“Twilight of the Idols (Or how to Philosophize with a Hammer)” by Friedrich Nietzsche (translated by R.J. Hollingdale)

This short book is a mismatch of aphorisms, blurbs, and short essays that Nietzsche wrote towards the end of his sanity. He begins, “This little book is a grand declaration of war.” From that bold start, he gives a taste of some choice maxims, “Even the bravest of us rarely has the courage for what he really knows…. To live alone one must be an animal or a god—says Aristotle. There is yet a third case: one must be both—a philosopher…. Which is it? Is man only God’s mistake or God only man’s mistake?—…. Let us not be cowardly in the face of our actions! Let us not afterwards leave them in a lurch!—Remorse of conscience is indecent.”

In an essay disparaging Socrates, Nietzsche begins by commenting on the value of life, “In every age the wisest have passed the identical judgement on life: it is worthless…. Everywhere and always their mouths have uttered the same sound—a sound full of doubt, full of melancholy, full of weariness with life, full of opposition to life.” In another essay he discusses morality and nature, “All naturalism in morality, that is all healthy morality, is dominated by an instinct of life—some commandment of life is fulfilled through a certain canon of ‘shall’ and ‘shall not’, some hinderance and hostile element on life’s road is thereby removed. Anti-natural morality, that is virtually every morality that has hitherto been taught, reverenced and preached, turns on the contrary precisely against the instincts of life…. It denies the deepest and the highest desires of life and takes God for the enemy of life…. Life is at an end where the ‘kingdom of God’ begins.” On determinism, he opines, “No one is accountable for existing at all, or for being constituted as he is, or for living in the circumstances and surroundings in which he lives…. One is necessary, one is a piece of fate, one belongs to the whole, one is the whole…. Nothing exits apart from the whole!… We deny God; in denying God, we deny accountability: only by doing that do we redeem the world.”

In an essay on German deficiencies, Nietzsche contrasts culture with the nation-state. “Culture and the state—one should not deceive oneself over this—are antagonists: the ‘cultural state’ is merely a modern idea…. All great cultural epochs are epochs of political decline…. Great and fine things can never be common property: pulchrum est paucorum hominum [beauty is for the few].” On a short paragraph on Thomas Carlyle, Nietzsche sneaks in his opinion on faith, “The desire for a strong faith is not the proof of a strong faith, rather the opposite. If one has it one may permit oneself the beautiful luxury of scepticism: one is secure enough, firm enough, fixed enough for it.”

Nietzsche bemoans modern customs and takes shots at Schopenhauer and Christ all in one go, “Our softening of customs—this is my thesis, my innovation if you like—is a consequence of decline; stern and frightful customs can, conversely, be a consequence of a superabundance of life…. That movement which with Schopenhauer’s morality of pity attempted to present itself as scientific—a very unsuccessful attempt!—is the actual decadence movement of morality; as such it is profoundly related to Christian morality. Strong ages, noble cultures, see in pity, in ‘love for one’s neighbor’, in a lack of self and self-reliance, something contemptible…. ‘Equality’, a certain actual rendering similar of which the theory of ‘equal rights’ is only the expression, belongs essentially to decline: the chasm between man and man, class and class, the multiplicity of types, the will to be oneself, to stand out—that which I call pathos of distance—characterizes every strong age.” He transitions to thoughts on institutional development, “Liberal institutions immediately cease to be liberal as soon as they are attained…. They undermine the will to power, they are the leveling of mountain and valley exalted to a moral principle, they make small, cowardly and smug—it is the herd animal which triumphs with them every time…. The man who has become free—and how much more the mind that has become free—spurns the contemptible sort of well-being dreamed of by shopkeepers, Christians, cows, women, Englishmen and other democrats. The free man is a warrior…. For institutions to exist there must exist the kind of will, instinct, imperative which is anti-liberal to the point of malice: the will to tradition, to authority, to centuries-ling responsibility, to solidarity between the succeeding generations backwards and forwards in infinitum.”

Nietzsche next discusses aesthetics and the concept of beauty, “Even the beauty of a race or a family, the charm and benevolence of their whole demeanour, is earned by labour: like genius, it is the final result of the accumulatory labour of generations. One must have made great sacrifices to good taste…. One must have possessed in it a selective principle in respect of one’s society, residence, dress, sexual gratification, one must have preferred beauty to advantage, habit, opinion, indolence…. Good things are costly beyond measure: and the law still holds that he who has them is different from him who obtains them. Everything good is inheritance: what is not inherited is imperfect, is a beginning.”

Finally, in an essay on the ancients and his love for tradition, Nietzsche finds time for a digression ripping Plato. “One does not learn from the Greeks…. Plato mixes together all forms of style; he is therewith in the matter of style a first decadent…. I find him deviated so far from all the fundamental instincts of the Hellenes, so morally infected, so much an antecedent Christian—he already has the concept ‘good’ as the supreme concept…. Plato is that ambiguity and fascination called the ‘ideal’ which made it possible for the nobler natures of antiquity to misunderstand themselves and to step on to the bridge which led to the ‘Cross’…. Affirmation of life even in its strangest and sternest problems, the will to life rejoicing in its own inexhaustibility through the sacrifice of its highest types—that is what I called Dionysian…. I again plant myself in the soil out of which I draw all that I will and can—I, the last disciple of the philosopher Dionysos—I, the teacher of the eternal recurrence.”

