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Why does Nietzsche think suffering is great? : Nietzsche

Posted: April 21, 2019 at 2:48 am


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"But not to perish from internal distress and doubt when one inflicts great suffering and hears the cry of suffering : that is great, that belongs to greatness." The Gay Science, Fourth Book, 325

How can suffering being great be justified?

-below are rebuttals to immediately clear posits-

-Was mich nicht umbringt macht mich strker." =That still leaves me with questions: I would say painful experiences make you more weary and occupy time, not that they make you stronger.

-Problems direct humanity toward betterment. =We all have pain and have recorded it for at least 4,000 years, and the elimination of anxiety regarding the sustinance of life has not occurred. (food/Healthcare in developed countries)

I have posted this on stackexchange and have been lacking an answer (admittedly this is its revised form, through feedback from said site). This is my first post on Reddit, though I am not unfamiliar with the beast, but I hope the more open format of this site can give me at least some additional perspectives for consideration.

This topic concerns me greatly, it has occupied all of my free time for 4 days now. This is a plea.

==Addendum, respondents please read==

It seems as the Nietzschean view is that suffering is something to be worked through, not appreciated in and of itself (outside of reflection on this given opportunity).

Is there another way to view the swath of humanity that is not transcending their suffering other than in disappointment and disgust?

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Why does Nietzsche think suffering is great? : Nietzsche

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April 21st, 2019 at 2:48 am

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Nietzsche’s Earth: Great Events, Great Politics // Reviews …

Posted: April 20, 2019 at 10:46 am


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This book offers a valuable and provocative contribution to the growing literature on Nietzsche's political philosophy. It invites us to understand Nietzsche's politics as consisting mainly in a kind of political program calling for a radical transformation of our earthly habitation. On Shapiro's reading, this program principally requires reconceiving our relation to temporality, and, in particular, to the future, by cultivating a kind of openness that can make us receptive to those rare opportunities for radical change Nietzsche called "great events". Nietzsche's politics of futurity, however, requires displacing the way of thinking prevalent in the petty politics of nation-states. In each chapter, Shapiro investigates different aspects of Nietzsche's critiques of this way of thinking, trying to articulate, at the same time, its positive alternative.

In the introductory chapter, Shapiro argues that "earth" is a political concept that Nietzsche meant to counterpose to the Hegelian notion of "world", which has politico-theological affiliations with pernicious notions of unity and eternity, and is implicated with a teleological metanarrative of the end of history that overly extols the nation-state as the medium for the world-spirit's self-realization (pp.4, 7, 11-13, 16). According to Shapiro, Nietzsche sought to combat these entrenched political notions by initiating a great politics of the earth that, in contrast to the homogenizing world of nation-states, entreats us to see our planet as a place of radical plurality and of mobile multitudes that can dedicate themselves to giving a new direction to the earth (p.5, 18). Shapiro is aware that the dichotomy of "earth" vs. "world" may be suspect, insofar as the contrast is not one Nietzsche appears to have made explicit in his texts. Still, he argues (in my view credibly) that the distinction illuminates important themes in Nietzsche's work and that, in a way, it is implicit from the beginning in all of Nietzsche's philosophizing.

Chapter 2 picks up the anti-metanarrative theme by focusing on early Nietzsche's invective against end of history thinking. Shapiro emphasizes the way in which, for Nietzsche, this kind of thinking is implicated with a racist ideology of national unity that devalues the exceptional human being in favor of the uniform, homogeneous masses of the nation-state (pp.29, 32). This association is partly explained by the fact that state thinking displays a tendency to draw borders and posits an exclusionary dichotomy, in which the reasonably regulated life of those living within the state is to be contrasted with the chaotic barbarism encountered outside (pp.50-51). To sustain this kind of ideology, the state exploits the journalistic conception of events understood as "news", i.e. as something that must be perpetually expected and feared, which, among other things, facilitates the manufacturing of permanent "states of exception" through which the hold on power of the money-makers and military despots that control the state is strengthened, with the excuse that it is the only way to handle the constant siege that the state is under (pp.46-47, 67-68). According to Shapiro, Nietzsche in his early writings, aiming to disrupt this network of statist ideas, tried to articulate a conception of "great events" as unpredictable and transformative occurrences that instead of foreclosing the future can throw it open. But his attempt failed because he was still caught up with problematic notions of national unity and even with Hegelian modes of thinking (pp.36-37, 56-57).

Chapter 3 begins with a look at "states of exception" which, on Shapiro's analysis, Nietzsche saw as symptoms of the fragility of the modern state (pp.65-66). The nation-state requires the use of devices to suspend the rule of law in part because the increased mobility of populations and the growing cultural intermingling of Europeans are eroding the authority of the state and threatening to abolish it altogether. Much of the chapter, however, is devoted to a very hard to follow discussion of techniques of measurement and control of people, processes of territorialization, deterritorialization, and reterritorialization that organize the way we think of our relation to space and earth, the relation between music and geography, and so on. As happens in other places, this discussion, while insightful, is a bit disorganized, with abrupt changes in focus and the development of lines of thought whose connection to an overarching thesis is not always discernible. Still, perhaps the connecting thread is to be found in Shapiro's attempt to articulate what he takes to be Nietzsche's way of exploring other alternatives for inhabiting the earth and overcoming the pernicious essentialism of the nation-state that stifles the spirit of a people. Shapiro argues that Nietzsche saw populations, not as masses to be molded into systematic and homogeneous forms, but as multitudes full of productive possibilities precisely because they constitute experiments in inhabiting the earth, ones that require mobility in the form of nomadic wanderings, migrations, and also climatic and environmental changes in order to be fecund (pp.91, 93). Out of these multitudes are born the hybrid humans that anticipate the European of the future by trying out different cultural combinations and syntheses (p.97).

