Whoever writes in blood and aphorisms does not want to be read but to be learned by heart.
— Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Well, I have never written in blood, and I have only a smattering of Nietzsche committed to memory. But I did recently donate blood to the Red Cross, which netted me $30 in gift cards, promptly applied toward more of his notebooks from Stanford University Press, so I have at least managed the minor alchemy of turning blood into aphorisms. I like to think he’d be impressed by my dedication.
At last, after talking for thirty hours on end and instructing me in all man needs to know, the Sage concluded:
“Now I shall sum up my teaching. It is contained in two axioms:
“‘All different things are identical.’
“‘All identicals are different.’
“Ring the changes in your mind on these two propositions and you will see, firstly, that they are not incompatible; next, that thought can formulate only one or the other and can only move from one to the other. There is a time for one of them and a time for the other, and the man who thinks the one will think the other. That’s all.”
I believe the Sage later became editor-in-chief of Engagement Today, where these two axioms remain the entire editorial manual. He’s teaching the manufacture of takes:
“All different things are identical.” → “Actually, Weightlifting and Reading Are the Same Activity.”
“All identicals are different.” → “Why Reading Is Nothing Like Weightlifting—and Why Confusing Them Is Dangerous.”
“There’s a time for one and a time for the other.” → Publish the second one nine months after the first.
Such is my turn of mind that I don’t expect to learn everything, from A to Z, from books; but only to get seeds of thought that I can cultivate within myself, in my private garden. I can make something only when I set out from very little and that very little bears fruit in me; were I to take larger quantities, I’d produce nothing—what is more, I do not understand what has already come to fruition.
My shelves are a kind of private seed bank: a library not principally of finished thoughts to be learned, but of dormant thoughts waiting for the conditions in which they can grow. I am the reverse Johnny Appleseed. I do not spread seeds of thought across the republic; I hoard them in climate-controlled conditions. I am not merely inattentive to the author’s whole argument; I am prowling through books with sacks, secateurs, and dubious property rights. Teach me? Author, feed me.
If I were a prince, I would hire or buy a private literary tea-pot, in which I would steep all the leaves of new books that promised well. The infusion would do for me without the vegetable fibre. You understand me; I would have a person whose sole business should be to read day and night, and talk to me whenever I wanted him to. I know the man I would have: a quick-witted, out-spoken, incisive fellow; knows history, or at any rate has a shelf full of books about it, which he can use handily, and the same of all useful arts and sciences; knows all the common plots of plays and novels, and the stock company of characters that are continually coming on in new costume; can give you a criticism of an octavo in an epithet and a wink, and you can depend on it; cares for nobody except for the virtue there is in what he says; delights in taking off big wigs and professional gowns, and in the disembalming and unbandaging of all literary mummies. Yet he is as tender and reverential to all that bears the mark of genius,—that is, of a new influx of truth or beauty,—as a nun over her missal. In short, he is one of those men that know everything except how to make a living. Him would I keep on the square next my own royal compartment on life’s chessboard. To him I would push up another pawn, in the shape of a comely and wise young woman, whom he would of course take,—to wife. For all contingencies I would liberally provide. In a word, I would, in the plebeian, but expressive phrase, “put him through” all the material part of life; see him sheltered, warmed, fed, button-mended, and all that, just to be able to lay on his talk when I liked,—with the privilege of shutting it off at will.
Sounds to me like what he wanted, nearly two centuries early, was an LLM. He doesn’t want an encyclopedia set, he wants a personality. A model with a customized system prompt. The one part that now seems obsolete is the enormous infrastructure required to keep the thing running. Holmes must house the critic, feed him, provide his clothing, and procure him a wife. OpenAI has simplified the interface somewhat, though the data centers are arguably the modern equivalent of all that sheltering, warming, feeding, and button-mending.
Thought is perhaps no more than a whim of Nature, who has bestowed it on a single species, as she bestowed on the rare or extinct mammals we see in our museums their absurd antlers: weapons or ornaments so curiously outspread, looped, gnarled,or branching that they are even more perilous than useless to the animal that wears them.
After all—why not? Our heads are cluttered up with speculations and ideas that get caught in the tangles of the forest of hard facts, and keep us in a quandary, proud of our excrescences, and doomed to bell, like rutting stags, our poems and our theories—magniloquent and mortified.
What a piece of work is man: how ingenious in folly, how elaborate in error, how infinite in his capacity to make a simple danger complicated. In reason, how labyrinthine; in apprehension, how confidently mistaken; in action, how divided against himself to invent both the cure and the argument against taking it. The beauty of the world, the paragon of animals — yet what is this paragon but a creature clever enough to escape superstition and cleverer still at manufacturing new ones, who clears the forest of predators only to catch his antlers in a thicket of his own theories?