“Vita contemplativa” by Byung-Chul Han (translated by Daniel Steuer)

This is another of Han’s short treatises, peppered with references to Heidegger, Arendt, and the German Romantics. His theme is, obviously, the life of contemplation. He first promotes inaction, “Life receives its radiance only from inactivity. If we lose the ability to be inactive, we begin to resemble machines that must simply function. True life begins when concern for survival, for the exigencies of mere life, ends. The ultimate purpose of all human endeavour is inactivity.” He continues with his definition of culture, “Culture sits beyond functionality and usefulness. The ornamental dimension, emancipated from any goal or use, is how life insists that it is more than survival.” He brings his theme around to happiness, “We owe true happiness to the useless and purposeless, to what is intentionally convoluted, what is unproductive, indirect, exuberant, superfluous, to beautiful forms and gestures that have no use and serve no purpose…. Ceremonious inactivity means: we do something, but to no end.”

Han describes living a life fully and presently here on earth. “The politics of inactivity liberates the immanence of life from the transcendence that alienates life from itself. Only in inactivity do we become aware of the ground on which we rest, and of the space in which we are…. Immanence as life is living in the mode of contemplation. Life as immanence is a capacity that does not act…. Immanence denotes a life that possesses itself, that suffices itself. This self-sufficiency is bliss.” Han promotes a life of reflection. “We must therefore increase the proportion of action that is contemplative, that is, ensure that action is enriched by reflection…. The compulsion to be active, to produce and to perform, leads to breathlessness. Under the weight of their own doings, humans suffocate…. Forgetfulness of being, resulting from the lack of reflection, takes our breath away. It reduces the human being to an animal laborans.”

Humans are creatures that unite with each other together through the common stories they tell. “The human being is an animal narrans, a narrating animal. But our lives are no longer determined by a reliable and binding narrative that provides meaning and orientation. We are very well informed, yet, in the absence of narrative, we are without orientation…. Truth is narrative. Information, by contrast, is additive…. Symbols create shared things that enable a We: cohesion within society…. In a symbolic void, society is diffracted into a collection of mutually indifferent individuals.” Han brings this back to having the time and space for inactivity, rest, contemplation, and reflection. “The future of humanity depends not on the power of people who act but on the resuscitation of the capacity for contemplation—that is, on the very capacity that does not act. If it does not incorporate the vita contemplativa, the vita activa degenerates into hyperactivity, and culminates in the burnout not only of the psyche but of the whole planet.”

“Introduction to Metaphysics” by Martin Heidegger (translated by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt)

This is a collection of Heidegger’s lectures on metaphysics and Dasein from 1935. He begins with the big question, “Why are there beings at all instead of nothing? That is the question.” He continues, “Philosophizing, we can now say, is extra-ordinary questioning about the extra-ordinary.”

Phusis is a big deal to Heidegger’s conception of metaphysics. He states, “The sway, phusis, first comes to to stand in what comes to presence. Beings as such now first come into being. This becoming-a-world is authentic history. Struggle as such not only allows for arising and standing-forth; it alone also preserves beings in their constancy.” We must look again to the nature of Being. “So the “universality” of “Being” in regard to all beings does not imply that we should turn away from this universality as fast as possible and turn to the particular…. The fact that for us the meaning of the word “Being” remains an indeterminate vapor is counterbalanced by the fact that we still understand Being, and distinguish it with certainty from not-Being—and this is not just another, second fact, but both belong together as one.”

Uncanniness is another critical concept for Heidegger. “The human being is, in one word, to deinotaton, the uncanniest….. The deinon is the terrible in the sense of the overwhelming sway, which induces panicked fear, true anxiety, as well as collected, inwardly reverberating, reticent awe. The violent, the overwhelming is the essential character of the sway itself…. But on the other hand, deinon means the violent in the sense of one who needs to use violence—and does not just have violence at his disposal, but is violence-doing, insofar as using violence is the basic trait not just of his doing, but of his Dasein…. We understand the un-canny as that which throws one out of the “canny,” that is, the homely, the accustomed, the current, the unendangered…. But human beings are the uncanniest…. They step out, move out of the limits that at first and for the most part are accustomed and homely, because as those who do violence, they overstep the limits of the homely, precisely in the direction of the uncanny in the sense of the overwhelming…. To be the uncanniest is the basic trait of the human essence.”

