The female intellect. Women’s intellect is manifested as perfect control, presence of mind, and utilization of all advantages. They bequeath it as their fundamental character to their children, and the father furnishes the darker background of will. His influence determines the rhythm and harmony, so to speak, to which the new life is to be played out; but its melody comes from the woman.

To say it for those who know how to explain a thing: women have the intelligence, men the heart and passion. This is not contradicted by the fact that men actually get so much farther with their intelligence: they have the deeper, more powerful drives; these take their intelligence, which is in itself something passive, forward. Women are often privately amazed at the great honor men pay to their hearts. When men look especially for a profound, warm-hearted being, in choosing their spouse, and women for a clever, alert, and brilliant being, one sees very clearly how a man is looking for an idealized man, and a woman for an idealized woman–that is, not for a complement, but for the perfection of their own merits.

{ Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, VII, 411 }

illustration { Screaming Mimi’s ad, 1990s }

{ Nietzsche, Gay Science, 42, I }

{ Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 248 }

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photo { Werner Amann }

The Four Errors.

Man has been reared by his errors: firstly, he saw himself always imperfect; secondly, he attributed to himself imaginary qualities; thirdly, he felt himself in a false position in relation to the animals and nature; fourthly, he always devised new tables of values, and accepted them for a time as eternal and unconditioned, so that at one time this, and at another time that human impulse or state stood first, and was ennobled in consequence.

When one has deducted the effect of these four errors, one has also deducted humanity, humaneness, and “human dignity.”

{ Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 1887 }

artwork { Jasper Johns, Green Target, 1955 (detail) | encaustic on newspaper and cloth over canvas | MoMA, NYC }

And only when you have all denied me will I return to you. (…) With another love shall I then love you. { Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathusta, 1, 22, 1883-1885 }

Friedrich Nietzsche and Michel Foucault were both born on October 15. Nietzsche in 1844, and Foucault 82 years later, in 1926. Towards the end of his life, Michel Foucault stated: “I am a Nietzschean.”

On this perfect day, when everything has become ripe and not only the grapes are growing brown, a ray of sunlight has fallen on to my life: I looked behind me, I looked before me, never have I seen so many and such good things together. Not in vain have I buried my forty-fourth year today. I was entitled to bury it — what there was of life in it is rescued, is immortal. (…)

The happiness of my existence, its unique character perhaps, lies in its fatefulness. (…)

I know my fate. One day my name will be associated with the memory of something tremendous—a crisis without equal on earth, the most profound collision of conscience, a decision that was conjured up against everything that had been believed, demanded, hallowed so far. I am no man, I am dynamite.— Yet for all that, there is nothing in me of a founder of a religion—religions are affairs of the rabble; I find it necessary to wash my hands after I have come into contact with religious people.— I want no “believers”; I think I am too malicious to believe in myself; I never speak to masses.— I have a terrible fear that one day I will be pronounced holy: you will guess why I publish this book before; it shall prevent people from doing mischief with me.

I do not want to be a holy man; sooner even a buffoon.— Perhaps I am a buffoon. (…) I was the first to discover the truth by being the first to experience lies as lies—smelling them out.— My genius is in my nostrils.”

{ Nietzsche, Ecce Homo (How One Becomes What One Is), 1888 }

“You are most frequently termed “philosopher” but also “historian”, “structuralist”, and “Marxist”. The title of your chair at the College de France is “Professor of the History of Systems of Thought”. What does this mean?

I don’t feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning. If you knew when you began a book what you would say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write it? What is true for writing and for a love relationship is true also for life. The game is worthwhile insofar as we don’t know what will be the end. My field is the history of thought. Man is a thinking being. The way he thinks is related to society, politics, economics, and history and is also related to very general and universal categories and formal structures. But thought is something other than societal relations. The way people really think is not adequately analyzed by the universal categories of logic. Between social history and formal analyses of thought there is a path, a lane - maybe very narrow - which is the path of the historian of thought.

(…)

The classical age is pivotal in all your writings. Do you feel nostalgia for the clarity of that age or for the “visibility” of the Renaissance when everything was unified and displayed?

All of this beauty of old times is an effect of and not a reason for nostalgia. I know very well that it is our own invention. But it’s quite good to have this kind of nostalgia, just as it’s good to have a good relationship with your own childhood if you have children. It’s a good thing to have nostalgia toward some periods on the condition that it’s a way to have a thoughtful and positive relation to your own present. But if nostalgia is a reason to be aggressive and uncomprehending toward the present, it has to be excluded.

Truth, Power, Self: An Interview with Michel Foucault | October 25th, 1982

7. Hostile to light. — If we make it clear to someone that strictly speaking he is never able to speak of truth but only of probability and degrees of probability, we usually discover from the unconcealed joy of one so instructed how much men prefer the spiritual horizon to be fluctuating and how in the depths of their soul they hate truth on account of its certainty. — Is the reason that they are all secretly afraid that one day the light of truth will be directed too brightly upon them? They want to signify something, consequently no one must know too exactly what they are? Or is it merely dread of a light brighter than their twilight, easily dazzled bat-souls are unaccustomed to and which they must therefore hate?

{ Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, Assorted Opinions & Maxims }

photo { Mark Borthwick }

The question of nutrition is closely related to that of locality and climate. None of us can live anywhere; and he who has great tasks to perform, which demand all his energy, has, in this respect, a very limited choice. The influence of climate upon the bodily functions, affecting their retardation or acceleration, is so great, that a blunder in the choice of locality and climate may not merely alienate a man from his duty, but may withhold it from him altogether, so that he never comes face to face with it.

Animal vigor never preponderates in him to the extent that it lets him attain that exuberant freedom in which he may say to himself: I, alone, can do that…

The slightest torpidity of the intestines, once it has become a habit, is quite sufficient to turn a genius into something mediocre, something “German”; the climate of Germany, alone, is more than enough to discourage the strongest and most heroic intestines.

Upon the tempo of the body’s functions closely depend the agility or the slowness of the spirit’s feet; indeed spirit itself is only a form of these bodily functions. Enumerate the places in which men of great intellect have been and are still found; where wit, subtlety, and malice are a part of happiness; where genius is almost necessarily at home: all of them have an unusually dry atmosphere. Paris, Provence, Florence, Jerusalem, Athens — these names prove this: that genius is dependent on dry air, on clear skies — in other words, on rapid organic functions, on the possibility of contenuously securing for one’s self great and evens quantities of energy.

{ Nietzsche, Ecce Homo | Continue reading }

{ R. Crumb, God Bless DAD, no date | Ink, graphite, and correction fluid on paper }

June 07, 2001
You can download it off napster. Nobody ever made a big deal about people taping songs off the radio, but it’s exactly the same thing.

{ nietzsche.blogspot.com }