Sixteen Lessons From Nietzsche

A Nietzsche special issue of Cultural Capital

Hello,

Welcome to a Nietzsche special issue of Cultural Capital. I’ve been re-reading one of my favourite books, Nietzche’s The Joyous Science. It’s dazzling: a collection of aphorisms, short essays and one-paragraph polemics. It isn’t as systematic or as important as later books like The Genealogy of Morals or Beyond Good and Evil but it is incredibly enjoyable for a casual reader and probably the place to start if you’ve never read Nietzsche before. This is Nietzsche as the supreme anarchist and sceptic of Western civilisation throwing out ideas on everything from love, despair, noise, dissatisfaction, music, truth and more. He is also an extremely acute psychologist. His famous ideas about morality appear here too in less elaborated form. This book precedes most of the more off-putting later stuff about the ubermensch etc.

The Joyous Science is such an interesting book I thought it deserved a special issue of Cultural Capital. So this newsletter is devoted entirely to quotations from The Joyous Science. Perhaps “lessons” is over doing it but it sounded good in the title. I should say that I’ve chosen the quotations here because I think they are interesting not because I necessarily agree with them. You don’t have to agree with even half or a quarter of what Nietzsche says to find him stimulating and provoking. If you agreed with him about everything you would probably go mad.

Briefly in other news.

I wrote my column this week about the intensity of youthful genius.

And I appeared on the Englesberg Ideas podcast to talk about the rise of short form video and the dawn of the post literate society.

Friedrich Nietzsche by Edvard Munch

Sixteen Lessons From Nietzsche

On people who are ashamed of their feelings

In dealings with people who are ashamed of their feelings, one must be able to disguise one’s own; for such people take a sudden antipathy to anyone who catches them in a moment of tenderness, or enthusiasm, or intemperate rage, as if their deepest secrets had been discovered. If one wants to do them a kindness in such moments one should make them laugh, and utter some cold, cruel witticism – then their heart turns to ice, and they regain self-possession.

Clarity vs obscurity

Whoever knows that he is profound strives for clarity; whoever would like the crowd to think he is profound strives for obscurity.

How we rationalise convention

When people in France began to oppose the Aristotelian unities, and as a result others began to defend them, something occurred which we so often see but are reluctant to acknowledge – their defenders rationalized these rules and why they ought to exist, for no better reason than not to have to admit that they were accustomed to them and their authority, and no longer wanted them otherwise. And this is what people do and have always done with every prevailing morality and religion: the reasons and intentions behind the habit are always ‘interpolated’ into it when some begin to deny its authority, and ask for reasons and intentions. Herein lies the great dishonesty of conservatives in every era – they corrupt the text.

How love and music are alike

This is our experience of music: we must first learn to hear, make out and distinguish a figure and a melody at all, to isolate and demarcate it as a living thing in its own right; then it requires a certain amount of effort and goodwill for us to tolerate it despite its strangeness; we need to exercise patience towards its aspect and expression, and generosity of spirit towards what is odd about it – finally there comes a time when we are accustomed to it, have come to expect it, and we begin to suspect that we would miss it if it were gone; and now it continues to work its irresistible magic on us more and more, and does not stop until we have become its abject and enraptured lovers, who want nothing more from the world than to experience it again and again. This is not only the case with music: it is in just this way that we have learned to love all the things which we now love. We are always eventually rewarded for our goodwill, our patience, reasonableness and gentleness towards what is strange, by the strange thing slowly casting off its veil and presenting itself to us as something new and inexpressibly beautiful.

Morality and the fear of isolation

The reproach of conscience, even in the most conscientious, is weak when set against the feeling: ‘This and that are contrary to the wholesome traditions of your society.’ A cold look or lips curled in scorn by those with whom and for whom one was brought up strikes fear even in the strongest. What are we afraid of? Isolation! As the argument which rebuts even the best arguments for a person or cause! So speaks the sociable instinct in us.

The despair of great thinkers

The duller the vision, the greater the extent of the good! Hence the perpetual cheerfulness of ordinary people and children! Hence the heartache, the remorseful despair of the great thinkers!

People care more about agreeing with each other than they care about the truth

The greatest labour of human beings hitherto has been to agree with one another on a great many things, and to impose upon themselves a law of agreement – regardless of whether these things are true or false. This is the intellectual discipline which has preserved mankind – but the opposing impulses are still so powerful that one cannot speak of mankind’s prospects with much confidence. The image of things is constantly changing, and perhaps will continue to do so at an ever-hastening pace; it is always the choicest spirits who baulk at anything universally binding – those engaged in the pursuit of truth above all!

