The Joyful Wisdom ("La Gaya Scienza") — Nietzsche — John Shaqi
The Joyful Wisdom ("La Gaya Scienza")
Nietzsche · en
injustice of sexual love should have been glorified and deified to such
an extent at all times; yea, that out of this love the conception of
love as the antithesis of egoism should have been derived, when it is
perhaps precisely the most unqualified expression of egoism. Here,
evidently, the non-possessors and desirers have determined the usage of
language,—there were, of course, always too many of them. Those who have
been favoured with much possession and satiety, have, to be sure,
dropped a word now and then about the "raging demon," as, for instance,
the most lovable and most beloved of all the Athenians—Sophocles; but
Eros always laughed at such revilers,—they were always his greatest
favourites.—There is, of course, here and there on this terrestrial
sphere a kind of sequel to love, in which that covetous longing of two
persons for one another has yielded to a new desire and covetousness, to
a _common_, higher thirst for a superior ideal standing above them: but
who knows this love? Who has experienced it? Its right name is
_friendship_.
15.
_Out of the Distance._—This mountain makes the whole district which it
dominates charming in every way, and full of significance: after we have
said this to ourselves for the hundredth time, we are so irrationally
and so gratefully disposed towards it, as the giver of this charm, that
we fancy it must itself be the most charming thing in the district—and
so we climb it, and are undeceived. All of a sudden, it itself, and the
whole landscape around and under us, is as it were disenchanted; we had
forgotten that many a greatness, like many a goodness, wants only to be
seen at a certain distance, and entirely from below, not from above,—it
is thus only that _it operates_. Perhaps you know men in your
neighbourhood who can only look at themselves from a certain distance to
find themselves at all endurable, or attractive and enlivening; they are
to be dissuaded from self-knowledge.
16.