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Saturday, September 20, 2003
Nietzschean Aphorisms Gone Bad
"The errors of great men are venerable because they are more fruitful than the truths of little men" - Nietzsche
Nietzsche is not my favourite miserable philosopher. I'm a Schopenhauer man. He was more a people person. As far as tortured novelists, my preference is for Dostoyevsky but being an epileptic he had an unfair advantage.
Anyhow, here Nietzsche goes beyond that place where the dragons lie. Well might the errors be more fruitful but does that make them more worthy of respect? And is that all there is to it?
The truths of little men are a showground mirror to the truths of the "great." By which i mean, the majority and their truths may not clearly reflect any fundamental truths but so what ? Is that all that matters? It is a must that the majority are not only respected by the ponces but more importantly that a fraternity exist between the two but a fraternity tempered with, and dare i say it, a sort of "love", in one of the Greek senses ( And i must say it's not love as we 20C Westerners conventionally know it. It's a ballsier one. See, say this link on agape, )
AGAPE
as well because it is the majority that absorb, reflect and sometimes distort the truths, errors, views and so on of the "big picture" sorts and no matter how good anyone's brain perspiration is it's only worth anything on one condition. That someone else does something with it. Whether that's agree with it, disagree with it, react to it, revolt against it .. No one person and what they think and do is "the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth". And the same applies to groups up to and including say the number of people found off their heads at a rave ..
At risk of sounding a little too Christian perhaps this was what the man with the beard meant when he said, " Love thy enemies."
Would it be all well and good if the majority believed and venerated the "great", and i really need to find a more agreeable alternative to that word, would it, really ? .. a world where everyone agrees on everything is not a perfect world. It's a world governed by inertia and inertia means decline, citizens.
Did i say i liked Dostoyevsky ?
Nietzsche is not my favourite miserable philosopher. I'm a Schopenhauer man. He was more a people person. As far as tortured novelists, my preference is for Dostoyevsky but being an epileptic he had an unfair advantage.
Anyhow, here Nietzsche goes beyond that place where the dragons lie. Well might the errors be more fruitful but does that make them more worthy of respect? And is that all there is to it?
The truths of little men are a showground mirror to the truths of the "great." By which i mean, the majority and their truths may not clearly reflect any fundamental truths but so what ? Is that all that matters? It is a must that the majority are not only respected by the ponces but more importantly that a fraternity exist between the two but a fraternity tempered with, and dare i say it, a sort of "love", in one of the Greek senses ( And i must say it's not love as we 20C Westerners conventionally know it. It's a ballsier one. See, say this link on agape, )
as well because it is the majority that absorb, reflect and sometimes distort the truths, errors, views and so on of the "big picture" sorts and no matter how good anyone's brain perspiration is it's only worth anything on one condition. That someone else does something with it. Whether that's agree with it, disagree with it, react to it, revolt against it .. No one person and what they think and do is "the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth". And the same applies to groups up to and including say the number of people found off their heads at a rave ..
At risk of sounding a little too Christian perhaps this was what the man with the beard meant when he said, " Love thy enemies."
Would it be all well and good if the majority believed and venerated the "great", and i really need to find a more agreeable alternative to that word, would it, really ? .. a world where everyone agrees on everything is not a perfect world. It's a world governed by inertia and inertia means decline, citizens.
Did i say i liked Dostoyevsky ?
