Final Study Guide

Final Review Sheet

Kant

Objects are given to us by means of sensibility, and it alone yields us intuitions; they are thought through the understanding, and from the understanding arise concepts.
But all thought must, directly or indirectly, by way of certain characters relate ultimately to intuitions, and therefore, with us, as sensibility, because in no other way can an object be given to us.
That in which alone the sensations can be posited and ordered in a certain form cannot itself be sensation; and therefore, while the matter of all appearance is given to us a posteriori only, its form must lie ready for the sensations a priori in the mind, and so must allow of being considered apart from all sensation.
[T]here are two pure forms of sensible intuition, serving as principles of a priori knowledge, namely, space and time.
By means of outer sense, a property of our mind, we represent to ourselves objects as outside us, and all without exception in space.
Inner sense, by means of which the mind intuits itself or its inner state, yields indeed no intuition of the soul itself as an object; but there is nevertheless a determinate form [namely, time] in which alone the intuition of inner states is possible, and everything which belongs to inner determinations is therefore represented in relations of time. Time cannot be outwardly intuited, any more than space can be intuited as something in us.
Space is nothing but the form of all appearances of outer sense. It is the subjective condition of sensibility, under which alone outer intuition is possible for us.
The true correlate of sensibility, the thing in itself, is not known, and cannot be known, through these representations; and in experience no question is ever asked in regard to it.
Time is not an empirical concept that has been derived from any experience. For neither coexistence nor succession would ever come within our perception, if the representation of time were not presupposed as underlying them a priori.
Time is nothing but the form of inner sense, that is, of the intuition of ourselves and of our inner state.
Everything that is represented through a sense is so far always appearance, and consequently we must either refuse to admit that there is an inner sense, or we must recognize that the subject, which is the object of the sense, can be represented through it only as appearance, not as that subject would judge of itself if its intuition were self-activity only, that is, were intellectual.
[T]he mind, since it then intuits itself not as it would represent itself if immediately self-active, but as it is affected by itself, and therefore as it appears to itself, not as it is.
So far, too, are the students of metaphysics from exhibiting any kind of unanimity in their contentions, that metaphysics has rather to be regarded as a battleground quite peculiarly suited for those who desire to exercise themselves in mock combats, and in which no participant has ever yet succeeded in gaining even so much as an inch of territory, not at least in such manner as to secure him in its permanent possession. This shows, beyond all questioning, that the procedure of metaphysics has hitherto been a merely random groping, and, what is worst of all, a groping among mere concepts.
[T]he new point of view enables us to explain how there can be knowledge a priori; and, in addition, to furnish satisfactory proofs of the laws which form the a priori basis of nature, regarded as the sum of the objects of experience - neither achievement being possible on the procedure hitherto followed.
[Reason] must approach nature in order to be taught by it. It must not, however, do so in the character of a pupil who listens to everything that the teacher chooses to say, but of an appointed judge who compels the witnesses to answer questions which he has himself formulated.
Hitherto it has been assumed that all our knowledge must conform to objects. ... We must therefore make trial whether we may not have more success in the tasks of metaphysics, if we suppose that objects must conform to our knowledge. This would agree better with what is desired, namely, that it should be possible to have knowledge of object a priori, determining something in regard to them prior to their being given.
If intuition must conform to the constitution of objects, I do not see how we could know anything of the latter a priori; but if the object (as object of the senses) must conform to the constitution of our faculty of intuition, I have no difficulty in conceiving such a possibility.
[A priori] knowledge has only to do with the appearances, and must leave the thing in itself as indeed real per se, but as not known by us. For what necessarily forces us to transcend the limits of experience and of all appearances is the unconditioned, which reason, by necessity and by right, demands in things in themselves, as required to complete the series of conditions.
[N]othing in a priori knowledge can be assigned to objects save what the thinking subject derives from itself ...
