A Polemic on Objectivity (For Tony) (Humans)

by xeno6696 @, Sonoran Desert, Friday, June 29, 2012, 02:45 (4281 days ago)

However greatfully we may welcome an objective spirit--and is there anyone who has never been mortally sick of everything subjective and of his accursed ipsissimosity? --in the end we also have to learn caution against our gratitude and put a halt to the exaggerated manner in which the "unselfing" and depersonalization of the spirit is being celebrated nowadays as if it were the goal itself and redemption and transfiguration. This is particularly characteristic of the pessimists's school, which also has good reasons for according the highest honors to "disinterested knowledge." -The objective person who no longer curses and scolds like the pessimist, the ideal scholar in whom the scientific instinct, after thousands of total and sem-failures, for once blossoms and blooms to the end, is certainly one of the most precious instruments there are; but he belongs in the hand of one more powerful. He is only an instrument; let us say, he is a mirror--he is no "end in himself." The objective man is indeed a mirror: he is accustomed to submit beofe whatever wants to be known, without any other pleasure than that found in knowing and "mirroring"; he waits until something comes, and then spreads himself out tenderly lest light footsteps and the quick passage of spiritlike beings should be lost on his plane and skin. -Whatever still remains in him of a "person" strikes him as accidental, often arbitrary, still more often disturbing: to such an extent has he become a passageway and reflection of strange forms and events even to himself. He recollects "himself" only with an effort and often mistakenly; he easily confuses himself with others, he errs about his own needs and is in this respect, alone unsubtle and slovenly. Perhaps his health torments him, or the pettiness and cramped atmosphere of wife and friend, or the lack of companions and company--yes, he forces himself to reflect on his torments--in vain. Already his thoughts roam--to a more general case, and tomorrow he knows no more than he did yesterday how he might be helped. He has lost any seriousness for himself, also time: he is cheerful, not for lack of distress, but for lack of fingers and handles for his need. His habit of meeting everything and experience halfway, the sunny and impartial hospitality with which he accepts evertyhing that comes his way, his type of unscrupulous benevolence, of dangerous unconcern aboyt Yes and No--alas, there are cases enough in which he has to pay for these virtues! And as a human being he becomes all too easily the caput mortuum (dross) of these virtues. -If love and hatred are wanted from him--I mean love and hatred as God, woman, and animal understand them--he will do what he can and give what he can. But one should not be surprised if it is not much--if just here he proves inauthentic, fragile, questionable, and worm-eaten. His love is forced, his hatred artificial, and rather un tour de force, a little vanity and exaggeration. After all, he is genuine only insofar as he may be objective: only in his cheerful "totalism" he is still "nature" and "natural." His mirror soul, eternally smoothing itself out, no longer knows how to affirm or negate; he does not command, neither does he destroy. "Je ne meprise presque rien," (I despise almost nothing.) he sais with Leibniz: one should not overlook and underestimate that presque. -Neither is he a model man; he does not go before anyone, nor behind; altogether he places himself too far apart to have any reason to take sides for good or evil. When confusing him for so long with the philosopher, with the Caesarian cultivator and cultural dynamo, one accorded him far too high honors and overlooked his most essential characteristics: he is an instrument, something of a slave though certainly the most sublime type of slave, but in himself nothing--presque rien! The objective man is an instrument a precious, easily injured and clouded instrument for measruring and as an arragement of mirrors, an artistic triumph that dservers care and onor; but he is no goal, no conclusion and sunrise, no complementary man in whom the rest of existence is justified, no termination--and still less a beginning, a begetting and first cause, nothing tough, powerful, self-reliant that wants to be master--rather only a delicate, carefully dusted, fine, mobile pot for forms that still has to wait for some content and substance in order to "shape" itself accordingly--for the most part, a man without substance and content, a "selfless" man. Consequently, also nothing for women, in parenthesi-----Frederick Nietzsche
Beyond Good and Evil, section 207.

--
\"Why is it, Master, that ascetics fight with ascetics?\"

\"It is, brahmin, because of attachment to views, adherence to views, fixation on views, addiction to views, obsession with views, holding firmly to views that ascetics fight with ascetics.\"

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