Quiz Oct.26 - Nietzschean happiness

Th 22 -Nietzsche, Antichrist 1; Gay Science 341; The Dawn Bk IV; WATCH:Nietzsche (SoL); When Nietzsche Wept-Eternal Recurrence; Human, All Too Human; LISTEN: Nihilism, In Our Time

1. What is Nietzsche's happiness "formula"?

2. What does Nietzsche consider "the most vicious outrage upon noble humanity," one of the "chief weapons... against our happiness"?

3. What is "the greatest weight"?

4. How do "free spirits" feel about the "death of God"?

5. What is the greatest happiness of "genius"?

6. What is the "dream of the mountain climber"?

DQ:
1. Is it possible to be happy without goals, purposes, and strong opinions? Is "living without a goal" ever a source of satisfaction? Is the Nietzschean assertion of "will" ultimately gratifying and purpose-giving? Is it something any of us can or should choose?

2. Is Nietzsche's "eternal recurrence" a form of immortality, or a superior alternative to it?

3. How would you respond to Nietzsche's "demon"? Would you consider his words a "gift"?

4. Are you a "free spirit" in Nietzsche's sense?

5. Are values a personal creation, a product of species interest, or absolutes?

6. Comment: "What doesn't kill me makes me stronger."

Friedrich Nietzsche - The Antichrist - Foreword This book belongs to the very few. Perhaps none of them is even living yet. Possibly they are the readers who understand my Zarathustra: how could I confound myself with those for whom there are ears listening today? -- Only the day after tomorrow belongs to me. Some are born posthumously. The conditions under which one understands me and then necessarily understands -- I know them all too well. One must be honest in intellectual matters to the point of harshness to so much as endure my seriousness, my passion. One must be accustomed to living on mountains -- to seeing one wretched ephemeral chatter of politics and national egoism beneath one. One must have become indifferent, one must never ask whether truth is useful or a fatality.... Strength which prefers questions for which no one today is sufficiently daring; courage of the forbidden; predestination for the labyrinth. An experience out of seven solitudes. New ears for new music. New eyes for the most distant things. A new conscience for truths which have hitherto remained dumb. And the will to economy in the grand style: to keeping one's energy, one's enthusiasm in bounds.... Reverence for oneself; love for oneself; unconditional freedom with respect to oneself ... Very well! These alone are my readers, my rightful readers, my predestined readers: what do the rest matter? -- The rest are merely mankind. -- One must be superior to mankind in force, in loftiness of soul -- in contempt... Friedrich Nietzsche 1 -- Let us look one another in the face. We are Hyperboreans -- we know well enough how much out of the way we live. 'Neither by land nor sea shalt thou find the road to the Hyperboreans': Pindar already knew that of us. Beyond the North, beyond the ice, beyond death -- our life, our happiness.... We have discovered happiness, we know the road, we have found the exit out of whole millennia of labyrinth. Whoe else has found it? -- Modern man perhaps? -- 'I know not which way to turn; I am everything that knows not which way to turn' -- sighs modern man.... It was from this modernity that we were ill -- from lazy peace, from cowardly compromise, from the whole virtuous uncleanliness of modern Yes and No. This tolerance and largeur of heart which 'forgives' everything because it 'Understands' everything is sirocco to us. Better to live among ice than among modern virtues and other south winds! ... We were brave enough, we spared neither ourselves nor others: but for long we did not know where to apply our courage. We became gloomy, we were called fatalists. Our fatality -- was the plenitude, the tension, the blocking-up of our forces. We thirsted for lightning and action, of all things we kept ourselves furthest from the happiness of the weaklings, from 'resignation'.... There was a thunderstorm in our air, the nature which we are grew dark -- for we had no road. Formula of our happiness: a Yes, a No, a straight line, a goal... 2 What is good? -- All that heightens the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself in man. What is bad? -- All that proceeds from weakness. What is happiness? -- The feeling that power increases -- that a resistance is overcome. Not contentment, but more power, not peace at all, but war; not virtue, but proficiency (virtue in the Renaissance style, virth, virtue free of moralic acid.) The weak and illconstituted shall perish: first principle of our philanthropy. And one shall help them to do so. What is more harmful than any vice? -- Active sympathy for the ill-constituted and weak -- Christianity .... 3 The problem I raise here is not what ought to succeed mankind in the sequence of species (-- the human being is a conclusion --): but what type of human being one ought to breed, ought to will, as more valuable, more worthy of life, more certain of the future. This more valuable type has existed often enough already: but as a lucky accident, as an exception, never as willed. He has rather been the most feared, he has hitherto been virtually the thing to be feared -- and out of fear the reverse type has been willed, bred, achieved: the domestic animal, the herd animal, the sick animal man -- the Christian... 4 Mankind does not represent a development of the better or the stronger or the higher in the way that is believed today. 'Progress' is merely a modern idea, that is to say a false idea. The European of today is of far less value than the European of the Renaissance; onward development is not by any means, by an necessity the same thing as elevation, advance, strengthening. In another sense there are cases of individual success constantly appearing in the most various parts of the earth and from the most various cultures in which a higher type does manifest itself: something which in relation to collective mankind is sort of a superman. Such chance occurences of great success have always been possible and perhaps always will be possible. And even entire races, tribes, nations can under certain circumstances represent such a lucky hit. 5 One should not embellish or dress up Christianity: it has waged a war to the death against this higher type of man, it has excommunicated all the fundamental instincts of this type, it has distilled evil, the Evil One, out of these instincts -- the strong human being as the type of reprehensibility, as the 'outcast'. Christianity has taken the side of everything weak, base, ill-constituted, it has made an ideal out of opposition to the preservative instincts of strong life; it has depraved the reason even of the intellectually strongest natures by teaching men to feel supreme values of intellectually as sinful, as misleading, as temptations. The most deplorable example: the depraving of Pascal, who believed his reason had been depraved by original sin while it had only been depraved by his Christianity!...
