The Joyful Wisdom ("La Gaya Scienza"): Complete Works, Volume TenNietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm
PhilosophyPhilosophy
The Joyful Wisdom ("La Gaya Scienza"): Complete Works, Volume Ten
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm
Philosophy
of discovering that we know too little. But it would be worse still
if it were otherwise,--if we knew too much; our duty is and remains
first of all, not to get into confusion about ourselves. We _are_
different from the learned; although it cannot be denied that amongst
other things we are also learned. We have different needs, a different
growth, a different digestion: we need more, we need also less. There
is no formula as to how much an intellect needs for its nourishment;
if, however, its taste be in the direction of independence, rapid
coming and going, travelling, and perhaps adventure for which only the
swiftest are qualified, it prefers rather to live free on poor fare,
than to be unfree and plethoric. Not fat, but the greatest suppleness
and power is what a good dancer wishes from his nourishment,--and I
know not what the spirit of a philosopher would like better than to be
a good dancer. For the dance is his ideal, and also his art, in the end
likewise his sole piety, his "divine service."...
382.
_Great Healthiness._--We, the new, the nameless, the
hard-to-understand, we firstlings of a yet untried future--we require
for a new end also a new means, namely, a new healthiness, stronger,
sharper, tougher, bolder and merrier than any healthiness hitherto. He
whose soul longs to experience the whole range of hitherto recognised
values and desirabilities, and to circumnavigate all the coasts of
this ideal "Mediterranean Sea," who, from the adventures of his most
personal experience, wants to know how it feels to be a conqueror and
discoverer of the ideal--as likewise how it is with the artist, the
saint, the legislator, the sage, the scholar, the devotee, the prophet,
and the godly Nonconformist of the old style:--requires one thing above
all for that purpose, _great healthiness--_such healthiness as one not
only possesses, but also constantly acquires and must acquire, because
one continually sacrifices it again, and must sacrifice it!--And
now, after having been long on the way in this fashion, we Argonauts
of the ideal, who are more courageous perhaps than prudent, and often
enough shipwrecked and brought to grief, nevertheless, as said above,
healthier than people would like to admit, dangerously healthy, always
healthy again,--it would seem, as if in recompense for it all, that we
have a still undiscovered country before us, the boundaries of which no
one has yet seen, a beyond to all countries and corners of the ideal
known hitherto, a world so over-rich in the beautiful, the strange, the
questionable, the frightful, and the divine, that our curiosity as well
as our thirst for possession thereof, have got out of hand--alas! that
nothing will now any longer satisfy us! How could we still be content
with _the man of the present day_ after such peeps, and with such a
craving in our conscience and consciousness? What a pity; but it is
unavoidable that we should look on the worthiest aims and hopes of the
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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