The Joyful Wisdom ("La Gaya Scienza")Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm
PhilosophyPhilosophy
The Joyful Wisdom ("La Gaya Scienza")
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm
Philosophy
_No Altruism!_—I see in many men an excessive impulse and delight in
wanting to be a function; they strive after it, and have the keenest
scent for all those positions in which precisely _they_ themselves can
be functions. Among such persons are those women who transform
themselves into just that function of a man that is but weakly developed
in him, and then become his purse, or his politics, or his social
intercourse. Such beings maintain themselves best when they insert
themselves in an alien organism; if they do not succeed they become
vexed, irritated, and eat themselves up.
120.
_Health of the Soul._—The favourite medico-moral formula (whose
originator was Ariston of Chios), "Virtue is the health of the soul,"
would, at least in order to be used, have to be altered to this: "Thy
virtue is the health of thy soul." For there is no such thing as health
in itself, and all attempts to define a thing in that way have
lamentably failed. It is necessary to know thy aim, thy horizon, thy
powers, thy impulses, thy errors, and especially the ideals and
fantasies of thy soul, in order to determine _what_ health implies even
for thy _body_. There are consequently innumerable kinds of physical
health; and the more one again permits the unique and unparalleled to
raise its head, the more one unlearns the dogma of the "Equality of
men," so much the more also must the conception of a normal health,
together with a normal diet and a normal course of disease, be abrogated
by our physicians. And then only would it be time to turn our thoughts
to the health and disease of the _soul_ and make the special virtue of
everyone consist in its health; but, to be sure, what appeared as health
in one person might appear as the contrary of health in another. In the
end the great question might still remain open: whether we could _do
without_ sickness, even for the development of our virtue, and whether
our thirst for knowledge and self-knowledge would not especially need
the sickly soul as well as the sound one; in short, whether the mere
will to health is not a prejudice, a cowardice, and perhaps an instance
of the subtlest barbarism and unprogressiveness.
121.
_Life no Argument._—We have arranged for ourselves a world in which we
can live—by the postulating of bodies, lines, surfaces, causes and
effects, motion and rest, form and content: without these articles of
faith no one could manage to live at present! But for all that they are
still unproved. Life is no argument; error might be among the conditions
of life.
122.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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