to ruin, forgetting one's self, misunderstanding one's self... Meanwhile the organising "idea," which is destined to become master, grows and continues to grow into the depths,—it begins to command, it leads you slowly back from your deviations and aberrations, it prepares individual qualities and capacities, which one day will make themselves felt as indispensable to the whole of your task — Nietzsche

Nosce te ipsum, know yourself by knowing your limits. And you apparently don't know yours.

It is actually.

Jist drop Nietzsche, you obviously have too hard a time understanding him.

More or less I don't give a fuck what you didn't say, I'm explaining will to power to you, not asserting wtf you said. And you're too dense to pick it up.

You got this insecurity about failing Aesthetic Socratism.

You seem to be saying that wtp is my feeling better about it if it — praxis

Errr, yo dude, you do you. But that's not what I said at all.

WtP is obeying the tyranny of your highest drives that differentiate you into you. There is no existentialism to it at all. You dont "create" yourself, you simply obey the tyranny that is you. If your highest drive is inherently destructive then you can sublimate it into another drive. Reconcile it to something in the same vein hence tragedy was born out of the Dionysian destructive drives being sublimated in the Apollonian order.

whatever that means

Here's what you said

Does anyone feel better about the Nietzschean notion of power—embodying it as a lifestyle? — praxis

Which consequently isn't you saying you don't think WtP is defined by how you feel about.

It's you asking if people feel better about Nietzsche's notion of it...

And yeah, if a person understands the concept intuitively without reading Nietzsche or even after reading Nietzsche I'm pretty sure there are plenty of people who prefer living to their strongest drives. Rather than living to some political dogma.

It's about living to your internal values rather than external values.

We see this more and more today with people yearning to embrace their own internal drives. In sex, in social, in academics. People dropping out of the "thou shalt" train to live towards "I will"

I guess I'm just hella confused about this:

I would feel better about it if lead to greater meaning (creativity, self-overcoming, and life affirmation) than the conventional definition of power. I can’t say how I feel more plainly than that. — praxis

Because that's essentially what will to power is...

All life is will to power, and thus the differentiating egg/seed etc etc is an example of it.

Check out BGE 188. Which details that tyranny of forces that embodies even language and how the long obedience in the same direction always reveals something worth living for. This isn't about "creating yourself" through picking yourself up by the bootstraps... this is about understanding the tyranny of your highest drives that differentiate your existence.

