Thursday, June 26, 2008

Living according to Nature.

Aphoristic work at its best,i must admit the quality of Nietzsche's prose is dazzling and without a shadow of doubt, second to none.Here he speaks about nature and 'living according to nature'.


You desire to LIVE "according to Nature"? Oh, you noble
Stoics, what fraud of words! Imagine to yourselves a being like
Nature, boundlessly extravagant, boundlessly indifferent, without
purpose or consideration, without pity or justice, at once
fruitful and barren and uncertain: imagine to yourselves
INDIFFERENCE as a power--how COULD you live in accordance with
such indifference? To live--is not that just endeavouring to be
otherwise than this Nature? Is not living valuing, preferring,
being unjust, being limited, endeavouring to be different? And
granted that your imperative, "living according to Nature," means
actually the same as "living according to life"--how could you do
DIFFERENTLY? Why should you make a principle out of what you
yourselves are, and must be? In reality, however, it is quite
otherwise with you: while you pretend to read with rapture the
canon of your law in Nature, you want something quite the
contrary, you extraordinary stage-players and self-deluders! In
your pride you wish to dictate your morals and ideals to Nature,
to Nature herself, and to incorporate them therein; you insist
that it shall be Nature "according to the Stoa," and would like
everything to be made after your own image, as a vast, eternal
glorification and generalism of Stoicism! With all your love for
truth, you have forced yourselves so long, so persistently, and
with such hypnotic rigidity to see Nature FALSELY, that is to
say, Stoically, that you are no longer able to see it otherwise--
and to crown all, some unfathomable superciliousness gives you
the Bedlamite hope that BECAUSE you are able to tyrannize over
yourselves--Stoicism is self-tyranny--Nature will also allow
herself to be tyrannized over: is not the Stoic a PART of
Nature? . . . But this is an old and everlasting story: what
happened in old times with the Stoics still happens today, as
soon as ever a philosophy begins to believe in itself. It always
creates the world in its own image; it cannot do otherwise;
philosophy is this tyrannical impulse itself, the most spiritual
Will to Power, the will to "creation of the world," the will to
the causa prima.



(Beyond Good and Evil)

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