Chapter 4 returns to the theme of great events, this time highlighting their nature as kairos or moments of opportunity to be seized at the right juncture. Shapiro argues that a key aspect of nobility, as Nietzsche understood it, consists in "a mode of living one's temporality involving alert vigilance, freedom from the crowd's enthusiasms of the moment, and from the deadly deformation of lived time through economies of debt that mortgage the future" (p.102). In order to seize the opportune moment, the noble type must think beyond peoples and fatherlands, thus implicating him with the desire to see Europe become one by experimenting with new cosmopolitan forms of diversity and multiplicity that extend beyond borderlines (pp.109-110, 116). Similarly, cultivating this type of nobility will require escaping the logic of mortgage time that governs nation-states, where personal and political time are subjected to a regime of debt and credit that forces us to experience life in the temporal mode of chronos, i.e. as a series of stretches of time measured in terms of conditions of repayments of debts and of penalties for defaulting that all militate against our ability to seize the kairos (p.130-131).

In chapter 5, Shapiro investigates the place of the garden metaphor in Nietzsche's politics. It includes a fascinating discussion of the historic role that the concept of the garden has played in the formation of modern aesthetics (pp.140-151). Shapiro has a very general statement regarding the garden as a space to promote a hedonistic happiness in which "the dominant themes are the shaping and tending of the natural, with a view to producing a rewarding result as well as the enjoyment of an earthly site" (pp.150-151). However, he fails to connect his rich analysis more forcefully with Nietzsche's use of the metaphor. This missed opportunity is unfortunate, for Shapiro touches on themes that are very much at play in Nietzsche's philosophy. For instance, Shapiro notes that the Italian and French styles of gardening that Nietzsche admired were designed to highlight the sovereignty of the human will over nature, its ability to master and civilize natural forces in order to subordinate them to some grand rational plan. And while, in fairness, it should be said that Shapiro does claim that the Nietzschean garden metaphor stresses the power of shaping, framing, and making (p.156), and that it even incorporates the idea of the garden as the work of reason on behalf of reason (p.162), the overall tendency of Shapiro's account is to foreclose the possible connection that these notions might have, in Nietzsche philosophy, to more grandiose conceptions of the human will and its capacity to plan the future with world-conquering and eternalizing ambitions. Such connections would, of course, run counter to the general picture of Nietzsche's politics Shapiro is determined to draw, in which supposedly the future of the earth cannot be planned (pp.98-99). Yet, it seems to me that such themes are very much part of Nietzsche's philosophy, as seen, for instance, in the important section GS 291 that Shapiro himself brings to our attention. For Nietzsche, the garden is not just the product of an experimental reason, as Shapiro would have it (p.161), but also of an eternalizing, totalizing, perhaps -- forgive the contrived formula -- even of a metanarrativizing reason. The Genoa builders of GS 291, after all, "built and adorned to last for centuries and not for the fleeting hour" and they "perpetrated acts of violence and conquest" with their designs, that had the grand ambition of laying hands to the whole world around them in order to "make it [their] possession by incorporating it into [their] plan". Here is one of the places where the real weak spot of Shapiro's otherwise insightful analysis is exposed most clearly, a point to which I will return shortly.

In the last chapter, Shapiro turns to Nietzsche's philosophy of the Antichrist by examining the infamous book that bears that name in its title. For Shapiro, one of the principal lessons of The Antichrist is that Christianity is Paul's political invention, through which the early Christian interpretation of the Jesus event was subverted in order to accommodate the fact that the apocalyptic expectations of the faith had been disappointed (pp.175, 186-187). A religion that started out as rigorously unworldly had to learn to adapt itself to a world that stubbornly continued to persist. This political adjustment involved, above all, developing a new theory of time in which history became plotted as a story of deferred redemption through the intervention of Church and State, whose worldly powers ward off the imminent coming of the Antichrist (pp.195-196). Since, according to Shapiro, the metanarrative of world-history is one of the chief elements of statist ideology, he argues that Christianity is the inventor of world-history and that The Antichrist is integral to Nietzsche's attempt to overcome this way of reckoning time that belittles humanity and the earth (pp.180-181). How the reformed Christian story of deferred redemption through the state transmutes itself into a story of fulfilled redemption in the state is something that Shapiro does not fully explain. On his account, Christianity lends ideological support to imperial authority partly by fomenting the belief that the state is the restraining force that can keep the Antichrist from appearing and history and the world from ending (p.186). Yet, part of statist ideology is also to suppose that the state will bring about the end of history, and these two functions, as restrainer and enabler of the end of time, do not seem compatible at first glance. Perhaps the answer to this apparent contradiction is obvious to Shapiro, but, in general, these kinds of unresolved tensions abound in his analysis.

Overall, Nietzsche's Earth is very interesting and provocative; it strives with no small measure of success to provide a coherent picture of Nietzsche's philosophy. Shapiro does a good job of showing the relevance of Nietzsche's thought to contemporary social and political issues like the war on terror, globalization, the environmental crisis, and so on. He is to be commended especially also for his ability to engage fearlessly with Nietzsche's metaphors, which are an essential part of his thinking, and yet are often neglected by many Anglophone commentators, particularly those working within the analytic tradition. To them, this book may serve as a lesson and an example of the kinds of rewards that could await those who dare to follow the thread that leads into Nietzsche's symbolic universe. In this regard, I think that Shapiro has benefitted well from the continental tradition he draws from, which has fewer qualms about engaging in metaphoric analysis.

But the root of Shapiro's strength may also be the source of his weakness. For one thing, readers who are not conversant with the philosophical perspectives of writers like Deleuze, Guattari, and Agamben will have a hard time following the discussions where these figures are recruited in order to explain important themes in Nietzsche's philosophy. Shapiro often forgets to take the time to help readers clearly understand the conceptual resources he deploys, leaving us to fend for ourselves and to resolve the apparent tensions introduced by the use of these resources. How is it that statist ideology, whose tendency supposedly inclines towards an entrenched mentality of drawing borders, is not, as one would have perhaps naturally expected, associated with the thought-process of "territorialization" by means of which "we humans (and all living things) . . . [stake] out a space, a place . . . we mark the borders of our situation" (p.85), but is instead linked to "deterritorializing" forms of thinking in which spaces are being absorbed in a kind of expansionist mindset that, disrespecting all borders, attempts to "[configure] itself as a mobile political structure, not absolutely tied to a fixed place" (p.86)? How is it that the network of statist ideas that includes the notion of the "end of history" according to which no more new events are to be expected because time has ceased, nonetheless, also includes the journalistic conception of events as "news" that must constantly be manufactured because the state cannot tolerate empty time?