42. One now begins to see just what it was that came to an end with the death on the cross: a new and thoroughly original effort to found a Buddhistic peace movement, and so establish happiness on earth—real, not merely promised. For this remains—as I have already pointed out—the essential difference between the two religions of décadence: Buddhism promises nothing, but actually fulfils; Christianity promises everything, but fulfils nothing.—Hard upon the heels of the “glad tidings” came the worst imaginable: those of Paul. In Paul is incarnated the very opposite of the “bearer of glad tidings”; he represents the genius for hatred, the vision of hatred, the relentless logic of hatred. What, indeed, has not this dysangelist sacrificed to hatred! Above all, the Saviour: he nailed him to his own cross. The life, the example, the teaching, the death of Christ, the meaning and the law of the whole gospels—nothing was left of all this after that counterfeiter in hatred had reduced it to his uses. Surely not reality; surely not historical truth!... Once more the priestly instinct of the Jew perpetrated the same old master crime against history—he simply struck out the yesterday and the day before yesterday of Christianity, and invented his own history of Christian beginnings. Going further, he treated the history of Israel to another falsification, so that it became a mere prologue to his achievement: all the prophets, it now appeared, had referred to his “Saviour.”... Later on the church even falsified the history of man in order to make it a prologue to Christianity.... The figure of the Saviour, his teaching, his way of life, his death, the meaning of his death, even the consequences of his death—nothing remained untouched, nothing remained in even remote contact with reality. Paul simply shifted the centre of gravity of that whole life to a place behind this existence—in the lie of the “risen” Jesus. At bottom, he had no use for the life of the Saviour—what he needed was the death on the cross, and something more. To see anything honest in such a man as Paul, whose home was at the centre of the Stoical enlightenment, when he converts an hallucination into a proof of the resurrection of the Saviour, or even to believe his tale that he suffered from this hallucination himself—this would be a genuine niaiserie in a psychologist. Paul willed the end; therefore he also willed the means.... What he himself didn’t believe was swallowed readily enough by the idiots among whom he spread his teaching.— What he wanted was power; in Paul the priest once more reached out for power—he had use only for such concepts, teachings and symbols as served the purpose of tyrannizing over the masses and organizing mobs. What was the only part of Christianity that Mohammed borrowed later on? Paul’s invention, his device for establishing priestly tyranny and organizing the mob: the belief in the immortality of the soul—that is to say, the doctrine of “judgment”.... 43 When the centre of gravity of life is placed, not in life itself, but in “the beyond”—in nothingness—then one has taken away its centre of gravity altogether. The vast lie of personal immortality destroys all reason, all natural instinct—henceforth, everything in the instincts that is beneficial, that fosters life and that safeguards the future is a cause of suspicion. So to live that life no longer has any meaning: this is now the “meaning” of life.... Why be public-spirited? Why take any pride in descent and forefathers? Why labour together, trust one another, or concern one’s self about the common welfare, and try to serve it?... Merely so many “temptations,” so many strayings from the “straight path.”—“One thing only is necessary”.... That every man, because he has an “immortal soul,” is as good as every other man; that in an infinite universe of things the “salvation” of every individual may lay claim to eternal importance; that insignificant bigots and the three-fourths insane may assume that the laws of nature are constantly suspended in their behalf—it is impossible to lavish too much contempt upon such a magnification of every sort of selfishness to infinity, to insolence. And yet Christianity has to thank precisely this miserable flattery of personal vanity for its triumph—it was thus that it lured all the botched, the dissatisfied, the fallen upon evil days, the whole refuse and off-scouring of humanity to its side. The “salvation of the soul”—in plain English: “the world revolves around me.”... The poisonous doctrine, “equal rights for all,” has been propagated as a Christian principle: out of the secret nooks and crannies of bad instinct Christianity has waged a deadly war upon all feelings of reverence and distance between man and man, which is to say, upon the first prerequisite to every step upward, to every development of civilization—out of the ressentiment of the masses it has forged its chief weapons against us, against everything noble, joyous and high-spirited on earth, against our happiness on earth.... To allow “immortality” to every Peter and Paul was the greatest, the most vicious outrage upon noble humanity ever perpetrated.—And let us not underestimate the fatal influence that Christianity has had, even upon politics! Nowadays no one has courage any more for special rights, for the right of dominion, for feelings of honourable pride in himself and his equals—for the pathos of distance.... Our politics is sick with this lack of courage!—The aristocratic attitude of mind has been undermined by the lie of the equality of souls; and if belief in the “privileges of the majority” makes and will continue to make revolutions—it is Christianity, let us not doubt, and Christian valuations, which convert every revolution into a carnival of blood and crime! Christianity is a revolt of all creatures that creep on the ground against everything that is lofty: the gospel of the “lowly” lowers....

