Dregs of Yore

Book IV, The Joyful Wisdom “The world always becomes fuller for him who grows up into the full stature of humanity; there are always more interesting fishing-hooks, thrown out to him; the number of his stimuli is continually on the increase, and similarly the varieties of his pleasure and pain,—the higher man becomes always at the same time happier and unhappier.” Privation is one of the means through which human beings acquire perspective, for privation hurls one into the deep pit of hell. How deep we fall depends on the intensity of privation, but this abyss also offers one a foothold to climb back up after battling the monsters that spring from the deep and retrieving the treasure they guard. Of course, one can undertake this journey voluntarily, which is infinitely better than being shoved head first into the pit of hell when one least expects it. Reading history is one of the means to do it, for it lays out in story form all the inclinations of wickedness and mayhem that not only ...

Chapter 6: We Scholars, Beyond Good and Evil “However gratefully one may welcome the objective spirit—and who has not been sick to death of all subjectivity and its confounded ipsissimosity!—in the end, however, one must learn caution even with regard to one's gratitude, and put a stop to the exaggeration with which the unselfing and depersonalizing of the spirit has recently been celebrated, as if it were the goal in itself, as if it were salvation and glorification—as is especially accustomed to happen in the pessimist school, which has also in its turn good reasons for paying the highest honours to "disinterested knowledge".” In the modern world, one is often not considered an “intellectual” if one does not, from time to time, take care to renounce his subjectivity. A great deal of respect and admiration is accorded to those who are able to view the world in an “objective” fashion, and is able to reduce his individual participation in the experience and representation ...

Chapter 5: The Natural History of Morals, Beyond Good and Evil “Whoever has followed the history of a single science, finds in its development a clue to the understanding of the oldest and commonest processes of all "knowledge and cognizance": there, as here, the premature hypotheses, the fictions, the good stupid will to "belief," and the lack of distrust and patience are first developed—our senses learn late, and never learn completely, to be subtle, reliable, and cautious organs of knowledge.” While embarking upon an adventure as this, that is to say, reading Nietzsche’s works, it is lines like these that continually remind one to break down each sentence into clauses, and re-read it a number of times. Nietzsche says so much in such few words, and sometimes more profound truths are only made clear when one reads his text slowly and repeatedly.  “Our eyes find it easier on a given occasion to produce a picture already often produced, than to seize upon the diverge...

In situations of chaos, there will be some people who will step in to try to further exploit either of the parties involved in the situation. These are the people who rob the wallet of a person who might by lying on the roadside after an accident. In the context of a social gathering, we call these people anti-social elements. There is also a second kind of people - those who will step in to partake in the victimhood of a suffering party, or to eke out their own victim identity in the situation.  It gets tricky to identify this type. Their acts are justified by many in the society out of the reassigned guilt of having possibly assumed the perpetrator role in our individual or any of our group identities at any given point of time in the history of mankind, out of general compassion for the suffering, or to the play the game of "I'm more virtuous than you." But we must be careful. As soon as there is a victim we rush to protect, there is also a culprit whom we rush to pros...

Chapter 5: The Natural History of Morals, Beyond Good and Evil “In contrast to laisser-aller (unrestrained freedom), every system of morals is a sort of tyranny against "nature" and also against "reason", that is, however, no objection, unless one should again decree by some system of morals, that all kinds of tyranny and unreasonableness are unlawful.” Given that Nietzsche has made previous assertions about the ruthless and wanton ways of Nature and its transcendence of its own “laws”, it stands to reason that anything that seeks to bring order to a vast and unrestrained force such as Nature would be a “tyranny” against it. “...one should remember the constraint under which every language has attained to strength and freedom—the metrical constraint, the tyranny of rhyme and rhythm.” Our speech progressed from animal sounds into systematic languages capable of articulating a range of emotions and experiences. Without established sets of rules of morphology, phonetic...

  It is a very commonly heard utterance - “I just want a simple life.” But “simple” is, in fact, rather complex. What is the bare minimum that is needed for one’s life to be classified as a “simple” one? Are we not perhaps taking a myriad of things for granted when we utter this sentence? What would this simple life entail?  To begin with, one would need somewhere to live. Since my main argument is not even about money, let us assume that one has the requisite amount of money to build or buy one. Of course, going deeper into the issue, one would have to examine whose money it is. Is it one’s own? How long and hard did one have to work to be able to afford a house that one can call one’s own? In other words, for how many years did one have to live a complex life, so that they could afford to buy just one of the most expensive items on the list of prerequisites of a “simple life”? Was the house or the money to buy/ build one given to one by one’s family members? In that case, so...