For those interested, I'd like to pursue a reading of Friedrich Nietzsche's The Gay Science: Book Five, We Fearless Ones. Book Five was written in 1887, after parts 1-4, also after his enigmatic Zarathustra and more philosophical Beyond Good and Evil and Geneology of Morals.
Book Five is a short read, but a consummation of much of his life's work packed tight in some of his finest writing. It precedes the bombastic brilliance of his 1888 period, and offers a tragic glimpse into the mind one of Europe's finest thinkers nearing the end of his writing career and beginning his mental collapse.
Book Five is also where Nietzsche challenges those scientific naturalists who celebrate the death of God to consider what consequences must follow from such an event. What happens when we de-deify nature and naturalize humanity?
Book Five is a short read, but a consummation of much of his life's work packed tight in some of his finest writing. It precedes the bombastic brilliance of his 1888 period, and offers a tragic glimpse into the mind one of Europe's finest thinkers nearing the end of his writing career and beginning his mental collapse.
Book Five is also where Nietzsche challenges those scientific naturalists who celebrate the death of God to consider what consequences must follow from such an event. What happens when we de-deify nature and naturalize humanity?
Quote:
374. Our new "infinite."- How far the perspective character of existence extends or indeed whether existence has any other character than this; whether existence without interpretation, without "sense," does not become "nonsense," whether, on the other hand, all existence is not essentially actively engaged in interpretation-that cannot be decided even by the most industrious and most scrupulously conscientious analysis and self-examination of the intellect: for in the course of this analysis the human intellect cannot avoid seeing itself in its own perspectives, and only in these.
We cannot look around our own corner: it is a hopeless curiosity that wants to know what other kinds of intellects and perspectives there might be; for example, whether some beings might be able to experience time backward, or alternately forward and backward (which would involve another direction of life and another concept of cause and effect). But I should think that today we are at least far from the ridiculous immodesty that would be involved in decreeing from our corner that perspectives are permitted only from this corner.
Rather has the world become "infinite" for us all over again: inasmuch as we cannot reject the possibility that it may include infinite interpretations. Once more we are seized by a great shudder-but who would feel inclined immediately to deify again after the old manner this monster of an unknown world? And to worship the unknown henceforth as "the Unknown One"? Alas, too many ungodly possibilities of interpretation are included in the unknown, too much devilry, stupidity, and foolishness of interpretation-even our own human, all too human folly itself, which we know ...