Christianity teaches moral scepticism

Even Christianity has made a great contribution to enlightenment: it taught moral scepticism in a very forceful and effective manner, accusing and deprecating with untiring patience and subtlety; it annihilated every individual’s belief in his own ‘virtue’; it wiped off the face of the earth those celebrated prigs of whom there were so many in antiquity, men who, confident in their own perfection, strutted about with all the dignity of a matador.

Thoughts are simpler than feelings

Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings – always darker, emptier and simpler than these.

Loud people

Those who have a very loud voice are almost incapable of thinking about subtle things.

How self-dissatisfaction drives greatness

In general, few people believe in themselves – and of those few, some possess this belief as a useful blindness or a partial eclipse of the intellect (what would they behold if they could get to the bottom of themselves!), while others must first acquire it; everything good, proficient or great that they do is in the first place an argument against the sceptic who dwells within them: it is a matter of convincing or persuading him, and that almost requires genius. Their greatness consists in their self-dissatisfaction.

The superior man is the poet and elaborator of his own life

The superior men are distinguished from the inferior by the fact that they see and hear unspeakably more, and see and hear more thoughtfully – and it is this which distinguishes man from the animals, and the superior animals from the inferior. The world always becomes fuller for him who grows up to the heights of humanity; there are always more interesting fishhooks dangled before him; he is constantly exposed to more stimuli and is likewise more susceptible to pleasure and pain – the superior man invariably becomes at the same time happier and unhappier. But a delusion remains his constant companion: he thinks he is merely a member of the audience before which the great drama of life is performed; he calls his nature contemplative, and thereby overlooks the fact that he himself is actually the poet and elaborator of his life.

Truth and natural selection

We have absolutely no organ for knowledge, for ‘truth’; we ‘know’ (or believe, or imagine) exactly as much as may be useful to us, exactly as much as promotes the interests of the human herd or species; and even what is called ‘useful’ here is ultimately only what we believe to be useful, what we imagine to be useful, but perhaps is precisely the most fatal stupidity which will some day lead to our destruction.

We are the victims of our our “splendid performances”

The cares of life compel almost all male Europeans to assume a definite role, their so-called profession; some are allowed to exercise discretion (a discretion more apparent than real, however) as regards which role, but most have it chosen for them. The result is strange enough: almost all Europeans confound themselves with their role as they grow older; they themselves are the victims of their own ‘splendid performance’ and have forgotten the extent to which chance, caprice and arbitrariness dictated the choice of ‘profession’ at the time – and how many other roles they might have played; but now it is too late! If we look below the surface, we see that their character is actually a further development of their role, their nature a further development of their artifice.

How Christian morality triumphed over Christianity

We can see what actually triumphed over the Christian God – Christian morality itself, an ever stricter conception of truthfulness, the confessional subtlety of the Christian conscience, translated and sublimated to the scientific conscience, to intellectual scrupulousness at all costs.

And a bonus quotation from another of my favourite Nietzsche books Human All Too Human. I have always thought this was very good on how some people desire to hurt others with their success and how there is something innately self-destructive about celebrity.

We care about the good opinion of others first because it is profitable, and then because we want to give others joy (children want to give joy to their parents, pupils to their teachers, men of good will to all other men). Only when someone holds the good opinion of others to be important without regard to his interests or his wish to give joy, do we speak of vanity. In this case, the man wants to give joy to himself, but at the expense of his fellow men, in that he either misleads them to a false opinion about himself or aims at a degree of “good opinion” that would have to cause them all pain (by arousing their envy). Usually the individual wants to confirm the opinion he has of himself through the opinion of others and strengthen it in his own eyes; but the mighty habituation to authority (which is as old as man) also leads many to base their own belief in themselves upon authority, to accept it from the hand of others. They trust other people’s judgement more than their own.

In the vain man, interest in himself, his wish to please himself reaches such a peak that he misleads others to assess him wrongly, to overvalue him greatly, and then he adheres to their authority; that is he brings about the error and then believes it.

One must admit, then, that the vain men want to please not only others, but also themselves, and that they go so far as to neglect their own interests thereby; for they are often concerned to make their fellow men ill-disposed, hostile, envious, and thus destructive towards them, only for the sake of having pleasure in themselves, self-enjoyment.