As I mentioned, it may be that the solution to these and other tensions is not so difficult, but Shapiro does not even seem to notice their presence in his account. Indeed, as I read this book, I often found myself feeling as if I had stepped into the middle of a veritable lighting storm of very suggestive insights, but absent the metal rod and the lens that could harness these flashes and concentrate them into a tightly focused beam. As a result, I cannot help but feel that, while generally coherent and capturing much that I believe to be really part of Nietzsche's philosophy, the Nietzschean tapestry that Shapiro has woven threatens to fall apart at the seams. It also provides a skewed and partial picture that omits important themes that, in many ways, are more central to Nietzsche's philosophical outlook and, thus, presumably integral to whatever political project he may have espoused. I have no doubt that, as Shapiro insists, Nietzsche's politics of futurity does entreat us to keep to some extent the future open, to cultivate nomadic lives and ways of thinking that are free from the stifling effects of nationalistic ideology, to resist the pernicious influence of the multitude's passing enthusiasms and the theatrical sensationalism of the modern press, so that we can seize the kairos; and so on.

But where, in this vision, is the Nietzsche who showed admiration for the laws of Manu, "whose goal was to 'eternalize' the supreme condition for a thriving life" (A 58)? Or the Nietzsche who laments the Christian destruction of the Roman Empire because "this most remarkable artwork in the great style was a beginning, its design was calculated to prove itself over the millennia -- , nothing like it has been built to this day, nobody has even dreamed of building on this scale, sub specie aeterni [from the standpoint of eternity]!" (A 60). Where, indeed, is the Nietzsche who, as Shapiro has it, may criticize the logic of mortgage time, but also has no problem incorporating that very logic into his own -- dare I say -- teleological metanarrative of redemption in The Genealogy, by appearing to suggest that the human being with the right to make promises, the sovereign individual who is the master of a free will, might be, in turn, the great promise that nature makes to us as repayment, perhaps, for the guilt it has incurred in using us for its bloody and cruel experiment of cultivating that great tree of humanity that we are to find in the recovered garden-earth Shapiro speaks of (GM II.2-3, 16)? A great promise and a debt, by the way, that in an interesting reversal of the Christian story might require our assistance to be repaid (for instance, by our learning to incorporate the thought of Eternal Recurrence into our lives); for nature is blind, and the god of nature, Dionysus, might be incapable of securing on his own the conditions that will ensure that we are able to enjoy -- as does the convalescent Zarathustra in his post-redemption speech -- the pleasant smell of the rosy apple of our volitional powers instead of the repulsive, sinful scent of a rotting free will that has spoiled on the tree (BGE 203, 211; Z III 'The Convalescent', 2).

It is not altogether surprising that Shapiro has a blind spot for these themes, for they tend to clash with those favored by the type of philosophic tradition in which he feels at home, and for which this kind of eternalizing metanarrative is part of the problem. Nietzsche often speaks positively of tradition. Its tyrannical hold can serve to educate the spirit in self-discipline and prepare it for freedom (BGE 44, 188). The will to tradition is also, for him, part of the engine that drives those powers, like the Roman Empire, "that can wait, that can still make promises", for this will belongs to "the sort of instincts that give rise to institutions, that give rise to a future" (TI 'Skirmishes', 39). But in his characteristic nuanced way, Nietzsche also warns us against becoming so comfortable within our traditions that we simply let our thoughts grow peacefully, all too peacefully from them (UM III.8). One of the things he admired in our modern culture was precisely its ability to contradict and to be hostile towards what is traditional; the ability to take sides against all that is familiar and wants to become firm in us (GS 296, 297).

None of us can completely escape the influence of our preferred traditions. But remembering to remain vigilant of the ways in which they might skew our outlooks might perhaps be one of the most important lessons I am bringing back home with me from my fortunate encounter with Shapiro's thought-provoking work.

REFERENCES

Nietzsche, Friedrich. (1997 [1873-6]), Untimely Meditations (UM), D. Breazeale (ed.) and R.J. Hollingdale (trans.). Cambridge University Press.

-- (2001 [1882 and 1887 (Book V added)]), The Gay Science: with a Prelude in German Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs (GS), B. Williams (ed.), and J. Nauckhoff and A. Del Caro (trans.). Cambridge University Press.

-- (2002 [1886]), Beyond Good and Evil (BGE), R.P. Horstmann and J. Norman (eds.), and J. Norman (trans.). Cambridge University Press.

-- (2005 [1888]), The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols and Other Writings (A, EH, and TI, respectively), A. Ridley and J. Norman (eds.), and J. Norman (trans.). Cambridge University Press.

-- (2006 [1887]), On the Genealogy of Morality (GM), K. Ansell-Pearson (ed.) and C. Diethe (trans.). Cambridge University Press.

-- (2006 [1883-5]), Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Z), R. Pippin (ed.) and A. Del Caro (trans.). Cambridge University Press.

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Hiking With Nietzsche by John Kaag review becoming who you …

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If Friedrich Nietzsche were alive today, what would he think of our times? The nations are again drawing away from one another and long to tear one another to pieces, he might observe. The sciences, pursued without any restraint and in a spirit of the blindest laissez faire, are shattering and dissolving all firmly held belief; the educated classes and states are being swept away by a hugely contemptible money economy. The world has never been more worldly, never poorer in love and goodness Everything, contemporary art and science included, serves the coming barbarism.

That passage, from one of the philosophers Untimely Meditations, was published in 1874 and illustrates the extent to which Nietzsche is always our exact contemporary. The problem with writing books about him, though, is that you just cant compete with the bleak hilarity and glamorous swagger of his prose, and to reduce the wild forest of his thoughts to single propositions in precis is nearly always to traduce him.

