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Existentialism
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 - 1900)
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A
sublime one saw I today, a solemn one, a penitent of the
spirit: Oh, how my soul laughed at his ugliness! (thus
spake zarathustra) |
 Why
do I know more than other people? Why, in general, am I so
clever? I have never pondered over questions that are not
really questions. I have never wasted my strength. I have
no experience, for instance, of actual religious difficulties.
I am quite unfamiliar with the feeling of "sinfulness."
Similarly I lack a reliable criterion for determining a prick
of conscience: from what one hears, a prick of conscience
does not seem to me anything very worthy of veneration. .
. . I dislike to leave an action of mine in the lurch; I prefer
to omit utterly the bad result, the consequences, from any
problem involving values. In the face of evil . consequences
it is too easy to lose the proper standpoint from which to
view an action. A prick of conscience seems to me a sort of
"evil eye." Something that has failed should be
all the more honored just because it has failed-this agrees
much better with my morality.-"God," "the immortality
of the soul," tcsalvation," a "beyond"-these
are mere notions, to which I paid no attention, on which I
never wasted any time, even as a child-though perhaps I was
never enough of a child for that-I am quite unacquainted with
atheism as a result, and still less as an event: with me it
is instinctive. I am too inquisitive, too skeptical, too arrogant
', to let myself be satisfied with an obvious and crass solution
of things. God is such an obvious and crass solution; a solution
which is a sheer indelicacy to us thinkers-at bottom He is
really nothing but a coarse commandment against us: ye shall
not think! . . . I am much more interested in another question
which the "salvation of humanity" depends much more
than upon any piece of theological curiosity: the question
of nutrition. (Ecce Homo)
Unmoved
is my depth: but it sparkleth with swimming enigmas and laughters.
There
are no moral phenomena at all, but only moral interpretation
of phenomena (Beyond Good and Evil )
Ce
qu'on fait n'est jamais compris mais seulement loué ou blâmé.
Nietzsche, Gay Science |
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