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
_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, for all practical purposes, 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 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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