The American philosophy professor John Kaag tries a different tack, aiming to use Nietzsche as a kind of elevated self-help guru, scattering discussions of the philosophers life and works through a memoir of the authors own youth and romantic life. This approach is defended early on by the claim that Nietzsches philosophy is no mere abstraction. It isnt to be realised from an armchair or the comfort of ones home. One needs to physically rise, stand up, stretch, and set off. It is surprising to see a professional philosopher talking of mere abstraction here. Few people today will stand up for abstraction, but it is a keystone of all intellectual endeavour, as Nietzsche himself well knew. There are epochs, he wrote, in which the man of reason and the man of intuition stand side by side, the one fearful of intuition, the other filled with scorn for abstraction, the latter as unreasonable as the former is artistic. (On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense, 1873.)

Abstraction having been thus derided, we set off nonetheless with the author to what you cant get much less abstract than: mountains. Kaag tells us how, as a 19-year-old student, he went hiking in the Swiss Alps just as his philosophical hero had done: Nietzsche came to the mountains to tread on the edge of the void. Kaag stopped eating and nearly threw himself into a crevasse before coming to his senses. Then, 17 years later, he returns, this time with his wife also a philosopher, but a Kantian who thinks Nietzsche a marauding fool and their small daughter.

Unnecessarily, Kaag takes us through the airport as they set off on their trip, but the interest intensifies as we begin to breathe with his family the purer air of the mountains. They settle into a fine old hotel, and we hear about Nietzsches love affair with Lou Salom, and accompany the author on a series of solitary hikes. Christ, it was a long way to the bottom, he remarks at one point. Absolute certainty did not live up here. We learn about his trousers and footwear, and there are good expository accounts of the major Nietzschean works, on tragedy, the genealogy of morals and so on. Kaag has a pleasingly wry, compact style, and is particularly interesting on thinkers that Nietzsche influenced heavily: Herman Hesse and Theodor Adorno.

The tone becomes more urgently confessional throughout Kaags book, as it becomes clear he is working through some sort of personal crisis but if Nietzsche isnt the man you want in a crisis, who is? Here in the Alps in 1881, near a pyramidal rock 6,000 feet beyond man and time, is where he conceived of his most horrifying consolation: the idea of eternal recurrence. In the dead of night, he explained, a demon might whisper to you: This life as you now live and have lived it you will have to live once again and innumerable times again; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unspeakably small or great in your life must return to you, all in the same succession and sequence even this spider and this moonlight between the trees.

Nietzsches demand is that you should joyfully embrace such a prospect; indeed, to do so he calls the highest formula of affirmation. Kaag rather spoils the moment here by reducing this awful existential task to a version of the old metaphysical idea that the movement of reality is best described in terms of cycles and epicycles. But Nietzsche wasnt making positive claims about the nature of material reality, he was throwing down a gauntlet; and we have still not picked it up.

To buy Hiking With Nietzsche for 13.19 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Hiking With Nietzsche is published by Granta (14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over 15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of 1.99.

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No theologian, no founder of religions thought about this, that if you accept God as the creator, you are destroying the whole dignity of consciousness, of freedom, of love. You are taking all responsibility from man, and you are taking all his freedom away. You are reducing the whole of existence to just the whim of a strange fellow called God.

But Nietzsche's statement is bound to be only one side of the coin. He is perfectly right, but only about one side of the coin. He has made a very significant and meaningful statement, but he has forgotten one thing, which was bound to happen because his statement is based on rationality, logic and intellect. It is not based on meditation.

Man is free, but free for what? If there is no God and man is free, that will simply mean man is now capable of doing anything, good or bad; there is nobody to judge him, nobody to forgive him. This freedom will be simply licentiousness.

There comes the other side. You remove God and you leave man utterly empty. Of course, you declare his freedom, but to what purpose? How is he going to use his freedom creatively, responsibly? How is he going to avoid freedom being reduced to licentiousness?

Friedrich Nietzsche was not aware of any meditations -- that is the other side of the coin.

Man is free, but his freedom can only be a joy and a blessing to him if he is rooted in meditation.

Remove God -- that is perfectly okay, he has been the greatest danger to human freedom -- but give man also some meaning and significance, some creativity, some receptivity, some path to find his eternal existence.

Zen is the other side of the coin. Zen does not have any God, that's its beauty.

But it has a tremendous science to transform your consciousness, to bring so much awareness to you that you cannot commit evil. It is not a commandment from outside, it comes from your innermost being. Once you know your center of being, once you know you are one with the cosmos -- and the cosmos has never been created, it has been there always and always, and will be there always and always, from eternity to eternity -- once you know your luminous being, your hidden Gautam Buddha, it is impossible to do anything wrong, it is impossible to do anything evil, it is impossible to do any sin.

Friedrich Nietzsche in his last phase of life became almost insane. He was hospitalized, kept in a mad asylum. Such a great giant, what happened to him? He had concluded: "God is dead," but it is a negative conclusion. He became empty, but his freedom was meaningless. There was no joy in it because it was only freedom from God, but for what? Freedom has two sides: from and for. The other side was missing. That drove him insane.

Emptiness always drives people insane. You need some grounding, you need some centering, you need some relationship with existence. God being dead, all your relationship with existence was finished. God being dead, you were left alone without roots. A tree cannot live without roots, nor can you.

God was non-existential, but it was a good consolation. It used to fill people's interior, although it was a lie. But even a lie, repeated thousands and thousands of times for millennia, becomes almost a truth. God has been a great consolation to people in their fear, in their dread, in their awareness of old age and death, and beyond -- the unknown darkness.

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Nietzsche is one of the bravest, most insightful philosophers that our species has produced. He was misunderstood in his own time and generally not well understood or appreciated in our time. But his contributions to the world of ideas cannot be underestimated. Nietzsche exposed one crucial element within the human condition better than anyone else. And that was the artificial limitations we place on ourselves are the cause of our unhappiness, our stupidities, and our arrogance. He was right about that! One of those limitations in particular is how religion makes people servile, robs them of both their initiative and rational capacities.

Nietzsche's challenge is to achieve personal responsibility. And he meant that not only in the small ways, but in the "big" way: to be responsible to your own aspirations, to your potential to become better. That was the concept for the overman-- a human of personal courage who would gladly stand against the idiocies of superstition (like religion).

