Friday, April 29, 2005
The hardest mother of them all
Fred sez:
"Do you have courage, O my brothers? Are you brave? Not courage before witnesses but the courage of hermits and eagles, which is no longer watched even by a god.
Cold souls, mules, the blind, and the drunken I do not call brave. Brave is he who knows fear but conquers fear, who sees the abyss, but with pride.
Who sees the abyss but with the eyes of an eagle; who grasps the abyss with the talons of an eagle -- that man has courage."
I often think about Fred during finals or other times when society tests my mettle or otherwise makes me jump through its hoops. People blindingly adhere to the world into which they were born, and this must necessarily be so. Reinventing the wheel every 25 years just wouldn't work -- besides, society needs the lemmings to be lemmings. Weekdays at the firm, keeping the little guy down, weekends at circuit city spending that disposable income.
Nietzsche was an angry man. If he had been a powerful man, he would have been a very bad man. He hates the world because of the hand he was dealt -- philosophy is the only means he has at his disposal to hit back. Some people punch walls, he wrote polemics. Same difference.
A lot of what he says is abhorrent, but we need people like him in our history. If we don't question the fundamental assumptions of the world we've crafted, people become lazy. Without critical thinkers, tradition becomes truth.
We need to be reminded that the we're at where we're at -- both the good and the bad -- because of the choices we have made. Human agency over determinism. That realization is both terrifying and liberating.
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"Do you have courage, O my brothers? Are you brave? Not courage before witnesses but the courage of hermits and eagles, which is no longer watched even by a god.
Cold souls, mules, the blind, and the drunken I do not call brave. Brave is he who knows fear but conquers fear, who sees the abyss, but with pride.
Who sees the abyss but with the eyes of an eagle; who grasps the abyss with the talons of an eagle -- that man has courage."
I often think about Fred during finals or other times when society tests my mettle or otherwise makes me jump through its hoops. People blindingly adhere to the world into which they were born, and this must necessarily be so. Reinventing the wheel every 25 years just wouldn't work -- besides, society needs the lemmings to be lemmings. Weekdays at the firm, keeping the little guy down, weekends at circuit city spending that disposable income.
Nietzsche was an angry man. If he had been a powerful man, he would have been a very bad man. He hates the world because of the hand he was dealt -- philosophy is the only means he has at his disposal to hit back. Some people punch walls, he wrote polemics. Same difference.
A lot of what he says is abhorrent, but we need people like him in our history. If we don't question the fundamental assumptions of the world we've crafted, people become lazy. Without critical thinkers, tradition becomes truth.
We need to be reminded that the we're at where we're at -- both the good and the bad -- because of the choices we have made. Human agency over determinism. That realization is both terrifying and liberating.
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