Analyzing psychologists...
‘Good and Evil’, ‘Good and Bad’
These English psychologists, who have to be thanked for having made the only attempts so far to write a history of the emergence of morality, - provide us with a small riddle in the form of themselves; in fact, I admit that as living riddles they have a significant advantage over their books - they are actually interesting! These English psychologists - just what do they want? You always find them at the same task, whether they want to or not, pushing the partie honteuse of our inner world to the foreground, and looking for what is really effective, guiding and decisive for our development where man’s intellectual pride would least wish to find it (for example, in the vis inertiae of habit, or in forgetfulness, or in a blind and random coupling of ideas, or in something purely passive, automatic, reflexive, molecular and thoroughly stupid) - what is it that actually drives these psychologists in precisely this direction all the time? Is it a secret, malicious, mean instinct to belittle man, which is perhaps unacknowledged? Or perhaps a pessimistic suspicion, the mistrust of disillusioned, surly idealists who have turned poisonous and green? Or a certain subterranean animosity and rancune towards Christianity (and Plato), which has perhaps not even passed the threshold of the consciousness? Or even a lewd taste toward the strange, for the painful paradox, for the dubious and nonsensical in life? Or finally - a bit of everything, a bit of meanness, a bit of gloominess, a bit of anti-Christianity, a bit of a thrill and need for pepper? …But people tell me that they are just old, cold, boring frogs crawling round men and hopping into them as if they were in their element, namely a swamp. I am resistant to hearing this and, indeed, I do not believe it; and if it is permissible to wish where it is impossible to know, I sincerely hope that the reverse is true, - that these analysts holding a microscope to the soul are actually brave, generous and proud animals, who know how to control their own pleasure and pain and have been taught to sacrifice desirability to truth, every truth, even a plain, bitter, ugly, foul, unchristian, immoral truth… Because there are such truths.
--from On the Geneology of Morality, by Friedrich Nietzsche
Picked up a copy of this book (alas, only temporarily) from the church library.
Why did no one warn me that Nietzsche is friggin' hilarious?!?
These English psychologists, who have to be thanked for having made the only attempts so far to write a history of the emergence of morality, - provide us with a small riddle in the form of themselves; in fact, I admit that as living riddles they have a significant advantage over their books - they are actually interesting! These English psychologists - just what do they want? You always find them at the same task, whether they want to or not, pushing the partie honteuse of our inner world to the foreground, and looking for what is really effective, guiding and decisive for our development where man’s intellectual pride would least wish to find it (for example, in the vis inertiae of habit, or in forgetfulness, or in a blind and random coupling of ideas, or in something purely passive, automatic, reflexive, molecular and thoroughly stupid) - what is it that actually drives these psychologists in precisely this direction all the time? Is it a secret, malicious, mean instinct to belittle man, which is perhaps unacknowledged? Or perhaps a pessimistic suspicion, the mistrust of disillusioned, surly idealists who have turned poisonous and green? Or a certain subterranean animosity and rancune towards Christianity (and Plato), which has perhaps not even passed the threshold of the consciousness? Or even a lewd taste toward the strange, for the painful paradox, for the dubious and nonsensical in life? Or finally - a bit of everything, a bit of meanness, a bit of gloominess, a bit of anti-Christianity, a bit of a thrill and need for pepper? …But people tell me that they are just old, cold, boring frogs crawling round men and hopping into them as if they were in their element, namely a swamp. I am resistant to hearing this and, indeed, I do not believe it; and if it is permissible to wish where it is impossible to know, I sincerely hope that the reverse is true, - that these analysts holding a microscope to the soul are actually brave, generous and proud animals, who know how to control their own pleasure and pain and have been taught to sacrifice desirability to truth, every truth, even a plain, bitter, ugly, foul, unchristian, immoral truth… Because there are such truths.
--from On the Geneology of Morality, by Friedrich Nietzsche
Picked up a copy of this book (alas, only temporarily) from the church library.
Why did no one warn me that Nietzsche is friggin' hilarious?!?