pxiv - “Nietzsche to speculate about how we have arrived at our present state of affairs and what our current practices conceal. … sketch of the value systems in the initial essay, his exploration of guilt and bad conscience in the second and his dissection of ascetic ideals in the final essay…”

pxv - “the designation of ‘good’ results from past altruistic actions garnering praise from those who were treated in an altruistic fashion… ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are not opposites” itself ‘good’ out of self-affirmation

pxvi - “good” and “bad” are related to master-slave (later ‘herd’) morality

pxii - “The result of punishment is therefore no remorse and guilt, but ‘a sharpening of intelligence… and improvement of the memory… (p69) Punishment can control our instincts and behaviour, and domesticate us, but it cannot open up a psychological space in our interiors where remorse and regret reign. In short, punishment alone does not make us moral human beings.”

pxii - “When humankind is no longer able to express its aggressive instincts externally, it turns them inwards. … the human being ‘imprisoned by the strictures (structures?) imposerd upon him by society to establish and preserve peace (p70). This war against the instincts forces the happy animal man ’to thinking, inferring, calculating, to connecting cause and effect’; we are reduced to our most fallible, our ‘most ppoorly developed, least reliable organ’: consciousness”

This fight for external peace brings great internal chaos

pxxiv - philosophers are forced to adopt aesthetic ideals

pxxv - “Nietzsche is conscious of sketching a paradoxical situation.” I remember feeling his awareness of the paradox he introduced.

pxxv - “how is it possible that ideals that are life-denying and life-negating have become the centre of a meaningful existence”

Preface

p3 - “We are unknown to ourselves, we men of science”

p5 - “I gave up the search for a supernatural origin of Evil.”

p5 - “under what conditions did man invent for himself those judgements of vale, Good and Evil? And what intrinsic value do they possess in themselves? Have they up to the present advanced human welfare, or rather have they harmed our race?“o

p8 - “the worthlessness of pity” … “a disease … morality as a cause”

p8 -” The value of these ‘values’ was taken for granted as a simple fact, and as indisputable. No one has, up to the present, expressed the slightest doubt or hesitation in judging the ‘good man’ to be of a higher value than the ’evil man’, of a higher value with regard specifically to human progress”

p9 - “the present lived at the expense of the future!”

p9 - “tamed”

p10 - “Take, for instance, my Zarathustra, I cannot acknowledge that anyone really knows that book well unless he has been either deeply wounded by it or deeply delighted by it at every point” He’s saying you are not him. Your life and experiences have not and will not perfectly align with his and therefore, 100% of his book and thoughts will not have the same identical meaning to you that they do to him.

p11 - “an art of interpretation … practise reading as an art, something which has nowadays been forgotten — that is why it will take quite some time for my writings to become ‘readable’, and for this it is necessary to become almost a cow, and under no circumstances a ‘modern man’!”

- Wow. He's saying we've lost our ability to communicate as a herd. We are no longer as capable of communicating and transferring thought and feelings.

First Essay: ‘Good and Evil’, ‘Good and Bad’

p14 - “good” was defined by acts that were aligned with nobility and had utility

p22 - and it was from the Jews that the reversal of values came where instead of “good” being aligned with “masters” it became from the perspective of the “slaves” … “aristocratic morality has vanished; the morality of the low classes has triumphed”

p27 - “A race of such resentful men will eventually prove more cunning than any aristocratic race”

p32 - “in losing our fear of man, we have also lost the hope in man, respect for man, the will to be man. The sight of man now wearies us — what is present-day nihilism if it is not that? … We are tired of man.”

p35 - “submission to those whom one hates is turned into ‘obedience’ (namely, obedience to one who, they say, demands such submission — they call him God.)”

p36 - “Faith in what? Love for what? Hope for what? These weaklings!”

p43 - “an animal that is free to make promises … the power of forgetfulness … prevents anything more from entering into our consciousness during the process of digesting that which we have already experienced”

p44 - “there can exist no joy, no hope, no pride, no real present, without forgetfulness. … a contrary force — memory … But what is the underlying hypothesis of all this? To be able to exert control over the future in this way, man must first learn to distinguish between necessary and accidental phenomena, to think causually, to see the distant future as though it were the present and to anticipate it, to establish with certainty what is the end, and what is the means to that end”

p48 - “How much blood and cruelty lies at the foundation of all ‘good things’!”