From Ecce Homo

At this point I can no longer evade a direct answer to the question, how one becomes what one is. And in giving it, I shall have to touch upon that masterpiece in the art of self-preservation, which is selfishness. ... Granting that one's life-task—the determination and the fate of one's life-task—greatly exceeds the average measure of such things, nothing more dangerous could be conceived than to come face to face with one's self by the side of this life-task. The fact that one becomes what one is, presupposes that one has not the remotest suspicion of what one is. From this standpoint even the blunders of one's life have their own meaning and value, the temporary deviations and aberrations, the moments of hesitation and of modesty, the earnestness wasted upon duties which lie outside the actual life-task. In these matters great wisdom, perhaps even the highest wisdom, comes into activity: in these circumstances, in which nosce teipsum would be the sure road to ruin, forgetting one's self, misunderstanding one's self, belittling one's self, narrowing one's self, and making one's self mediocre, amount to reason itself. Expressed morally, to love one's neighbour and to live for others and for other things may be the means of protection employed to maintain the hardest kind of egoism. This is the exceptional case in which I, contrary to my principle and conviction, take the side of the altruistic instincts; for here they are concerned in subserving selfishness and self-discipline. The whole surface of consciousness—for consciousness is a surface—must be kept free from any one of the great imperatives. Beware even of every striking word, of every striking attitude! They are all so many risks which the instinct runs of "understanding itself" too soon. Meanwhile the organising "idea," which is destined to become master, grows and continues to grow into the depths,—it begins to command, it leads you slowly back from your deviations and aberrations, it prepares individual qualities and capacities, which one day will make themselves felt as indispensable to the whole of your task,—step by step it cultivates all the serviceable faculties, before it ever whispers a word concerning the dominant task, the "goal," the "object," and the "meaning" of it all. Looked at from this standpoint my life is simply amazing. For the task of transvaluing values, more capacities were needful perhaps than could well be found side by side in one individual; and above all, antagonistic capacities which had to be free from the mutual strife and destruction which they involve. An order of rank among capacities; distance; the art of separating without creating hostility; to refrain from confounding things; to keep from reconciling things; to possess enormous multifariousness and yet to be the reverse of chaos—all this was the first condition, the long secret work, and the artistic mastery of my instinct. Its superior guardianship manifested itself with such exceeding strength, that not once did I ever dream of what was growing within me—until suddenly all my capacities were ripe, and one day burst forth in all the perfection of their highest bloom. I cannot remember ever having exerted myself, I can point to no trace of struggle in my life; I am the reverse of a heroic nature. To "will" something, to "strive" after something, to have an "aim" or a "desire" in my mind—I know none of these things from experience. Even at this moment I look out upon my future—a broad future!—as upon a calm sea: no sigh of longing makes a ripple on its surface. I have not the slightest wish that anything should be otherwise than it is: I myself would not be otherwise.... But in this matter I have always been the same. I have never had a desire. A man who, after his four-and-fortieth year, can say that he has never bothered himself about honours, women, or money!—not that they did not come his way.... It was thus that I became one day a University Professor—I had never had the remotest idea of such a thing; for I was scarcely four-and-twenty years of age. In the same way, two years previously, I had one day become a philologist, in the sense that my first philological work, my start in every way, was expressly obtained by my master Ritschl for publication in his Rheinisches Museum.[4] (Ritschl—and I say it in all reverence—was the only genial scholar that I have ever met. He possessed that pleasant kind of depravity which distinguishes us Thuringians, and which makes even a German sympathetic—even in the pursuit of truth we prefer to avail ourselves of roundabout ways. In saying this I do not mean to underestimate in any way my Thuringian brother, the intelligent Leopold von Ranke....)

The more contrasting forces within... meaning that there are tons of forces stacking up in rank order. The highest of which will be so strong that they define you. That is if you're not sickened on lazy peace and cowardly compromise, attempting to quell the war within.

This is why ploticizing over those who are self aware is such a crock of shit, they are differtiating into that tyranny of their highest drives. Through living the best life they know how. Through a style of innocence in their instincts.

The will to power isn't about Coveting power.

Birth of Tragedy 12

Before we name this other spectator, let us pause here a moment in order to recall our own impression, as previously described, of the discordant and incommensurable elements in the nature of Æschylean tragedy. Let us think of our own astonishment at the chorus and the tragic hero of that type of tragedy, neither of which we could reconcile with our practices any more than with tradition—till we rediscovered this duplexity itself as the origin and essence of Greek tragedy, as the expression of two interwoven artistic impulses, the Apollonian and the Dionysian.

To separate this primitive and all-powerful Dionysian element from tragedy, and to build up a new and purified form of tragedy on the basis of a non-Dionysian art, morality, and conception of things—such is the tendency of Euripides which now reveals itself to us in a clear light.

In a myth composed in the eve of his life, Euripides himself most urgently propounded to his contemporaries the question as to the value and signification of this tendency. Is the Dionysian entitled to exist at all? Should it not be forcibly rooted out of the Hellenic soil? Certainly, the poet tells us, if only it were possible: but the god Dionysus is too powerful; his most intelligent adversary—like Pentheus in the "Bacchæ"—is unwittingly enchanted by him, and in this enchantment meets his fate. The judgment of the two old sages, Cadmus and Tiresias, seems to be also the judgment of the aged poet: that the reflection of the wisest individuals does not overthrow old popular traditions, nor the perpetually propagating worship of Dionysus, that in fact it behoves us to display at least a diplomatically cautious concern in the presence of such strange forces: where however it is always possible that the god may take offence at such lukewarm participation, and finally change the diplomat—in this case Cadmus—into a dragon. This is what a poet tells us, who opposed Dionysus with heroic valour throughout a long life—in order finally to wind up his career with a glorification of his adversary, and with suicide, like one staggering from giddiness, who, in order to escape the horrible vertigo he can no longer endure, casts himself from a tower. This tragedy—the Bacchæ—is a protest against the practicability of his own tendency; alas, and it has already been put into practice! The surprising thing had happened: when the poet recanted, his tendency had already conquered. Dionysus had already been scared from the tragic stage, and in fact by a demonic power which spoke through Euripides. Even Euripides was, in a certain sense, only a mask: the deity that spoke through him was neither Dionysus nor Apollo, but an altogether new-born demon, called Socrates. This is the new antithesis: the Dionysian and the Socratic, and the art-work of Greek tragedy was wrecked on it. What if even Euripides now seeks to comfort us by his recantation? It is of no avail: the most magnificent temple lies in ruins. What avails the lamentation of the destroyer, and his confession that it was the most beautiful of all temples? And even that Euripides has been changed into a dragon as a punishment by the art-critics of all ages—who could be content with this wretched compensation?

