Nietzsche on Philosophers

Beyond Good and Evil summary

• Most of the conscious thinking of a philosopher is secretly guided and forced into certain channels by his instincts. “Being conscious” is not the opposite of what is instinctive.
• Behind all logic and its seeming sovereignty of movement, there stand valuations, or more clearly, physiological demands for the preservation of a certain type of life. For example, definite should be worth more than the indefinite.
• The falseness of a judgement is not necessarily an objection to a judgement. The question is to what extent it is life-promoting, life preserving, species-preserving, perhaps species-cultivating.
• Without accepting logic, without measuring reality against invented world, without a constant falsification of the world by means of numbers, man could not live.
• To explain how the incomprehensible metaphysical claims of a philosopher came about, it is always well to ask first: at what morality does he aim? Every philosopher would like to represent itself as the ultimate purpose of existence.
• Scholars who are scientific may really have a drive for knowledge. A scientific man is like an independent clockwork, that once well wound, works on vigorously.
• In philosopher, there is nothing that is impersonal. His morality bears decided and decisive witness to who he is
• Nature is wasteful, indifferent, without purposes and considerations, without mercy and justice. Human beings could not live according to this indifference. Living is precisely wanting to be other that Nature.
• Stoics says “Live according to life”. How could you not do that? Why make a principle of what you yourselves are and must be. Stoics wants to impose his morality, his ideal, on nature.
• As soon as any philosophy begins to believe in itself, it always creates the world in its own image. It cannot do otherwise. Philosophy is the most spiritual will to power, to the “creation of the world”, to the first cause.
• Kantian question “How are synthetic judgments a priori possible?” should be replaced by another question, “Why is belief in such judgments necessary?” to what extent, it is life-preserving, and life-cultivating.
• A living thing seeks above all to discharge its strength. Life itself is will to power. Self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent results.
• Physics is only an interpretation, not a world-explanation. It is based on belief on the senses. What can be seen and felt is fascinating,persuasive, and convincing.
• The charm of platonic way of thinking, which was a noble way of thinking, consisted in resistance to obvious sense-evidence. The charm is enjoyed by a stronger and more demanding senses than our contemporaries, who knew how to find a higher triumph in remaining masters of their senses.
• Physics is a right imperative for a tough, industrious race of machinists and bridge-builders of the future, who have nothing but rough work to do.
• There is no such thing such “absolute knowledge”, and “thing in itself”
• A refutable theory attracts subtler minds. Again and again, someone comes along who feels he is strong enough to refute it.
• Willing is something complicated, something that is a unit only as a word. Let us be more cautious and “unphilosophical” about what is wiling. Willing is sensations.Willing is an affect. The affect of superiority in relations to him who must obey.
• “Freedom of the will” is the expression for state of delight of the person who commands and at the same time identifies himself with the executor of the order, and who enjoys triumph over obstacles, but thinks within himself that it was really his will itself that overcame them.
• Individual philosophical concepts grow up in connection and relationship with each other. The most diverse philosophers keep filling in a definite fundamental scheme of possible philosophies. Their thinking is far less a discovery than a recognition, a remembering, a return and a homecoming to a remote primordial, and inclusive household of the soul.
• Owing to the unconscious domination and guidance by grammatical functions, everything is prepared for a similar development and sequence of philosophical system. Philosophers within the domain of the Ural-Altaic languages will found on paths of thought different from those of the Indo-Germanic people and the Muslims. The spell of certain grammatical functions is the spell of physiological valuations and racial conditions.
• One should use “cause” and “effect” only as pure concepts, that is to say, as conventional fictions for the purpose of designation and communication, not for explaination.
• “Unfreedom of the will” is regarded as a problem from two entirely opposite standpoints, but always in a personal manner: 1. Some will not give up their “responsibility”, their belief in themselves, the personal right to their merits at any price (the vain races belong to this class). 2. Others do not wish to be answerable for anything, or blamed for anything, and owing to an inward self- contempt, seek to lay the blame for themselves somewhere else.
• The doctrine of the development of the will to power. A doctrine that has “the heart” against it. A doctrine of the reciprocal dependence of the “good” and the “wicked”. A doctrine regards even the effects of hatred, envy, covetousness, and the lust to rule as conditions of life, as factors essentially, fundamentally must be present in the general economy of life. It must, then, be further enhanced if life is to be further enhanced. This hypothesis is a very strange, painful and dangerous insight. There are good reasons why everyone should keep away from it. But those who once drifted there, like Nietsche did, they destroy morality, and stand beyond good and evil.