I wasn't sure whether to put this thread, but it's about a book so I hope this is the right place.
I have just finished reading Nietzsche The Use and Abuse of History for Life and I can’t remember ever having read a book that has made as much impact on me as this one. Has anyone ever read it?
Nietzsche goes on about how, history, and all the knowledge it contains should only be used for inspiring actions, not for knowledge per se. He argues that the trouble with modern society is that knowledge is valued for it’s own sake, people are ‘walking encyclopedias’, completely out of touch with what it is to be human. The value we place on knowledge is making us conform to the past, and other people’s second hand thoughts, when we should be making up our own.
Culture is fake and insincere, a sphere totally apart from life, people just criticise the creators, without actually reacting in an emotional way to the art, without truly experiencing it, there only reaction is to rip it apart, disect it. Desctruct rather than construct. Nietzsche says it’s terrible that knowledge is valued over life when knowledge should only be used to make us act in life. Nietzsche puts an emphasis on man being a creative being, knowledge he thinks should only be used for us to create.
Humans are ignoring their true nature and ‘The striving for the denial of the individual will is...more foolish than suicide’.
I really felt like there was something true about what Nietzsche was saying, I’ve been thinking that there’s this ‘self’ inside of me , I think I was when I was a child, a free self, that type of person I feel like I am when I’m walking along a beach, on holiday etc, and that I’ve lost touch with them. Perhaps that was what it was to be truly alive. When people talk about going travelling to ‘find themselves’ I cringe, I always used to think they weren’t finding themselves but finding their favourite self, a happy holiday self that they wanted to be all year round. But now I’m starting to think there’s some truth in it. Perhaps we have lost touch with our natural selves. I’ve lived in a city all my life, but I’ve had feelings of being out of touch with nature for a long time, feelings I’ve just been dismissing as some stupid hippyish inclinations, but now I’m starting to wonder if there truely is a more natural self that it would be better to be. |
