So Dr. Breuer challenges Nietzsche. I wrote about the first six chapters a few days ago: my enthusiasm hasn’t dimmed. :-)
“We are each composed of many parts, each clamoring for expression. We can be held responsible only for the final compromise, not for the wayward impulses of each of the parts” (300).
“’One must have chaos and frenzy within oneself to give birth to a dancing star.’” (179-180). [oft-quoted, even by the Deaf community!]
“A tree requires stormy weather if it is to attain a proud height…creativity and discovery are begotten in pain” (179).
The notion of eternal recurrence (249-251) deserves its own post in the phenomenology thread (good section in wikipedia on Nietzsche's view, emphasizing the thought rather than the physical reality of an eternal return). There’s something of the dialectic/dialogic in there (see p. 84, too). It has convinced me that it is time to read the copy of Thus Spake Zarathurstra that I picked up in Berlin last summer.
More on interpretation (I extrapolate): “ a series of meanings folded into” [an object, fill in the blank] (247). “accommodating to [interlocturs’] rhythm[s]” (245), “a philosopher’s personal moral structure dictates the type of philosophy he creates…the counselor’s personality dictates his counseling approach…” (182),
On blogging (!): yearning for an audience, the loneliness of living an unobserved life.
On dreams: “’I wonder,’ Nietzsche mused, ‘whether our dreams are closer to who we are than either rationality or feelings’” (242).
On the unconscious: “Consciousness is only the translucent skin covering existence: the trained eye can see through it – to primitive forces, instincts, to the very engine of the will to power” (239).
On life: “Life is a spark between two identical voids, the darkness before birth and the one after death” (238). “Living means to be in danger” (199).
SAM: “Death loses its terror if one dies when one has consummated one’s life! If one does not live in the right time, then one can never die at the right time” (247).
On memory: “Could there be such a thing as an active forgetting – forgetting something not because it is unimportant but because it is too important?” (231).
On good questions: They help one think differently. (223)
Dionysion passion: No need to live without magic, but you might ”have to change your conditions for passion” (222).
“…where philosophy falls short. Teaching philosophy and using it in life are very different undertakings” (209).
On volume: “If no one will listen, it’s only natural to shout!” (195).
On time and will: “The fact that the will cannot will backward does not mean the will is impotent! Because, thank God, God is dead – that does not mean existence has no purpose! Because death comes – that does not mean that life has no value” (190).
Nietzsche’s mission: “to save humankind from both nihilism and illusion” (140). [soon followed by this next, which I frame slightly out-of-context but what the hell]: “We’ll have to invent our procedure along the way” (141). :-)
