Joy Wants Eternity

[heraklitismus]

Nietzsche is really awesome.

Mike Tyson

[heraklitismus]

It is even a difficult thing for him to admit to himself that the insect or the bird perceives an entirely different world from the one that man does, and that the question of which of these perceptions of the world is the more correct one is quite meaningless, for this would have to have been decided previously in accordance with the criterion of the correct perception, which means, in accordance with a criterion which is not available . But in any case it seems to me that "the correct perception" -- which would mean "the adequate expression of an object in the subject" -- is a contradictory impossibility.

Friedrich Nietzsche, On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense, §1 [edited excerpt]

[heraklitismus]

Humans lie in accordance with firmly established convention, to lie en masse and in a style that is binding for all. Now man of course forgets that this is the way things stand for him. Thus he lies in the manner indicated, unconsciously and in accordance with habits which are centuries' old; and precisely by means of this unconsciousness and forgetfulness he arrives at his sense of truth.

Friedrich Nietzsche, On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense, §1 [excerpt]

[heraklitismus]

What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and; anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions- they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins.

Friedrich Nietzsche, On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense, §1 [excerpt]

[heraklitismus]

Every concept arises from the equation of unequal things. Just as it is certain that one leaf is never totally the same as another, so it is certain that the concept "leaf" is formed by arbitrarily discarding these individual differences and by forgetting the distinguishing aspects. This awakens the idea that, in addition to the leaves, there exists in nature the "leaf": the original model according to which all the leaves were perhaps woven, sketched, measured, colored, curled, and painted--but by incompetent hands, so that no specimen has turned out to be a correct, trustworthy, and faithful likeness of the original model.

Friedrich Nietzsche, On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense, §1 [excerpt]

[heraklitismus]

Whereas Aeschylus sees the sublime in the sublimity of Olympian justice, Sophocles sees it – strangely enough – in the sublime obscurity of Olympian justice. He restores the standpoint of the people on every count. The undeservedness of a terrible fate seemed sublime to him, the truly insoluble puzzles of human existence were his tragic muse.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Dionysiac World View, §3 [excerpt]

[heraklitismus]

What mattered above all was to transform those repulsive thoughts about the terrible and absurd aspects of existence into representations with which it was possible to live; these representations are the sublime, whereby the terrible is tamed by artistic means, and the comical, whereby disgust at absurdity is discharged by artistic means. These two interwoven elements are unified in a work of art which imitates and plays with intoxication.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Dionysiac World View, §3 [excerpt]

[heraklitismus]

What speaks out of [the Greek Gods] is a religion of life, not one of duty or asceticism or spirituality. All these figures breathe the triumph of existence, a luxurious vitality accompanies their cult. They do not make demands; all that exists is deified in them, regardless of whether it is good or evil.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Dionysiac World View, §2 [excerpt]

[heraklitismus]

Nowhere can the incredible idealism of the Hellenic race be grasped more readily than here: a cult of nature which, amongst the peoples of Asia, had meant the crudest unleashing of lower drives, a panhetaeric animality which surrendered of social ties for a certain period of time, was transformed amongst the Hellenes into a festival of universal redemption, a day of transfiguration. All the sublime drives of their character were revealed in this idealization of orgy.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Dionysiac World View, §1 [excerpt]

[heraklitismus]

Without myth, however, all cultures lose their healthy, creative, natural energy; only a horizon surrounded by myths encloses and unifies a cultural movement.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, §23

[heraklitismus]

While the critic was seizing power in the theatre and concert hall, the journalist in schools, and the press in society, art degenerated into an object of entertainment of the lowest kind, and aesthetic criticism was used to bind together a vain, distracted, selfish, and furthermore meagre and unoriginal sociability, the meaning of which is supplied by Schopenhauer’s parable of the hedgehogs; in consequence, there has never been a time when art was chattered about so much and valued so little.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, §22 [excerpt]

[heraklitismus]

It is true that the popular and entirely false opposition of soul and body, far from explaining  the difficult relationship of music to drama, only confuses it utterly; but for some unknown reason the unphilosophical coarseness of that opposition seems to have become an article of faith gladly confessed by our aestheticians in particular, whereas they have not learned, or not wished to learn, for equally unknown reasons, anything about the opposition between appearance and thing-in-itself.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, §21 [excerpt]

[heraklitismus]

Yes, my friends, believe with me in the Dionysian life and in the re-birth of tragedy. The age of the Socratic man is over: crown yourselves with ivy, take the thyrsus stalk in your hand, and don’t be amazed when tigers and panthers lie down fawning at your feet. Only now you must dare to be tragic men, for you are to be redeemed. You are to lead the Dionysian celebratory procession from India to Greece! Arm yourselves for a hard battle, but have faith in the miracles of your god!”

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, §20 [excerpt]

[heraklitismus]

Here [in this period of exhaustion] a desperate, isolated man couldn't choose a better symbol than the knight with Death and the Devil, as Dürer has drawn him for us, the knight in armour with the hard bronze gaze, who knows how to make his way along his terrible path, without wavering at his horrific companions—and yet without any hope, alone with his horse and hound. Such a Dürer knight was our Schopenhauer: he lacked all hope, but he wanted the truth. There is no one like him.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, §20 [excerpt]

[heraklitismus]

Let no one seek to diminish our belief in the impending rebirth of Hellenic Antiquity, for this alone allows us to hope for a renewal and purification of the German spirit through the fire-magic of music. What else could one say to awaken any comforting expectation for the future amidst the growing sterility and exhaustion of present-day culture?

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, §20 [excerpt]

[heraklitismus]

There is no other period in art in which so-called education and true art have confronted each other with such feelings if estrangement and aversion as the one we now see before our very eyes.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, §20

[heraklitismus]

At the same time, we feel as if the birth of a tragic time period for the German spirit only means a return to itself, a blessed rediscovery of self, after hugely invasive forces from outside had for a long time forced it into servitude under their form, that spirit which, so far as form is concerned, had lived in helpless barbarism. And now finally, after its return home to the original spring of its being, it can dare to stride in here before all peoples, bold and free, without the guiding reins of a Romanesque civilization. If only it can now understand how to keep learning continuously from a single people, the Greeks; being at all capable of learning from them is already a high honour and a remarkable distinction. And when have we needed these most eminent of mentors more than now, when we are experiencing the rebirth of tragedy and are in danger of not knowing where it is coming from and of being incapable of interpreting where it wants to go?

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, §19 [excerpt]