Nietzshe may not be everyone's cup of tea. In fact, reading his work can be as challenging as the ideas themselves. But the work is potent! Few others are even worthy to stand in his shadow.

Unfortunately, his ideas and writings were twisted, perverted, and co-opted by lesser minds. Still, reading Nietzsche is like throwing oneself into a cold lake; surprising, alarming, and then exhilarating. Good stuff, if you can take it.

(And I also agree with electropath: it's the hard questions that make us better.)

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Beware lest in fighting your demons, and battling with tyranny and injustice you do not become as your detractors, for no greater defeat hath man than to be so conquered by his opponent as to assume the subversive vices of those who seek this very end your demons seek t impose upon you paraphrased.

The light that shines leading the path to truth and liberty for the annihilators of freedom is a blazing furnace threatening their demise. War is a terrible thing, to live enchained is to inadvertently empower the wicked by their silence condoning the public wrong inflicted upon one, shielding the million wrongs they must impose upon others less able to communicate their woe. It is not my lot nor your task to judge those who preside in power, monarchs of a gruesome era greater feted by reward in their inclusion in the suffering of a dying eternal light. There is great profit to be gained for the torture of great minds and thinkers and evil prosper greater when men collude and do nothing. Psychological warfare bears no scars, holds no evidence, is unwitnessed. The greatest travesty is the laying of blame at the dismantled and defamed alter of God and his Saints for the sins of the earth gods*, a title they cunningly connive to assume, given the privilege and impunity it accords the wise and noble who by merit are afforded freedom of the people, a diplomatic trust further exploited by the same said rogue. Nietzsche saif ''God is dead'' most know this, exemplified by the sheer bloody minded evil and witchery that proliferates about us.

Nietzsches truth is undoubtedly immense in its depth yet he too was greatly tormented and dignified in his suffering, the Saintly are known to endure the onslaughts of purveyors of ignorance of paths of self damnation well. Witchery makes a mockery of wisdom, reason, sense and rationale, of propriety, decorum and anal encompassing love for a humanity portrayed as the obstructants and sinners. A people are as free and peaceable, enlightened and unified as the prowess of the establishment. To cast the sins of evil incompetents upon the ancient lores of scripture to exonerate these fiends is not only a blasphemy but ensures an absence of responsibility and accountability for the suffering and struggle of the people caused by the aforementioned.

The truth remains unspoken, misinterpreted. To cast down Gods grace as a right, as 'unconditional love' demanded by a people raised in a dysfunctional and misguided society is a libel and false misappropriation upon God. Nonexistence does not always work well in Gods favour. It allows these claims to remain unchallenged and the perpetrators of the consciously asserted crimes to go unpunished. A divided and set upon populace besieged by conflicting tenets and laws of scripture and state. Mankind has eternally awaited the coming of a Saviour, yet each to descend has in some form or guise been tormented and disassembled, ostracised and ultimate destroyed, usually in isolation. Retaining alive the myth of existence of a God or freeing God* for the people and their elect to assume accountability for their own actions are two choices obviating a need for resolve to release.

The ego and the Super Ego, does Man require God or God mans devotion, how preposterous to presume God could have need of mortals, and yet facts lead one to think a strong God is a strong man, fallen disempowered man causes the absence of any sense of God. Yet man lives free without adulation of the unseen and alternately sensed, heard, touched, felt. The death of innocence notable only when it gives forth wisdom. The awakening, the reunification of mans mortal soul with the universal. Can a universe care for a microcosmic man, and has mans consciousness the capacity to fathom and seek his universe. The Ego. A sense of Gods need for mankind to unite as one that his soul find rest, when tested, akin to the dominance battling in a spousal relationship for harmonious equanimity, retaliates in denial of any such need.

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Friedrich Nietzsche, who was born in 1844, fell silent in 1889, and died eleven years later, was the first great philosopher of the twentieth century. What made, and makes, him so important, is that he recognized with great clarity and impressive foresight the most troubling and persistent problem of modernity, the problem of values. His attempts to resolve this problem were not successful, but they did uncover depths of issues that still defeat our best efforts today.

Portrait of Nietzsche Athamos Stradis 2012

Lets begin with his notorious declaration that God is dead (first in The Gay Science, 1872). Secular thinking is a commonplace today, but in Nietzsches time this declaration was strikingly prophetic. The point of the claim is not so much to assert atheism: although Nietzsche was certainly an atheist, he was far from being a pioneer of European atheism. Rather, his observation is sociological, in a way: he means that Western culture no longer places God at the center of things. In another way, the term sociological is quite misleading, for there is nothing value-neutral in Nietzsches assertion. The death of God has knocked the pins out from under Western value systems, and revealed an abyss below. The values we still continue to live by have lost their meaning, and we are cast adrift, whether we realize it or not. The question is, what do we do now?

One might at first think that the death of God is an all-too-familiar issue, conservative Christians arguing that if God does not exist then objective moral values dont exist either, and secular humanists replying indignantly that Gods existence is entirely irrelevant to the validity of the moral judgments we make. Nietzsche agrees with those theists that the death of God signaled the end of objectivity as a feature of moral value, but differs from them by not taking this as a reason to believe in God. Yet he did not think that values were subjective in the crude popular sense, that anyones convictions are as valid as anyone elses. Rather, to Nietzsche, values have power, and spring from power: like works of art, their greatness is in their power to move us. But the media manipulation of popular sentiment is no indicator of the power that creates value, since almost everybody is merely a member of the herd to Nietzsche. Any relating of value to popular preferences (even the preferences of an aristocracy) is an attempt to hold on to the objectivity of values. But if moral objectivity is at an end, an entirely new and radically individualistic source of value must be sought. Nietzsches conception of the power of values is deeply elitist: only the great can create values.