Heidegger does go off on what would seem to be some tangents. Many are still fruitful. He rants on the state of modernity, “The spiritual decline of the earth has progressed so far that peoples are in danger of losing their last spiritual strength, the strength that makes it possible even to see the decline…. For the darkening of the world, the flight of the gods, the destruction of the earth, the reduction of human beings to a mass, the hatred and mistrust of everything creative and free have already reached such proportions throughout the whole earth that such childish categories as pessimism and optimism have long become laughable.” He continues, “When the creators have disappeared from the people, when they are barely tolerated as irrelevant curiosities, as ornaments, as eccentrics alien to life, when authentic struggle ceases and shifts into the merely polemical, into the intrigues and machinations of human beings within the present-at-hand, then the decline has already begun. For even when an age still makes an effort just to uphold the inherited level and dignity of its Dasein, the level already sinks. It can be upheld only insofar as it is always creatively transcended.” Where is he going with this? What does it have to do with metaphysics?

Finally, Heidegger brings in how logos interacts with phusis, “In the inception, this is what happens: logos as the revealing gathering—Being, as this gathering, is fittingness in the sense of phusis—becomes the necessity of the essence of historical humanity. From here one need take only a single step to grasp how logos, so understood, determines the essence of language and how logos becomes the name for discourse. Being-human, according to its historical, history-opening essence, is logos, the gathering and apprehending of the Being of beings.” He concludes, “Being and the understanding of Being are not a present-at-hand fact. Being is the fundamental happening, the ground upon which historical Dasein is first granted in the midst of beings that are opened up as a whole…. Being, in contradistinction to becoming, is enduring. Being in contradistinction to seeming, is the enduring prototype, the always identical. Being in contradistinction to thinking, is what lies at the basis, the present-at-hand. Being in contradistinction to the ought, is what lies at hand in each case as what ought to be and has not yet been actualized or already has been actualized. Endurance, perpetual identity, presence at hand, lying at hand—all at bottom say the same: constant presence, on as ousia…. The mere determinateness of Being is not a matter of delimiting a mere meaning of a word. It is the power that today still sustains and prevails over all our relations to beings as a whole.”

“Master Incapable: A Medieval Daoist on the Liberation of the Mind” by Wunengzi (translated by Jan de Meyer)

This treatise, written in the ninth century, by a pseudonymous Daoist scholar is fairly unknown. It incorporates the teachings of the Tao Te Ching and Zhuanghzi, but is also very much its own philosophical work. Master Incapable begins by discussing the Daoist concept of spontaneity, “He who relies on spontaneity will last, and he who obtains constancy will be saved…. It is the spontaneous nature of the mind to be flood-like and empty.” For him, the naming of terms was the start of unnatural distinctions, “When all-under-heaven was in its natural state, there was no distinction between rulers and subjects. That rulers and subjects were created so as to separate the venerable from the lowly means that those called “sages” used their knowledge to deceive the ignorant. Using one’s knowledge to deceive the ignorant is fraudulence.” Lack of purpose is actually a goal, “When there is no purposive action, humans are uncorrupted and correct, and accord with the natural order…. When there is purposive action, there are cravings and desires, and people’s inborn nature is brought into disorder.”

Much of Master Incapable’s teachings are on the proper role of the gentleman, “Whether you’re treated generously or poorly depends on allotment…. The gentleman can be humane towards others, but he cannot make others behave humanely towards him. He can treat others with propriety, but he cannot make others treat him with propriety…. Just now, I was formless in emptiness and silence. Free of emotions, I was immersed in unfathomable darkness. I know nothing to be anxious about and amuse myself by strumming the zither and singing.” In another discourse, he continues, “Thus is the mind of the gentleman: he cultivates himself without fault with others, and he conceals his own usefulness instead of shining among the crowd. When the right time arrives, he responds, and when approached, he gives help. He responds according to the moment, but without scheming for himself. He gives help without being zealous about his achievements. For this reason, no favors become attached to him, and resentment has nowhere to pile up.”

The Void is another recurring theme of Daoist philosophy, “Someone who has immersed in the Void and who concentrates on the Permanent would not feel ennobled to become a king or marquis, nor humbled to become a servant or slave…. Inside himself he has room for neither sadness nor happiness…. The physical form and material things are the root of decay and decline. They affect you emotionally, and you experience the impermanence of depression and happiness. If you entwine the root of decay and decline with impermanent emotions, then waking is like dreaming, and one hundred years are like a single night. If you are able to immerse yourself in the Void and to concentrate on the Permanent, then hunger, cold, wealth, and honors will lose all significance to you.”

Finally, Master Incapable concludes, “When you show a mountain with tigers and leopards or a sea with whales to an ant in an anthill, or to a frog in a well, they will certainly grow suspicious: they are only familiar with what they themselves have seen. When you talk about the principle of nonpurposive action to people who crave and desire worldly pursuits, they will certainly feel puzzled: they dwell in what they are habituated to…. They are lost in cravings and desires until death. In the whole world there is not a single person who returns to the origin and does not allow any cravings and desires to arise…. So! Nonpurposive action is our own choice, and cravings and desires are our own choice. Nonpurposive action leads to serenity, while cravings and desires lead to undertakings. Serenity leads to happiness, and undertakings lead to worrying…. Those who are enlightened turn their back on custom.”