There is an interesting remark in the introduction which has some modern resonance (I think). The author writes — remember this is 1904 — of ‘That modern weakness of moral fibre, that false sentimentalism, which tends to make our sympathies go to the side of the criminal rather than his victim, was not characteristic of the Elizabethan age.’ But insofar as we now consider the Edwardian age in which Baildon wrote to be of great harshness by comparison with our own rather than one of sentimentalism, perhaps we ought to be careful of complaining of the softness of our times. Perhaps, indeed, they will seem harsh to our even more sentimental successors: or perhaps they will attribute their own travails to past sentimentalism, namely ours.
Progressivism and declinism look like opposites, but both depend on the same picture: history as a line, with ourselves anxiously locating our position upon it. Are we farther along than our ancestors, or sliding backwards? Either way, the present becomes a referendum on the entire human adventure. A cyclical view would relieve some of the anxiety because it turns these alleged historical verdicts into recurrent human predicaments. Severity produces revulsion and a movement toward mercy; mercy decays into indulgence; indulgence provokes a demand for severity. Confidence hardens into arrogance, skepticism dissolves into confusion, confusion creates a hunger for certainty, and the wheel turns again. No generation permanently solves the problem because each solution cultivates the conditions of its own correction.
The metaphor is far more intelligent than its author, and this is the case with many things. Everything has its depths. He who has eyes sees something in everything.
I love metaphors, and I feel pleased when I come up with what I consider to be a good one, but I also feel a little bit like I’ve cheated — as if I’ve explained something rather than merely artfully compared two things. I feel like Victor Frankenstein, accidentally stitching life together from dead parts: one observation, one image, one half-remembered association, one stolen nerve from some previous book. Then the lightning hits, and suddenly it sits up.
Keep the prejudice-testicles, by all means; a mind without them may be well-behaved, but it will not sire many thoughts. But keep a muzzle on the suspicion-snout. Let prejudice supply vigor, suspicion supply caution, and judgment hold the leash. That last part is vital: the intact crank, allowed to roam at will, sprays his opinions everywhere. Every book, movie, sentence, political event, and innocent passerby must be claimed by the same stale scent. The mind doesn’t need to be neutered, but it must be housebroken.
We are buds on a single tree — what do we know of what can become of us in the interest of the tree! But we have a consciousness as if we wanted to be and should be everything, a fantasy of ‘ego’ and everything ‘non-ego.’ Cease feeling ourselves to be such fantastical ego! Learn step by step to throw off the reputed individual! Discover the errors of the ego! Realize egoism as error! Certainly do not construct altruism as the opposite! That would be the love of the other reputed individuals! No! Get beyond‘me’ and ‘you’! Perceive cosmically!
Poor Nietzsche is temperamentally incapable of serenity. Even when he approaches self-dissolution, he does it like a man waving a sword with his hair on fire. The ego may be an error, but by God, it will be destroyed heroically. A Buddhist monk might say, “Observe the arising and passing away of the self.” Nietzsche says, “SMASH THE REPUTED INDIVIDUAL AND PERCEIVE COSMICALLY!” Same mountain, much more lightning. Zen, but with a Prussian barracks aftertaste. The monastery has no meditation cushions, only cold baths, mountain walks, and aggressively annotated Heraclitus.
“A monk asked Master Nietzsche, ‘Does the dog have Buddha-nature?’ Nietzsche struck him with a riding crop and shouted, ‘THE DOG IS A BAD PHILOLOGIST!’”
I love ideas as much as I love women. I derive a sensuous pleasure from playing with ideas. Genuine ideas dance and sing. They sparkle and twinkle with mirth and mischief. They titillate the mind, kindle the imagination, and warm the heart. They have grace and promise.
Hoffer saw the flirtatious side of ideas. But ideas are not always coquettes at a party. Sometimes they are cold hands pressed against your back just as you were drifting off to sleep. They give you the silent treatment all morning, then want to talk when you are driving, showering, or carrying groceries. They flirt outrageously in the margins of a book, then become prim and distant when you sit down at the keyboard. Sometimes they ask “Does this paragraph make me look fat?” and you must gently suggest that perhaps the second sentence is retaining water, or that possibly it wouldn’t hurt to lose a couple adjectives. Sometimes they keep you in the friendzone for years: intimate enough to haunt you, evasive enough to resist becoming an essay. Others move in after one conversation and begin rearranging the furniture.