Nietzsche argued that in ancient times, values belonged to peoples who created them:

A tablet of the good hangs over every people. Behold, it is the tablet of their overcomings; behold, it is the voice of their will to power You shall always be the first and excel all others: your jealous soul shall love no one, unless it be the friend that made the soul of the Greek quiver: thus he walked the path of his greatness To practice loyalty and, for the sake of loyalty, to risk honor and blood even for evil and dangerous things with this teaching another people conquered themselves, and through this self-conquest they became pregnant and heavy with great hopesThus Spake Zarathustra, I, 1883

Thus in antiquity it was the power through which a people defined itself that created the values of that people. Then came what Nietzsche thinks of as the degenerate complexity of Christianity, in which weakness rather than power was used to define value: The meek shall inherit the earth. (Matthew 5:5) In fact, the Christian priestly class does exercise its own will to power, in its triumph over pagan peoples, but in the process mans instinctual animal pride has been abased through the disciplines of poverty, mortification of the flesh, guilt for sin; a morality echoing the message of a God who suffers on the cross. The explicit message is that value is not embodied in earthly holy men, but beyond, yet the truth is the opposite: the priests power has been realized in their victory over competing allegiances. But this victory has been won through Christianitys plague of self-denial what Nietzsche calls a nay-saying to life.

But with the death of God, Christianitys mode of anti-strength value-creation has collapsed, and modern man has no firm unitary belief to replace it. Our value is an incoherent pastiche of bits and pieces from a hundred sources. Nietzsche called it the multi-colored cow. The smorgasbord of faiths on offer in the West today wonderfully illustrates what Nietzsche foresaw: values as mix-and-match consumer goods. This is absurd, and the results are pitifully anemic; but how and where can the human will to power burst forth with a new set of values? That was Nietzsches dilemma, and it has become the explicit dilemma of modern humanity, just as he predicted.

Like all the best philosophers, Nietzsche made a heroic attempt to give a solution to his problem. He gave his solution the name bermensch, literally translated overman, although its more often translated (somewhat painfully to us) as superman. Mere man is not a creator of value; his individuality proves to be insufficient to achieve that. His only dignity is that he may be a bridge to something higher: The ape is an embarrassment to man; just so will man be an embarrassment to the overman. The overman is that higher type of individual who has an absolute self-confidence in his power, and through the powerful assertion of his individuality, values may once again be created: not by peoples, not clothed in the spurious authority of a beyond, but for the first time in a specifically individual assertion of values through individually-justified action. And these values must be created, not appropriated as something already existent.

Nietzsche did not claim to know in detail what the overman would be like. He did think that the overman will have fellows, metaphorical brothers, but he must be an individual though and through: the future genius is a non-genus. Thats one reason why the Nazi appropriation of the bermensch concept for the master race is outrageous to all Nietzsche scholars. Nietzsche expressed contempt for anti-Semites and for propagandists of Germanic racial superiority. Modern man, mass man, whatever racial affiliation he may boast, is anathema to Nietzsche. It is an absurd dream of contemporary culture that we anyone at all just by being ourselves can surpass the ancient creativity of entire peoples. Most individuals are too small for the task (the crowd chants Were all individuals! Monty Python, Life of Brian). Any person can try to live according to what he calls my own values, but they are usually not his own values: they are bits and pieces picked up in the bazaar of modernity, and he has no idea where they came from. Nothing is more obvious to Nietzsche than the fact that people dont generally know how to create values.

I think Nietzsche provides a powerful indictment of modernity. Of course, Nietzsche may simply be wrong that the only values with any value (so to speak) are those a powerful individual creates. Personally, I believe that he is wrong. That is, I accept his claim that values must be created by individuals, but I deny that a value-creating individual must be a Nietzschean overman. Furthermore, I think that there are values associated with being human whose validity extends beyond the human self-creating context, to apply to rational beings in general. In that way, I am a Kantian. Sure, the individual as modern multi-culturally sensitive individual cannot create value; but I think it is possible to retain a sense of individuals legislating values while shedding the overmans sense of absolute separateness from other rational individuals.

Why is modern man so agonized still? I dont know. But I wont be totally surprised if Nietzsche turns out to be the first great philosopher of the twenty-first century too.

Dr Eric Walther 2012

Eric Walther taught philosophy from 1967 and computer science from 1983 at the C.W. Post Campus of Long Island University; he retired in 2003. He holds a PhD in Philosophy from Yale University, and an MS in Computer Science from Polytechnic University.

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Ah! how ineptly cometh the word "virtue" out of their mouth! And when they say: "I am just," it always soundeth like: "I am just-revenged!"

With their virtues they want to scratch out the eyes of their enemies;and they elevate themselves only that they may lower others.

And again there are those who sit in their swamp, and speak thus from among the bullrushes: "Virtue - that is to sit quietly in the swamp. We bite no one, and go out of the way of him who would bite; and in all matters we have the opinion that is given us."

And again there are those who adore attitudes, and think that virtue is a sort of attitude. Their knees continually adore, and their hands are eulogies of virtue, but their heart knoweth naught thereof.

And again there are those who regard it as virtue to say:

"Virtue is necessary";

but, after all is said and done,

they believe only that policemen are necessary.

Thus Spake Zarathustra

A madman runs into a marketplace crying incessantly,

"I seek God!

I seek God!"

This action provokes laughter from the menin the marketplace who do not believe in God.

In jest, they ask the madman whether God is lost, hiding, or traveling on a voyage.

With piercing vision, the madman confronts his tormentors with this announcement:

"God is dead.

God remains dead.

And we have killed God."

From 1880 until his collapse in January1889, Friedrich Nietzsche led a wandering existence as a stateless individual,writing most of his major works during this period.

The initialsymptoms of Friedrich Nietzsche'sbreakdown, asevidenced in the letters he sent to his friends in the few days of lucidityremaining to him, bear many similarities to the ecstatic writings of religiousmystics.

Friedrich Nietzsche's letters describe his experience as areligious breakthrough and he rejoices, rather than laments.

A paper published in Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavicareconsiders the insanity and death of philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who iscommonly thought to have died of neurosyphilis.

The story of Nietzschehaving caught syphilis from prostitutes was actually concocted after the SecondWorld War by Wilhelm Lange-Eichbaum, an academic who was one of Nietzsche'smost vociferous critics.

Jewish intellectuals at the time were keen todemolish the reputation of Nietzsche, who they claimed came up with the conceptof the "Superman" to underpin Nazism whenin fact the idea of the Chosen Peoplestarted in Judah.

