In Honor of Nietzsche’s Birthday

In honor of Nietzsche’s birthday I wrote about Sparta and its transvaluation of decadent Greek values. I also treated myself to a tiny bit of harshness this morning, using my vital energy in a way that promotes a superabundance of strength, health, and vitality. I listened to non-decadent music and ate simple but wholesome food, conscious of digestion and its role in conceptualization. I bought nothing and entered no marketplace. The mob and plebian instincts were kept safely at bay. I do this everyday, if at all possible.

These are the notes I gathered for the Nietzsche component of my current paper. Part One was submitted to Counter-Currents today. Look for it soon.

NIETZSCHE NOTES

Ecce Homo (Cambridge)

82. The Value of Enemies – To be able to be an enemy presupposes a strong nature; they need resistance and look for it. An aggressive pathos is an essential component of strength in the same way that revenge is for the weak. One can measure the strength of attackers by the opponents he chooses. You must have equality among enemies, as there is no glory in conquering what is beneath you.

On The Genealogy of Morality (Cambridge)

66. For we need another sort of spirit than we are likely to encounter in this age: spirits who are strengthened by wars and victories, for whom conquest, adventure, danger, and even pain have actually become a necessity; they would need to be acclimatized to thinner air; and to have a sort of sublime nastiness.

Beyond Good and Evil (Cambridge)

20. Method: concepts never arbitrary but always as part of a system – they grow in concert with others.

Zarathustra

22-24. Body as seat of life. Spirit and will as manifestations of bodily energy!

135. Via modernity we have grown smaller – our goal is a soft life, comfort, with fingers for mediocre work but no fists.

136. for a tree to grow tall it must put down hard roots in hard rock.

137. Put aside half willing . . . be the kind of people who can will . . . love with great love, love with great contempt.

137. Small becoming smaller, poorer, more sterile – poor weeds, poor soil.

The Anti-Christ

4. What is good? What is bad?

4. What type of human should be bred? More deserving of life.

5. Today’s man worth less than Renaissance man.

5. Christian war against instincts of the higher type – it has taken the side of everything weak and degenerate.

6. Thus, we have poor instincts, those that desire what is harmful for life/strength.

7. All of modernity is unhealthy!

9. Virtue must come from OUR needs, not those of the weak.

12. Human as sickly animal that suffers from its instincts.

13. Only people who suffer from life want to lie their way out of reality.

14. “Whenever the will to power falls off in any way, there will also be physiological decline, decadence. And when the most masculine virtues and drives have been chopped off the god of decadence, he will necessarily turn into a god of the physiologically retrograde, the weak.”

15. Propositions of ascending life: everything strong, brave, domineering, and proud.

17. Mild climate, gentle and liberal customs, absence of militarism, cheerfulness, quiet.

21. The instinct of resentment said no to everything ascending: success, power, beauty, self-affirmation – made affirmation of life as evil.

26. The polar opposite of struggle, of any feeling of doing-battle as modern instinct; incapacity for resistance as morality, blessed in peace, gentleness, and the Inability to be an enemy. We reject a life without exceptions, rejections, distance.

27. Ultras protect their institutions and traditions.

40. “Aristocraticism of the mind” (pathos of distance from vulgarity, failures, weaklings, and the lowly) has been undermined by the lie of equality of souls.

49. Truth not pleasurable but harsh!

50. How can Christianity convince us that a perfect soul can be carried in a cadaverous body?

Cate

104. Quote: without isolation there is nothing noble or lofty to be obtained; where all go [meaninglessness] follows alongside.

111. LANG MENTALITA: to despise neutrality – liberalism as a tepid philosophy for tepid souls devoid of conviction and always ready to compromise, to swim with the current, to dilute their ideas in a sea of moderation.

112. -> shame at avoiding conflict/war

178. LANG: current philistine education (the magazine readers of today who are the prototype moral ethical beings of modernity) -> deification of the everyday – they calmly appropriate and make of all their own personal cultural property, to be interpreted for their petty purposes and according to their petty standards. (Think – how we interact with classical Rome via tourism and greatness via pop culture.)

440. LANG MENTALITA Violence: via modernity we have grown smaller – our goal is a soft life, comfort, with fingers for mediocre work but no fists. (Z 135)

472. LANG MENTALITA’ Critique of Modernity: a relentless process of democratization, a tendency to exalt compassion and pity, a cult of facility and painlessness – all corrupting European civilization via a sheep-like herd animal mentality.

Late Notebooks

90. “For there to be a fact, a meaning must always first be projected in.”

91. “A greater degree of power corresponds to a different consciousness, feeling, desiring, a different perspectival view.” USED

93. Understanding moral judgments as symptoms of physiological thriving or failure as well as consciousness of the conditions of preservation and growth.

166. Breeding Strength: achieved by hardship; against education to create tools for society; against the progressive diminishment of man (in will, responsibility, self-assurance, capacity to set goals); learning opposite values; isolation/distance through interests of preservation; a free conscience toward what is forbidden.

242. “Each individual is also the whole line of development.” Then connected to ascending and descending lines and how Christianity normalizes the latter.

255. Regulating instincts (Think environment, beauty, stimulation to life or degeneracy).

**31. Relationship between morality and weak modern body!!

**68. Pathos of distance and how it works!

180. Transvaluation – saying YES to what everyone else says NO.

184. Almost all crimes involve the expression of qualities a man should not lack – HONOR

186. Highest esteem for greatness and great men/things (the beauty of Rome) – passion as prerogative, greatness outside morality, greatness in crime.

194. Seeking beyond to bourgeois morality (which make the COP of what we do have only spice and cruelty [otherwise for the weak and decadent]).

200. Education of the Will

201. festival of pride, exuberance, unruliness, divine Yes to oneself, mockery of M.

187. exception to modern man, who makes himself via circumstance and search for pleasure. Excepetion to CM, which is designed only for the average, all too average modern consumer – Beyond MM.

**166. Breeding Strength: achieved by hardship; against education to create tools for society; against the progressive diminishment of man (in will, responsibility, self-assurance, capacity to set goals); learning opposite values; isolation/distance through interests of preservation; a free conscience toward what is forbidden.

207-8. Modern man as intelligent slave animal, industrious, modest, inquisitive, multifarious, coddled, weak-willed, cosmopolitan chaos of affects. Ultra with will to be stronger – psychologically naked.

208. What decides rank is power, the rest is cowardice. Seek rank, destroy the middling.

210. Modernity seeks to shatter the strong, to discourage their courage, transform their pride into moments of unease and qualms of conscience, to make noble instincts poisonous and sick.

227. If you do away with strong oppositions and differences of rank, you also do away with strong love, noble disposition, the feeling of self.

255. Regulating instincts.

Gay Science

146. Live all or nothing.

160. A more virile warlike age will restore honor to bravery. The key to harvesting the most from existence is to live dangerously – against the modern world!