p50 - “in this very society the object is to _provide the promise-maker with a memory”

p51 - “sphere of contracts

p51 - “their beginnings, like the beginnings of all great things in this world, are drenched with blood, through and through… how can suffering be considered a compensation for ‘debts’? — It is because the infliction of suffering produces supreme pleasure”

p54 - “What really raises one’s indignation against suffering is not suffering itself, but the senselessness of it all … man was more or less obliged to invent gods”

p58 - “The creditor has always become more humane as he has grown richer; ultimately, the extent of injury which he can endure without really suffering becomes the criterion of his wealth. It is possible to conceive of a society blessed with so great a consciousness of its own power_ as to indulge in the most aristocratic luxury of letting malefactors act with impunity. ‘What do my parasites matter to me?’”

p59 - “it ends, like every good thing on earth, by destroying itself.”

p61 - “law in the world represents the very battle against the reactive feelings”

p61 - “To speak of intrinsic right and wrong is absolutely nonsensical”

p64 - “The extent of ‘progress’ is gauged by the greatness of the sacrifice that it requires; humanity sacrificed en masse for the benefit of a stronger kind of man, one that could flourish — that would be progress…”

p67 - “genuine remorse is certainly extremely rare; prisons and correctional institutions are not the soil that this gnawing worm of remorse prefers”

p69 - “punishment tames man, but does not make him ‘better’”

p70 - “bad” conscience is a societal artifact. “he found himself finally imprisoned by the strictures (structures?) imposed upon him by society to establish and preserve peace. … suddenly all their instincts were rendered useless … had to resort to using their most poorly developed, least reliable organ, their ‘consciousness’.”

p70 - “All instincts that cannot be given external expression turn inwards — this is what I mean by the internalization of man”

p73 - “This hidden violence upon the self, this cruelty of the artist, this desire to take oneself as a piece of difficult, refractory, anguished material and form something of it; to brand it with a will”

p74 - “each living generation recognizes a legal obligation towards the earlier generation, and particularly towards the earliest generation”

p75 - “the ancestor is ultimately transfigured into a god.”

p78 - “God himself personally paying himself; God as the one being who can deliver Man from what Man had become unable to deliver himself — the creditor playing scapegoat for his debtor, out of love (can you belive it?), out of love for his debtor!…

Third Essay: What Do Ascetic Ideals Mean?

p82 - man needs an ideal goal … “will rather desire oblivion than not desire at all”

p84 - A goal makes life enticing; with challenges and gaps between ‘good’ and ’evil’

p85 - “their delicate balance between ‘animal’ and ‘angel’ as necessarily an objection to existence … Such ‘conflicts’ actually make life all the more enticing. On the other hand, it is only too clear that once the miserable swine are reduced to worshipping chastitiy — and there are such swine! — they will only see and worship in it the antithesis to themselves, the antithesis to miserable swine.”

p85 - “perversion of the ascetic ideal”

p85 - “like every artist, first attains the ultimate pinnacle of his greatness when he can see himself and his art as subordinate to him, when he can laugh at himself.”

p86 - “it is certainly best to separate an artist from his work so completely that he cannot be taken as seriously as his work.”

p87 - “her pregnancy … must be forgotten if the child is to be a source of joy.”

p87 - “Homer could not have created an Achilles, nor Goethe a Faust, if Homer had been an Achilles or if Goethe had been a Faust.”

p89 - “music … the sovereignty of music … speaking the language of the will … ventriloquist of God”

p91 - will vs thought. thought is celebrated but you don’t get a break to think without the work of the will. the experience

p96 - “thought himself hoarse” … “he who thinks in words, thinks as a speaker and not as a thinker (which shows thathe does not think objectively, about things, but only of his relations with things — that, in point of fact, he only thinks of himself and his audience).”

p96 - “one who is sure of himself speaks softly”

p97 - “reluctant to employ the word ’truth’”