In the late 19th century more than 90 per cent ofthose with advanced syphilis rapidly declined and died within five years ofdiagnosis. Nietzsche, in contrast, lived for another 11 years.

Theauthors of the new study published in published in Acta PsychiatricaScandinavica suggest that Nietzsche died of frontotemporal dementia atype of dementia that specifically affects the frontal and temporal lobes.Other studies of medical records suggest that Friedrich Nietzsche almostcertainly died of a slowly-developing brain tumor.

"Nietzsche was notantiSemitic or a nationalist, andhated the herd mentality,"said Prof Stephen Houlgate, a Nietzsche scholar at Warwick University. "If thisnew research gets rid of another misconception about him,I'm delighted."

Friedrich Nietzsche was heavily influenced byArthur Schopenhauer.

Arthur Schopenhauer theorized thathumans living in the realm of objects areliving in the realm of desire, and thus are eternally tormented by that desire (thisparallels the dharma of SiddharthaGautama).

That drive was defined byArthur Schopenhauer as the inherentdrive within humans beings, and indeed all creatures, to stayalive and to reproduce.

ArthurSchopenhauer believed that through art the thinkingindividual could be jarred out oftheir limited, individualprespective to feel a sense of the universal (metaphysics)directly.

Nietzsche's hypothesis of the human condition to someextent left out thesocial engineering variable by assuming that the herd is willing toaccepts its role - most ofthe time they are born into it and quite simply see no otherway.

There most definitely is apecking order mentality in that people will agree with powerful personalitiesin the hope of currying those people's favor and many willing ride the force ofa personality wave regardless of moral concerns.

That is dueto the fact that these individuals basically owe theirincreased material wealthand power to their lack of empathy which gives them an operationaladvantage.

This website defines a new perspective with which to engage reality to which its author adheres. The author feels that the falsification of reality outside personal experience has forged a populace unable to discern propaganda from reality and that this has been done purposefully by an international corporate cartel through their agents who wish to foist a corrupt version of reality on the human race. Religious intolerance occurs when any group refuses to tolerate religious practices, religious beliefs or persons due to their religious ideology. This web site marks the founding of a system of philosophy named The Truth of the Way of the Lumire Infinie - a rational gnostic mystery religion based on reason which requires no leap of faith, accepts no tithes, has no supreme leader, no church buildings and in which each and every individual is encouraged to develop a personal relation with the Creator and Sustainer through the pursuit of the knowledge of reality in the hope of curing the spiritual corruption that has enveloped the human spirit. The tenets of The Truth of the Way of the Lumire Infinie are spelled out in detail on this web site by the author. Violent acts against individuals due to their religious beliefs in America is considered a "hate crime."

This web site in no way condones violence. To the contrary the intent here is to reduce the violence that is already occurring due to the international corporate cartels desire to control the human race. The international corporate cartel already controls the world economic system, corporate media worldwide, the global industrial military entertainment complex and is responsible for the collapse of morals, the elevation of self-centered behavior and the destruction of global ecosystems. Civilization is based on cooperation. Cooperation does not occur at the point of a gun.

American social mores and values have declined precipitously over the last century as the corrupt international cartel has garnered more and more power. This power rests in the ability to deceive the populace in general through corporate media by pressing emotional buttons which have been preprogrammed into the population through prior corporate media psychological operations. The results have been the destruction of the family and the destruction of social structures that do not adhere to the corrupt international elites vision of a perfect world. Through distraction and coercion the direction of thought of the bulk of the population has been directed toward solutions proposed by the corrupt international elite that further consolidates their power and which further their purposes.

All views and opinions presented on this web site are the views and opinions of individual human men and women that, through their writings, showed the capacity for intelligent, reasonable, rational, insightful and unpopular thought. All factual information presented on this web site is believed to be true and accurate and is presented as originally presented in print media which may or may not have originally presented the facts truthfully. Opinion and thoughts have been adapted, edited, corrected, redacted, combined, added to, re-edited and re-corrected as nearly all opinion and thought has been throughout time but has been done so in the spirit of the original writer with the intent of making his or her thoughts and opinions clearer and relevant to the reader in the present time.

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Friedrich Nietzsche – Scholar, Philosopher – Biography

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Influential German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) is known for his writings on good and evil, the end of religion in modern society and the concept of a "super-man."

Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was born on October 15, 1844, in Rcken bei Ltzen, Germany. In his brilliant but relatively brief career, he published numerous major works of philosophy, including Twilight of the Idols and Thus Spoke Zarathustra. In the last decade of his life he suffered from insanity; he died on August 25, 1900. His writings on individuality and morality in contemporary civilization influenced many major thinkers and writers of the 20th century.

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was born on October 15, 1844, in Rcken bei Ltzen, a small village in Prussia (part of present-day Germany). His father, Carl Ludwig Nietzsche, was a Lutheran preacher; he died when Nietzsche was 4 years old. Nietzsche and his younger sister, Elisabeth, were raised by their mother, Franziska.

Nietzsche attended a private preparatory school in Naumburg and then received a classical education at the prestigious Schulpforta school. After graduating in 1864, he attended the University of Bonn for two semesters. He transferred to the University of Leipzig, where he studied philology, a combination of literature, linguistics and history. He was strongly influenced by the writings of philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. During his time in Leipzig, he began a friendship with the composer Richard Wagner, whose music he greatly admired.

In 1869, Nietzsche took a position as professor of classical philology at the University of Basel in Switzerland. During his professorship he published his first books, The Birth of Tragedy (1872) and Human, All Too Human (1878). He also began to distance himself from classical scholarship, as well as the teachings of Schopenhauer, and to take more interest in the values underlying modern-day civilization. By this time, his friendship with Wagner had deteriorated. Suffering from a nervous disorder, he resigned from his post at Basel in 1879.

For much of the following decade, Nietzsche lived in seclusion, moving from Switzerland to France to Italy when he was not staying at his mother's house in Naumburg. However, this was also a highly productive period for him as a thinker and writer. One of his most significant works, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, was published in four volumes between 1883 and 1885. He also wrote Beyond Good and Evil (published in 1886), The Genealogy of Morals (1887) and Twilight of the Idols (1889).