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The Gay Science (aka Joyful Wisdom)
/232/ Aph. 290 One thing is needful.—To "give style" to one's character—a great and rare art! It is practiced by those who survey all the strengths and weaknesses of their nature and then fit them into an artistic plan until every one of them appears as art and reason and even weaknesses delight the eye. Here a large mass of second nature has been added; there a piece of original nature has been removed—both times through long practice and daily work at it. Here the ugly that could not be removed is concealed; there it has been reinterpreted and made sublime. Much that is vague and resisted shaping has been saved and exploited for distant views; it is meant to beckon toward the far and immeasurable. In the end, when the work is finished, it becomes evident how the constraint of a single taste governed and formed everything large and small. Whether this taste was good or bad is less important than one might suppose, if only it was a single taste!
It will be the strong and domineering natures that enjoy their finest gaiety in such constraint and perfection under a law of their own; the passion of their tremendous will relents in the face of all stylized nature, of all conquered and serving nature. Even when they have to build palaces and design gardens they demur at giving nature freedom.
Conversely, it is the weak characters without power over /233/ themselves that hate the constraint of style. They feel that if this bitter and evil constraint were imposed upon them they would be demeaned; they become slaves as soon as they serve, they hate to serve. Such spirits—and they may be of the first rank—are always out to shape and interpret their environment as free nature: wild, arbitrary, fantastic, disorderly, and surprising. And they are well advised because it is only in this way that they can give pleasure to themselves. For one thing is needful: that a human being should attain satisfaction with himself, whether it be by means of this or that poetry and art, only then is a human being at all tolerable to behold. Whoever is dissatisfied with himself is continually ready for revenge, and we others will be his victims, if only by having to endure his ugly sight. For the sight of what is ugly makes one bad and gloomy.
Aph. 341 The greatest weight.—What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: "This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence—even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!"
Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: "You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine." If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, "Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?" would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?
/279/ Aph. 343 The meaning of our cheerfulness.— The greatest recent event—that "God is dead,"' that the belief in the Christian god has become unbelievable—is already beginning to cast its first shadows over Europe. For the few at least whose eyes—the suspicion in whose eyes is strong and subtle enough for this spectacle, some sun seems to have set and some ancient and profound trust has been turned into doubt; to them our old world must appear daily more like evening, more mistrustful, stranger, "older." But in the main one may say: The event itself is far too great, too distant, too remote from the multitude's capacity for comprehension even for the tidings of it to be thought of as having arrived as yet. Much less may one suppose that many people know as yet what this event really means—and how much must collapse now that this faith has been undermined because it was built upon this faith, propped up by it, grown into it; for example, the whole of our European morality. This long plenitude and sequence of breakdown, destruction, ruin, and cataclysm that is now impending—who could guess enough of it today to be compelled to play the teacher and advance proclaimer of this monstrous logic of terror, the prophet of a gloom and an eclipse of the sun whose like has probably never yet occurred on earth?
Even we born guessers of riddles who are, as it were, waiting on the mountains, posted between today and tomorrow, stretched in the contradiction between today and tomorrow, we firstlings and premature births of the coming century, to whom the shadows that must soon envelop Europe really should have appeared by now—why is it that even we look forward to the /280/ approaching gloom without any real sense of involvement and above all without any worry and fear for ourselves? Are we perhaps still too much under the impression of the initial consequences of this event—and these initial consequences, the consequences for ourselves, are quite the opposite of what one might perhaps expect: They are not at all sad and gloomy but rather like a new and scarcely describable kind of light, happiness, relief, exhilaration, encouragement, dawn.
Indeed, we philosophers and "free spirits" feel, when we hear the news that "the old god is dead," as if a new dawn shone on us; our heart overflows with gratitude, amazement, premonitions, expectation. At long last the horizon appears free to us again, even if it should not be bright; at long last our ships may venture out again, venture out to face any danger; all the daring of the lover of knowledge is permitted again; the sea, our sea, lies open again; perhaps there has never yet been such an "open sea."—
