The Joyful Wisdom ("La Gaya Scienza")Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm
PhilosophyPhilosophy
The Joyful Wisdom ("La Gaya Scienza")
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm
Philosophy
motives of the soul, gloomy, suffering, ardent—a thinker who found
laughter necessary as the remedy of life, and who almost gave himself up
as lost every day that he had not laughed,—seems much more like an
Italian, and related by blood to Dante and Leopardi, than like a
Frenchman. One knows Chamfort's last words: "_Ah! mon ami_," he said to
Sieyès, "_je m'en vais enfin de ce monde, où il faut que le cœur se
brise ou se bronze_—." These were certainly not the words of a dying
Frenchman.
96.
_Two Orators._—Of these two orators the one arrives at a full
understanding of his case only when he yields himself to emotion; it is
only this that pumps sufficient blood and heat into his brain to compel
his high intellectuality to reveal itself. The other attempts, indeed,
now and then to do the same: to state his case sonorously, vehemently,
and spiritedly with the aid of emotion,—but usually with bad success. He
then very soon speaks obscurely and confusedly; he exaggerates, makes
omissions, and excites suspicion of the justice of his case: indeed, he
himself feels this suspicion, and the sudden changes into the coldest
and most repulsive tones (which raise a doubt in the hearer as to his
passionateness being genuine) are thereby explicable. With him emotion
always drowns the spirit; perhaps because it is stronger than in the
former. But he is at the height of his power when he resists the
impetuous storm of his feeling, and as it were scorns it; it is then
only that his spirit emerges fully from its concealment, a spirit
logical, mocking, and playful, but nevertheless awe-inspiring.
97.
_The Loquacity of Authors._—There is a loquacity of anger—frequent in
Luther, also in Schopenhauer. A loquacity which comes from too great a
store of conceptual formulæ, as in Kant. A loquacity which comes from
delight in ever new modifications of the same idea: one finds it in
Montaigne. A loquacity of malicious natures: whoever reads writings of
our period will recollect two authors in this connection. A loquacity
which comes from delight in fine words and forms of speech: by no means
rare in Goethe's prose. A loquacity which comes from pure satisfaction
in noise and confusion of feelings: for example in Carlyle.
98.
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