In these works of the 1880s, Nietzsche developed the central points of his philosophy. One of these was his famous statement that "God is dead," a rejection of Christianity as a meaningful force in contemporary life. Others were his endorsement of self-perfection through creative drive and a "will to power," and his concept of a "super-man" or "over-man" (bermensch), an individual who strives to exist beyond conventional categories of good and evil, master and slave.

Nietzsche suffered a collapse in 1889 while living in Turin, Italy. The last decade of his life was spent in a state of mental incapacitation. The reason for his insanity is still unknown, although historians have attributed it to causes as varied as syphilis, an inherited brain disease, a tumor and overuse of sedative drugs. After a stay in an asylum, Nietzsche was cared for by his mother in Naumburg and his sister in Weimar, Germany. He died in Weimar on August 25, 1900.

Nietzsche is regarded as a major influence on 20th century philosophy, theology and art. His ideas on individuality, morality and the meaning of existence contributed to the thinking of philosophers Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault; Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud, two of the founding figures of psychiatry; and writers such as Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Thomas Mann and Hermann Hesse.

Less beneficially, certain aspects of Nietzsche's work were used by the Nazi Party of the 1930s'40s as justification for its activities; this selective and misleading use of his work has somewhat darkened his reputation for later audiences.

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In ‘Hiking With Nietzsche,’ Challenges Are Seen Through The …

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Philosophy professor John Kaag's 2016 book, American Philosophy, was a heady mix of memoir and intellectual history wrapped up in a romantic story of a lost library and new love. In Hiking with Nietzsche, he tries to repeat this feat by chronicling his return with his second wife and their toddler daughter to the scene of his near-fatal teenage attempt to follow Nietzsche's trail and thought processes through the Swiss Alps.

His alpine scrambles, which are both physical and mental, are fascinating, if something of an uphill battle for him. Kaag's wise takeaway: "Even slipping can be instructive. Something happens not at the top, but along the way."

Like Alain de Botton, Kaag believes that philosophy can offer applicable relevance to personal dilemmas a sort of elevated form of self-help. In American Philosophy Kaag wrote, "At its best, philosophy tries to explain why our lives, so fragile and ephemeral, might have lasting significance." In his new book, he quotes Nietzsche "I profit from a philosopher only insofar as he can be an example" and notes that, as a teenager, Nietzsche was drawn to Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Promethean individualism" and "experiential turn in philosophy." So, too, is Kaag.

Hiking with Nietzsche is enriched by Walter Kaufmann's nonpareil translations. (He was my college mentor in philosophy.) Fifty years ago, Kaufmann wrote, "Nietzsche is one of the few philosophers since Plato whom large numbers of intelligent people read for pleasure," but added that his impact on literature may be greater than on philosophy. Like many of the existentialist writers he influenced, including Albert Camus and Hermann Hesse, Nietzsche is much loved by brooding adolescents. But in Kaag's opinion, he is too often "pooh-poohed as juvenile" as are his exhortations to "become who you are." Hiking with Nietzsche attempts not altogether successfully to push back against this marginalizing view.

As in American Philosophy, Kaag deftly intertwines sympathetic biography, accessible philosophical analysis, and self-critical autobiography. Aiming for a palatable mix, his narrative is a series of switchbacks between his family vacation in Switzerland's grand Waldhaus Hotel a magnet for Nietzsche pilgrims like Thomas Mann, Theodor Adorno, and Hermann Hesse and ruminations on the seminal works that Nietzsche composed during his 10 years in Sils-Maria.

Kaag notes the preponderance of philosopher-walkers besides Nietzsche: the Buddha, Socrates, Kant, Rousseau, Thoreau. "The history of philosophy is largely the history of thought in transit," he writes. His book takes us on a hike through Nietzsche's manically prolific output, which occasionally feels like a forced march but more often feels like an invigorating excursion. Scrambling up treacherous rocky inclines in worn sneakers, Kaag reflects on the peaks and valleys of Nietzsche's life and philosophy. He considers the tug between Apollonian and Dionysian impulses addressed in Nietzsche's first book, The Birth of Tragedy; Nietzsche's challenge in Thus Spoke Zarathustra "to imagine ourselves...above the societal conventions and self-imposed constraints that quietly govern modern life"; and his concept of the origin of moral values in Beyond Good and Evil, a book which Kaag's Kantian wife, Carol Hay, pronounces misogynist, hypothetical, and stupid.

Along the way, two vivid portraits emerge: the first, of the brilliant albeit often histrionic and "wrong-headed" German's descent into madness; and, the second, of Kaag, an intense insomniac who, not yet 40, has emerged as an engaging populizer of philosophy. Readers may be surprised by some of Kaag's personal revelations, including the severe anorexia that nearly killed him: "This type of self-deprivation was my first addiction and after all these years I still remember it fondly," he writes. He also draws parallels between Nietzsche's early loss of his father to his own, noting, "My father, like Nietzsche's, went crazy when I was four. Nietzsche's died. Mine abandoned his family." Nietzsche sought an alternate father figure in composer Richard Wagner, a terrible choice which ended in serious disillusionment. Kaag sought salvation in philosophy.

Kaag refracts other personal issues through Nietzsche's writings, including the challenges of adulthood and parenting, noting the tedium, restrictions, and battles of will with a contrary toddler whom he amusingly likens to Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener. He recalls his mixed feelings over his father's pronouncements that he'd never wanted children "but that I was not always the burden he'd anticipated," and comments, "Most of my adult life has been premised on not becoming my own absent dad." Yet after a miserable excursion with his wife and daughter in a frozen, cramped gondola, he fumes with startling honesty: "Coming here with the family had been a bad idea. Before meeting Carol, I never wanted kids. Not even a little. Some days I still don't."

Kaag extracts plenty of relevant ideas from Nietzsche and his followers in this stimulating book about combating despair and complacency with searching reflection. But, interestingly, it's while watching his daughter blissfully gather woodland wildflowers or a shepherd contentedly eating a hunk of cheese while checking his flock that he experiences the most resonant moments of grace and insight.

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