Let us now approach this Socratic tendency with which Euripides combated and vanquished Æschylean tragedy.

We must now ask ourselves, what could be the ulterior aim of the Euripidean design, which, in the highest ideality of its execution, would found drama exclusively on the non-Dionysian? What other form of drama could there be, if it was not to be born of the womb of music, in the mysterious twilight of the Dionysian? Only the dramatised epos: in which Apollonian domain of art the tragic effect is of course unattainable. It does not depend on the subject-matter of the events here represented; indeed, I venture to assert that it would have been impossible for Goethe in his projected "Nausikaa" to have rendered tragically effective the suicide of the idyllic being with which he intended to complete the fifth act; so extraordinary is the power of the epic-Apollonian representation, that it charms, before our eyes, the most terrible things by the joy in appearance and in redemption through appearance. The poet of the dramatised epos cannot completely blend with his pictures any more than the epic rhapsodist. He is still just the calm, unmoved embodiment of Contemplation whose wide eyes see the picture before them. The actor in this dramatised epos still remains intrinsically rhapsodist: the consecration of inner dreaming is on all his actions, so that he is never wholly an actor.

How, then, is the Euripidean play related to this ideal of the Apollonian drama? Just as the younger rhapsodist is related to the solemn rhapsodist of the old time. The former describes his own character in the Platonic "Ion" as follows: "When I am saying anything sad, my eyes fill with tears; when, however, what I am saying is awful and terrible, then my hair stands on end through fear, and my heart leaps." Here we no longer observe anything of the epic absorption in appearance, or of the unemotional coolness of the true actor, who precisely in his highest activity is wholly appearance and joy in appearance. Euripides is the actor with leaping heart, with hair standing on end; as Socratic thinker he designs the plan, as passionate actor he executes it. Neither in the designing nor in the execution is he an artist pure and simple. And so the Euripidean drama is a thing both cool and fiery, equally capable of freezing and burning; it is impossible for it to attain the Apollonian, effect of the epos, while, on the other hand, it has severed itself as much as possible from Dionysian elements, and now, in order to act at all, it requires new stimulants, which can no longer lie within the sphere of the two unique art-impulses, the Apollonian and the Dionysian. The stimulants are cool, paradoxical thoughts, in place of Apollonian intuitions—and fiery passions—in place Dionysean ecstasies; and in fact, thoughts and passions very realistically copied, and not at all steeped in the ether of art.