Aph. 344. How we, too, are still pious.—In science convictions have no rights of citizenship, as one says with good reason. Only when they decide to descend to the modesty of hypotheses, of a provisional experimental point of view, of a regulative fiction, they may be granted admission and even a certain value in the realm of knowledge—though always with the restriction that they remain under police supervision, under the police of mistrust.—But does this not mean, if you consider it more precisely, that a conviction may obtain admission to science only when it ceases to be a conviction? Would it not be the first step in the discipline of the scientific spirit that one would not permit oneself any more convictions?
Probably this is so; only we still have to ask: To make it possible for this discipline to begin, must there not be some prior conviction—even one that is so commanding and unconditional that it sacrifices all other convictions to itself? We see that science also rests on a faith; there simply is no science "without presuppositions." The question whether truth is needed must not only have been affirmed in advance, but affirmed to such a degree that the principle, the faith, the conviction finds expression: "Nothing is needed more than truth, and in relation to it everything else has only second-rate value."
This unconditional will to truth—what is it? Is it the will not to allow oneself to be deceived? Or is it the will not to deceive? For the will to truth could be interpreted in the second way, too—if only the special case "I do not want to deceive myself" is subsumed under the generalization "I do not want to deceive." But why not deceive? But why not allow oneself to be deceived?
Note that the reasons for the former principle belong to an altogether different realm from those for the second. One does not want to allow oneself to be deceived because one assumes it is harmful, dangerous, calamitous to be deceived. In this sense, science would be a long-range prudence, a caution, a utility; but one could object in al fairness: How is that? Is wanting not to allow oneself to be deceived really less harmful, less langerous, less calamitous? What do you know in advance of the character of existence to be able to decide whether the greater advantage is on the side of the unconditional mistrust or of the unconditionally trusting? But if both should be required, much trust as well as much mistrust, from where would science then be permitted to take its unconditional faith or conviction on which it rests, that truth is more important than any other thing, including every other conviction? Precisely this conviction could never have come into being if both tuth and untruth constantly proved to be useful which is the case. Thus—the faith in science, which after all exists undeniably, cannot owe its origin to such a calculus of utility; it must have originated in spite of the fact that the disutility and dangerousness of "the will to truth," of "truth at any price" is proved to it constantly. "At any price ': how well we understand these words once we have offered and slaughtered one faith after another on this altar!
Consequently, "will to truth" does not mean "I will not allow [282] myself to be deceived" but—there is no alternative—"I will not deceive, not even myself"; and with that we stand on moral ground. For you only have to ask yourself carefully, "Why do you not want to deceive?" especially if it should seem—and it does seem!—as if life aimed at semblance, meaning error, deception, simulation, delusion, self-delusion, and when the great sweep of life has actually always shown itself to be on the side of the most unscrupulous polytropoi[refers to Homer's characterization of Odysseus: much travelled, versatile, wily, and manifold]. Charitably interpreted, such a resolve might perhaps be a quixotism,[referring to Don Quixote] a minor slightly mad enthusiasm; but it might also be something more serious, namely, a principle that is hostile to life and destructive.—"Will to truth"—that might be a concealed will to death.
Thus the question "Why science?" leads back to the moral problem: Why have morality at all when life, nature, and history are "not moral"? No doubt, those who are truthful in that audacious and ultimate sense that is presupposed by the faith in science thus affirm another world than the world of life, nature, and history; and insofar as they affirm this "other [283] world"—look, must they not by the same token negate its counterpart, this world, our world?—But you will have gathered what I am driving at, namely, that it is still a metaphysical faith upon which our faith in science rests—that even we seekers after knowledge today, we godless anti-metaphysicians still take our fire, too, from the flame lit by a faith that is thousands of years old, that Christian faith which was also the faith of Plato, that God is the truth, that truth is divine.—But what if this should become more and more incredible, if nothing should prove to be divine any more unless it were error, blindness, the lie—if God himself should prove to be our most enduring lie?—
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The Dawn of Day