This seems…optimistic. My experience is that once we know our weaknesses, they simply force us to buy them new clothes. The old disguise has been compromised. Vanity can no longer appear decked out as independence; cowardice has been seen strolling around in prudence’s hat; laziness has overplayed its hand as philosophical detachment. Very well, then. Back to the wardrobe. A man must go on deceiving himself somehow, and self-knowledge, far from ending the deception, merely raises the cost of production.
The conquerors enslave the conquered, who in turn begin to shape and color the secret dreams and the culture of their masters. The diabolical prisoners’ cage is occupied first by the sadist who designed it. The Duke of Alva ends a career of legendary terror by being breast-fed. English colonels would stamp round India for years, snorting with contempt, and return home to join the Theosophical Society. In large American cities so many people are in a hurry and drive automobiles that traffic in the congested streets goes into slow motion. In England so many people want to live on the edge of the countryside that miles and miles of it disappear into the city. Both whole communities and individuals turn their back on some pitfall and hurry off to land in another, rather deeper. Just when Man thinks he can do everything, he finds himself helpless in the clutch of some unknown force. And in this ironic principle, which appears to govern so much of our lives, I find delight. Even when it comes close and hurts, the delight is still there. “The Old So-and-So!” I mutter admiringly, from that part of me which must be immortal and invulnerable.
Priestley calls it the ironic principle, but I prefer to think of it as the trickster god who loves us and wants us to be amused. Just when man is most convinced he has mastered events, secured his dignity, and arranged the world to his liking, he sits on a whoopee cushion or slips on a patch of black ice. One trap escaped, another entered; one boast uttered, one humiliation prepared. Reality will not let us remain pompous for long. Priestley’s genius is to greet this with delight instead of resentment. That may be as good a definition of wisdom as any: to feel the pain, but also to get the joke.
I wish men would begin by respecting themselves: everything else follows from that. Certainly, with just that one is finished for the others: it’s the last thing they can forgive. What? A man who respects himself?
I like that this avoids the Scylla of performative self-depreciation and the Charybdis of therapeutic affirmation. Both are still groveling pleas to an audience. Vanity they understand. Woundedness they understand. Even self-hatred is legal tender, socially speaking. But a person who seems to stand on his own authority, without begging to be patted or absolved, feels like a rebuke to everyone still performing for the room. A man who respects himself is harder to recruit, harder to shame, harder to manipulate. He does not automatically hand others the right to define him. That independence reads, to many people, as insolence. It shrugs off the grasping hands of insecurity, apology, or neediness with which other people get a grip on you. As Don Draper put it in a Nietzschean moment — you feel bad for me? I don’t think about you at all.
This explains my whole style. I’ve tried to stop, honestly. I’ve tried to become a respectable long-form thinker. But the moment I start “developing” an idea, it loses something. So I don’t write essays. I’m an intellectual flasher. I expose a brief idea in public and then immediately close my trench coat and flee before someone can demand citations.
Hatred of mediocrity is unworthy of a philosopher: it is almost a question mark over his right to ‘philosophy.’ Precisely because he is the exception, he must take the rule under his wing, must help everything average to keep up its faith in itself.
This is one of the aphorisms that changed my life when I read it as a young man. Here he’s basically saying: if your identity depends on hating the average, you’re still orbiting the average. It was a call to stop needing an enemy. Contempt is a dependency: you require the thing you despise to complete your self-image. Nietzsche suggested a better ideal: genuine tolerance for difference, and a kind of intellectual independence that refuses the cheap pleasures of being reactive. We can’t live free of all relationships, but we can choose them more deliberately: not as planets chained to the obvious gravitational centers, but as comets — still in a larger orbit, just not the one everyone expects.
My ‘scepticism’, my retreat from or disdain for real things, acts and so on, is without doubt linked to my muscular mediocrity. I’ve always had an intense dislike for any positive muscular effort and although physically fairly well-proportioned and having a certain ‘athletic’ disposition, namely a feeling for the elegance of movement — the feeling of muscular weakness, whether real or imagined, has played a significant role in my development. I’ve always attempted to replace an expenditure of energy φ by an expenditure of energy ψ.
Many such cases. That’s a lot of fancy-schmancy words just to say, “I can’t squat 135 to below parallel.” It’s the old saw about doing vs. teaching, revised: those who can’t lift, cerebrate. Which would be harmless enough — everyone compensates somewhere — except the cerebrators so often feel obliged to moralize about it, as if the Meathead’s love of iron were a symptom of a stunted mind rather than the simple fact that some men are at home in their bodies. The propaganda runs one way because Eggheads own the printing presses: the strong are only strong because they can’t think. But the logic works in reverse too. A man who can move twice his bodyweight in plates has less need to flee into abstractions to feel potent.