Mind and feeling
Nietzsche
Overcoming
Nietzsche (1844–1900 · Germany) — Overcoming.
What actually happened?
In January 1889, in a street in Turin, Nietzsche saw a horse being whipped by its driver. He ran across, threw his arms round the animal's neck and wept, and then broke down. He never recovered his reason and spent the remaining eleven years in madness. A man who had spent his working life on the will to power finished his philosophy in front of an innocent horse, in tears. The thinking is full of strength and conquest and the life was full of weakness and pain. That contradiction is the most useful door into him.
Eternal recurrence
If you had to repeat what you are doing now for ever, what would you choose? It is not a claim that the universe actually loops. It is a test at the limit: a thing worth repeating without end is a thing genuinely worth doing, and a thing you could not stand to repeat was never really what you wanted. There is no stricter instrument for checking what you value.
Two hours on the phone tonight — would you take that for ever? Run the same question over the three things that took the most of today.
The will to power
The essence of life is to expand, to overcome, to become more. His will to power is not political office, it is an internal drive to go past yourself. What he calls master morality is creating your own standard of value and beating yesterday's version of yourself, rather than using phrases like humility is a virtue to keep the strong in check.
An athlete going past a limit, an artist breaking a style, a founder walking into unknown territory. None of it is taking something off somebody else.
God is dead
God is dead, and we have killed him. Not an atheist announcement but a diagnosis of modernity: with the traditional moral system gone, the source of meaning goes with it and nihilism moves in. His remedy is that each person has to become a maker of values. The overman is not a superhero, he is someone able to create a meaning for his own existence.
Inherited belief, family structure and national identity all coming apart at once, with no answer left to why am I alive. The modern crisis of meaning is what the sentence was pointing at.
Perspectivism
There are no facts, only interpretations. What anybody sees is an interpretation issued from their own vantage, history and interest, and not the objective article. This is not relativism, it is epistemic humility: knowing your own angle is partial, and going out to collect the other angles on purpose.
Ray Dalio's radical open-mindedness is perspectivism in practice — invite everybody to attack your judgement, because their vantage may hold what yours cannot.
How do I use it today?
Run the eternal recurrence test. Take the three things that took the most of your time today and ask, one by one, whether you would accept repeating them for ever. Cut the ones that come back no, and go deeper into the ones that come back yes. It is more direct than any system of time management.
Deep read
Read alongside
Further
Lines to keep
What does not kill me makes me stronger.
We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once.
Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman, a rope over an abyss.
One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.
He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.