Genius... is often unhappy, and if it feels its greatest happiness in creating, it is because it forgets that precisely then, with the highest determinate activity, it does something fantastic and irrational (such is all art) and cannot help doing it. 264. DECEIVING ONE'S SELF. Envious men with a discriminating intuition endeavour not to become too closely acquainted with their rivals in order that they may feel themselves superior to them. 265. THERE is A TIME FOR THE THEATRE. When the imagination of a people begins to diminish, there arises the desire to have its legends represented on the stage : it then tolerates the coarse substitutes for imagination. In the age of the epic rhapsodist, however, the theatre itself, and the actor dressed up as a hero, form an obstacle in the path of the imagination instead of acting as wings for it too near, too definite, too heavy, and with too little of dreamland and the flights of birds about them. 266. WITHOUT CHARM. He lacks charm and knows it. Ah, how skilful he is in masking this defect. He does it by a strict virtue, gloomy looks, and acquired distrust of all men, and of existence itself; by coarse jests, by contempt for a more refined manner of living, by pathos and pretensions, and by a cynical philosophy yea, he has even developed into a character through the continual knowledge of his deficiency. 267. WHY so PROUD ? A noble character is distinguished from a vulgar one by the fact that the latter has not at ready command a certain number of habits and points of view like the former: fate willed that they should not be his either by inheritance or by education. 268. THE ORATOR'S SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS. How difficult it was in Athens to speak in such a way as to win over the hearers to one's cause without repelling them at the same time by the form in which one's speech was cast, or withdrawing their attention from the cause itself by this form ! How difficult it still is to write thus in France! 269. SICK PEOPLE AND ART. For all kinds of sadness and misery of soul we should first of all try a change of diet and severe manual labour ; but in such cases men are in the habit of having recourse to mental intoxicants, to art for example which is both to their own detriment and that of art  Can you not see that when you call for art as sick people you make the artists themselves sick? 270. APPARENT TOLERATION. Those are good, benevolent, and rational words on and in favour of science, but, alas! I see behind these words your toleration of science. In a corner of your inmost mind you think, in spite of all you say, that it is not necessary for you that it shows magnanimity on your part to admit and even to advocate it, more especially as science on its part does not exhibit this magnanimity in regard to your opinion ! Do you know that you have no right whatever to exercise this toleration ? that this condescension of yours is an even coarser disparagement of science than any of that open scorn which a presumptuous priest or artist might allow himself to indulge in towards science ? What is lacking in you is a strong sense for everything that is true and actual, you do not feel grieved and worried to find that science is in contradiction to your own sentiments, you are unacquainted with that intense desire for knowledge ruling over you like a law, you do not feel a duty in the need of being present with your own eyes wherever knowledge exists, and to let nothing that is " known " escape you. You do not know that which you are treating with such toleration! and it is only because you do not know it that you can succeed in adopting such a gracious attitude towards it. You, forsooth, would look upon science with hatred and fanaticism if it for once cast its shining and illuminating glance upon you ! What does it matter to us, then, if you do exhibit toleration and towards a phantom! and not even towards us! and what do we matter! 271. FESTIVE MOODS. It is exactly those men who aspire most ardently towards power who feel it indescribably agreeable to be overpowered! to sink suddenly and deeply into a feeling as into a whirlpool ! To suffer the reins to be snatched out of their hand, and to watch a movement which takes them they know not where! Whatever or whoever may be the person or thing that renders us this service, it is nevertheless a great service: we are so happy and breathless, and feel around us an exceptional silence, as if we were in the most central bowels of the earth. To be for once entirely powerless! the plaything of the elementary forces of nature. There is a restfulness in this happiness, a casting away of the great burden, a descent without fatigue, as if one had been given up to the blind force of gravity. This is the dream of the mountain climber, who, although he sees his goal far above him, nevertheless falls asleep on the way from utter exhaustion, and dreams of the happiness of the contrast this effortless rolling down hill. I describe happiness as I imagine it to be in our present-day society, the badgered, ambitious society of Europe and America. Now and then they wish to fall back into impotence... this enjoyment is offered them by wars, arts, religions, and geniuses. When a man has temporarily abandoned himself to a momentary impression which devours and crushes everything and this is the modern festive mood he afterwards becomes freer, colder, more refreshed, and more strict, and again strives tirelessly after the contrary of all this power.

Podcasts-Cultivating our garden... Nietzsche's Hyperboreans... Dawn post-Hyperborea