Accordingly, if we have perceived this much, that Euripides did not succeed in establishing the drama exclusively on the Apollonian, but that rather his non-Dionysian inclinations deviated into a naturalistic and inartistic tendency, we shall now be able to approach nearer to the character æsthetic Socratism. supreme law of which reads about as follows: "to be beautiful everything must be intelligible," as the parallel to the Socratic proposition, "only the knowing is one virtuous." With this canon in his hands Euripides measured all the separate elements of the drama, and rectified them according to his principle: the language, the characters, the dramaturgic structure, and the choric music. The poetic deficiency and retrogression, which we are so often wont to impute to Euripides in comparison with Sophoclean tragedy, is for the most part the product of this penetrating critical process, this daring intelligibility. The Euripidian prologue may serve us as an example of the productivity of this, rationalistic method. Nothing could be more opposed to the technique of our stage than the prologue in the drama of Euripides. For a single person to appear at the outset of the play telling us who he is, what precedes the action, what has happened thus far, yea, what will happen in the course of the play, would be designated by a modern playwright as a wanton and unpardonable abandonment of the effect of suspense. Everything that is about to happen is known beforehand; who then cares to wait for it actually to happen? —considering, moreover, that here there is not by any means the exciting relation of a predicting dream to a reality taking place later on. Euripides speculated quite differently. The effect of tragedy never depended on epic suspense, on the fascinating uncertainty as to what is to happen now and afterwards: but rather on the great rhetoro-lyric scenes in which the passion and dialectics of the chief hero swelled to a broad and mighty stream. Everything was arranged for pathos, not for action: and whatever was not arranged for pathos was regarded as objectionable. But what interferes most with the hearer's pleasurable satisfaction in such scenes is a missing link, a gap in the texture of the previous history. So long as the spectator has to divine the meaning of this or that person, or the presuppositions of this or that conflict of inclinations and intentions, his complete absorption in the doings and sufferings of the chief persons is impossible, as is likewise breathless fellow-feeling and fellow-fearing. The Æschyleo-Sophoclean tragedy employed the most ingenious devices in the first scenes to place in the hands of the spectator as if by chance all the threads requisite for understanding the whole: a trait in which that noble artistry is approved, which as it were masks the inevitably formal, and causes it to appear as something accidental. But nevertheless Euripides thought he observed that during these first scenes the spectator was in a strange state of anxiety to make out the problem of the previous history, so that the poetic beauties and pathos of the exposition were lost to him. Accordingly he placed the prologue even before the exposition, and put it in the mouth of a person who could be trusted: some deity had often as it were to guarantee the particulars of the tragedy to the public and remove every doubt as to the reality of the myth: as in the case of Descartes, who could only prove the reality of the empiric world by an appeal to the truthfulness of God and His inability to utter falsehood. Euripides makes use of the same divine truthfulness once more at the close of his drama, in order to ensure to the public the future of his heroes; this is the task of the notorious deus ex machina. Between the preliminary and the additional epic spectacle there is the dramatico-lyric present, the "drama" proper.

Thus Euripides as a poet echoes above all his own conscious knowledge; and it is precisely on this account that he occupies such a notable position in the history of Greek art. With reference to his critico-productive activity, he must often have felt that he ought to actualise in the drama the words at the beginning of the essay of Anaxagoras: "In the beginning all things were mixed together; then came the understanding and created order." And if Anaxagoras with his "νοῡς" seemed like the first sober person among nothing but drunken philosophers, Euripides may also have conceived his relation to the other tragic poets under a similar figure. As long as the sole ruler and disposer of the universe, the νοῡς, was still excluded from artistic activity, things were all mixed together in a chaotic, primitive mess;—it is thus Euripides was obliged to think, it is thus he was obliged to condemn the "drunken" poets as the first "sober" one among them. What Sophocles said of Æschylus, that he did what was right, though unconsciously, was surely not in the mind of Euripides: who would have admitted only thus much, that Æschylus, because he wrought unconsciously, did what was wrong. So also the divine Plato speaks for the most part only ironically of the creative faculty of the poet, in so far as it is not conscious insight, and places it on a par with the gift of the soothsayer and dream-interpreter; insinuating that the poet is incapable of composing until he has become unconscious and reason has deserted him. Like Plato, Euripides undertook to show to the world the reverse of the "unintelligent" poet; his æsthetic principle that "to be beautiful everything must be known" is, as I have said, the parallel to the Socratic "to be good everything must be known." Accordingly we may regard Euripides as the poet of æsthetic Socratism. Socrates, however, was that second spectator who did not comprehend and therefore did not esteem the Old Tragedy; in alliance with him Euripides ventured to be the herald of a new artistic activity. If, then, the Old Tragedy was here destroyed, it follows that æsthetic Socratism was the murderous principle; but in so far as the struggle is directed against the Dionysian element in the old art, we recognise in Socrates the opponent of Dionysus, the new Orpheus who rebels against Dionysus; and although destined to be torn to pieces by the Mænads of the Athenian court, yet puts to flight the overpowerful god himself, who, when he fled from Lycurgus, the king of Edoni, sought refuge in the depths of the ocean—namely, in the mystical flood of a secret cult which gradually overspread the earth.