Nietzsche on Individualism

The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.

- Nietzsche

Seneca on Fighting

To fight with an equal is dangerous; with a superior, mad; with an inferior, degrading.

Seneca the Elder

To fight with an equal is dangerous; with a superior, mad; with an inferior, degrading.

Seneca the Elder

Goethe on Enslavement

None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.

- Goethe

Alexander Pope on Ambition

The same ambition can destroy or save.

Alexander Pope (from: Essay on Man)

Schopenhauer on Genius

{p.115} It is the curse of the genius that in the same {p. 116} measure in which others think him great and worthy of admiration, he thinks them small and miserable creatures. His whole life long he has to suppress this opinion; and, as a rule, they suppress theirs as well. Meanwhile, he is condemned to live in a bleak world, where he meets no equal, as it were an island where there are no inhabitants but monkeys and parrots. Moreover, he is always troubled by the illusion that from a distance a monkey looks like a man.

Vulgar people take a huge delight in the faults and follies of great men; and great men are equally annoyed at being thus reminded of their kinship with them.

The real dignity of a man of genius or great intellect, the trait which raises him over others and makes him worthy of respect, is at bottom the fact, that the only unsullied and innocent part of human nature, namely, the intellect, has the upper hand in him, and prevails; whereas, in the other there is nothing but sinful will, and just as much intellect as is requisite for guiding his steps, –rarely any more, very often somewhat less, –and of what use is it?

It seems to me that genius might have its root in a certain perfection and vividness of the memory as it stretches back over the events of past life. For it is only by dint of memory, which makes our life in the strict sense a complete whole, that we attain a more profound and comprehensive understanding of it.

Arthur Schopenhauer

The Art of Controversy and Other Posthumous Papers

Selected and Translated by T. Bailey Saunders, M.A.
London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd. Ruskin House 40 Museum Street, W.C.
First Published 1896, Reprinted 1921 The Aberdeen University Press Ltd.

Modern philosophy : a footnote to Heidegger

I made a new blog page: Heidegger on Death. It is a very different way of viewing Death than what is ordinarily taught by mainstream society, which Heidegger calls the ‘they-self’, a kind of social conditioning that goes against and hides the true self.

In order to show the importance of Heidegger’s work, the following is a description by translator Jonathan Rée, explaining that Heidegger didn’t need to complete Part 2 of his magnum opus, Being and Time, because it was completed by subsequent modern philosophers, who altogether make but a footnote of Heidegger’s original work:

One might see Being and Time as seeking completion in the work of others, including many who would be affronted by any association with ‘Heideggerianism’. For instance, there are Levinas’s invocations of the unassimilable ‘other’, Simone de Beauvoir’s critiques of ‘feminine’ inauthenticity, Sartre’s criticisms of traditional psychology and ethics, and Althusser’s and Foucault’s revolts against ‘historicism’ and ‘humanism’, not to mention Derrida’s unmistakable Heideggerian programme of ‘deconstruction’. Or there are the attempts by theologians such as Bonhoeffer, Buber, Bultmann and Tillich to ‘demythologize’ religious belief, Lacan’s revolt against ‘ego-psychology’, or the ‘humanistic’ psychologies of Binswanger, Rogers, and R.D. Laing. Then there is the vast tradition of ‘western’ or ‘cultural’ Marxism, carried forward by Lukás, Marcuse and Adorno; the various strands of ‘interpretive’ sociology from Schütz to Bourdieu; and the ‘history from below’ intitiated by E.P. Thompson and Emmanuel Leroi Ladurie. Or there is Anglo-American ‘philosophy of mind’, rooted in the anti-Cartesianism of Gilbert Ryle, and the anti-positivistic theory of science pioneered by Alexandre Koyré and Thomas Kuhn. The greatest adventures of twentieth-century thought, in other words, may be little more than an incomplete series of footnotes to Heidegger’s Being and Time.

Pp. 50 – 51. Heidegger, by Jonathan Rée, 1999, Routledge, New York; part of The Great Philosophers series. All quotations are from Being and Time, (German edition 7th edition, Max Niemeyer, Tübingen, 1953) the classic English translation thereof, by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, Blackwell, Oxford, 1962

The Intellect tries to defend the Heart

The intellect is a defense against emotions of the heart that are too painful to bear. What “makes sense”, is “logical”, and “rational”, and what may even be considered “progressive” and “modern” is really all just a cover-up for what lies in the bottom of the heart, that is, one’s personal truth, and it is untouchable by all the logic and rationality in the world. It is a sacred truth, and if it does not belong in the world as is, if it is too innocent for the world, and if it is deeper and stronger than what the world allows, the intellect will desperately try to crush out that deeper truth, in an effort to survive. It must, otherwise the world would violently crush the gentle heart and with it, the will to live. This is where the denial of personal truth begins; this is the moment when a person succumbs to the will of the world, to the will of the other, rather than living within the pure truth of the heart, because it is forbidden, perhaps even despised by the world incapable of the same, and therefore it is impossible to bear.