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'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'
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'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'

Nietzsche: philosophy as self-mastery « Previous | |Next »
December 13, 2006

Back to Nietzsche's Human, All too Human which is addressed to free spirits. He understands this text in terms of being a spiritual cure, or self-treatment that overcomes his romanticism (expressed in The Birth of Tragedy); self-treatment in the sense of self-mastery. So we have the abandonment of a pessimistic romanticism with an analytic naturalism. Nietzsche writes in the 'Preface' to Book One:

From this morbid isolation, from the desert of these years of temptation and experiment, it is strill a long road to that tremendous overflowing certainity and health which may not dispense even with wickedness, as a means and fishhook of knowledge, to that mature freedom of spirit which is equally self-mastery and discipline of the heart and permits acess to many and contradictory modes of thought--to that inner spaciousness and indulgence of superabundance which excludes the danger that the spirit may even on its own road perhaps lose itself and become infatuated and remain intoxicated in some corner or other, to that superfluity of formative, curative, moulding and restorative forces which is precisely the sign of great health, that superfluity which grants to the free spirit the dangerous priviledge of living experimentally and of being allowed to offer itself to adventure: the master's privilege of the free spirit!

What we have here is a romance with science that endevours to characterize a new kind of free spirit: one that is liberated from those forms of thinking that stunt, fetter, bind and hobble us to a form of thinking that requires independence, strength and courage. This kind of freedom is something that has to be acquired through self-mastery---a process involving sickness, convalescence and becoming healthy.

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| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 5:07 PM | | Comments (2)
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Questions: what is this eidolon of health towards which the will of the free spirit should be directed? What is the form of this pure affirmation, that we may fully imagine its boundaries and therby aknowledge when we have drawn close to its presence? For is it not also a form of thinking that may one day serve to pinion the very free spirit who accepts it as a goal and highest hope, and will not this dogma of affirmation itself become, one day, through dissemination, a treasured possession of the crowd?

Amijoseph,
Good points. I am still working through Human, All Too Human. Nietzsche talks in terms of being stunted by romantic pessimism (Schopanhauer and Wagner)and saying farewell to what is decaying and despairing.This process involves recovery and returning to health and the will to live.

It is a process of the liberation of fettered spirits from the many kinds of shackles that bind them.

The task of the spiritual exercises is to know the way to a new health, a health of tomorrow. That is what he says in the Preface to Book Two. We have to turn to other works to glean more ---eg., Beyond Good and Evil has a section entitled 'The Free Spirit' where he links it to the coming of new kinds of philosophers of the future.

It is new type that needs to be created.