Active Nihilism” an ideal of the highest degree of powerfulness of the spirit, the over-richest life— partly destructive, partly ironic. …
Modern pessimism is an expression of the uselessness of the modern world — not of the world of existence. …
The concept of decadence. — Waste, decay, elimination need not be condemned: they are necessary consequences of life, of the growth of life. The phenomenon of decadence is as necessary as any increase and advance of life: one is in no position to abolish it. Reason demands, on the contrary, that we do justice to it.
……….– Fredrich Nietzsche
The Dark Fantastic: Literature, Philosophy, and Digital Arts 
S.C:
Thanks for the Nietzsche quotes! Any suggestions for reading and understanding aphorisms? I’m reading through Daybreak (aka The Dawn) and some of them seem so cryptic. Maybe there’s an Aphorisms For Dummies book out there! :>)
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I’d return to Nietzsche’s masters in this form: François de La Rochefoucauld and Chateaubriand. Nietzsche is a mercurial thinker, antagonistic, fiery, a thought in movement against thought that allows the mind to traverse itself in the moment of its annihilation. One doesn’t understand this kind of thought like one does reading such plodding arguments as Kant’s, but rather as one reads Shakespeare – a flame in the spur, a striking of the flint on the anvil of the mind.
Not being a systematic thinker Nietzsche used this short pithy form as a spur to thought, rather than as a completed one. For him it was the compression of thought into its singular and most complex form. The aphorism is to philosophy what the Pindaric Ode was to poetry, the movement of the mind across the veil of greatness, the striving toward the best, the epitome of excellence.
Another is Emile Cioran, his A Short History of Decay is a good place to start. Also Geary’s Guide to the World’s Great Aphorists.
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Thanks! I’ll definitely check out the sources you mentioned. Nietzsche sure was dynamite!
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Yea, of late been rereading him… Like Bataille I read Nietzsche in my teens like a Bible. Been years since I reread him. I’d absorbed him into my being long ago. That’s one reason people have a hard time with me: they try to put me in a box of Left or Right, reduce me to some position or stance when like Emerson and Nietzsche I left those boxes long ago and became a singular and unique aristocrat of the spirit. Even Henry Miller uttered his approval of the notion of an “aristocracy of the intellect”. Either way one can’t be labelled and be unique. So one is always safe: one knows from the beginning that people will see one as one is not, and never know what one is…
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I disagree with this totalistic notion of an interconnectedness-of-everything… smells of objective idealism?
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ah the title is from the flaky host and co. the interviewed author/physicist makes the point that there are truly alien matters (pardon the pun) that make up most of existence.
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ah… haha
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Reblogged this on taherehbarati and commented:
Fredrich Nietzsche is a great philosopher of our time and his words are still influencing and reshaping human relationships. The following is a beautiful quotation of him that makes us ponder…
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