[T]here is no contradiction [given that 'object' has both phenomenal and a noumenal senses] in supposing that one and the same will is, in the appearance, that is, in its visible acts necessarily subject to the law of nature, and so far not free, while yet, as belonging to a thing in itself, is not subject to that law and is therefore free. My soul, viewed from the latter standpoint, cannot indeed be known by means of speculative reason (and still less through empirical observation); and freedom as a property of a being to which I attribute effects in the sensible world, is therefore also not knowable in such a fashion.
Thus it does indeed follow that all possible speculative knowledge of reason is limited to mere objects of experience. But our further contention must also be duly borne in mind, namely, that though we cannot know these objects as things in themselves, we must yet be in position at least to think them as things in themselves; otherwise we should be landed in the absurd conclusion that there can be appearance without anything that appears.
'Being' is obviously not a real predicate; that is, it is not a concept of something which could be added to the concept of a thing. It is merely the positing of a thing, or of certain determinations, as existing in themselves. Logically, it is merely the copula of a judgment. The proposition, 'God is omnipotent', contains two concepts, each of which has its object - God and omnipotence. The small word 'is' adds no new predicate, but only serves to posit the predicate in relation to the subject.
Experience teaches us that a thing is so and so, but not that it cannot be otherwise.
These unavoidable problems set by pure reason itself are God, freedom, and immortality.
Thus the critique of reason, in the end, necessarily leads to scientific knowledge; while its dogmatic employment, on the other hand, lands us in dogmatic assertions to which other assertions, equally specious, can always be opposed - that is, in skepticism.
Let us suppose that there is nothing antecedent to an event, upon which it must follow according to rule. All succession of perception would then be only in the apprehension, that is, would be merely subjective, and would never enable us to determine objectively which perceptions are those that really precede and which are those that follow.
The experience of an event [ i.e. of anything as happening] is itself possible only on this assumption [of an antecedent cause].
All alterations take place in conformity with the law of the connection of cause and effect.
Without sensibility no object would be given to us, without understanding no object would be thought. Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.
Concepts are based on the spontaneity of thought, sensible intuitions on the receptivity of impressions.
The objective validity of the categories as a priori concepts rests, therefore, on the fact that, so far as the form of thought is concerned, through them alone does experience become possible. They relate of necessity and a priori to objects of experience, for the reason that only by means of them can any object whatsoever of experience be thought.
But a deduction of the pure a priori concepts can never be obtained in this manner; it is not to be looked for in any such direction. For in view of their subsequent employment, which has to be entirely independent of experience, they must be in a position to show a certificate of birth quite other than that of descent from experiences.
The objective validity of the categories as a priori concepts rests, therefore, on the fact that, so far as the form of thought is concerned, through them alone does experience become possible.
It must be possible for the 'I think' to accompany all my representations; for otherwise something would be represented in me which could not be thought at all, and that is equivalent to saying that the representation would be impossible, or at least would be nothing to me.
For the manifold representations, which are given in an intuition, would not be one and all my representations, if they did not all belong to one self-consciousness. As my representations (even if I am not conscious of them as such) they must conform to the condition under which alone they can stand together in one universal self-consciousness, because otherwise they would not all without exception belong to me.
Only in so far, therefore, as I can unite a manifold of given representations in one consciousness, is it possible for me to represent to myself the identity of the consciousness in [i.e. throughout] these representations.
Understanding is, to use general terms, the faculty of knowledge. This knowledge consists in the determinate relation of given representations to an object; and an object is that in the concept of which the manifold of a given intuition is united.
Therefore the empirical unity of consciousness, through association of representations, itself concerns an appearance, and is wholly contingent.
Knowledge involves two factors: first, the concept, through which an object in general is thought (the category); and secondly, the intuition, through which it is given. For if no intuition could be given corresponding to the concept, the concept would still indeed be a thought, so far as its form is concerned, but would be without any object, and no knowledge of anything would be possible by means of ~. So far as I could know, there would be nothing, and could be nothing, to which my thought could be applied.
[A]s yielding knowledge of things, [the categories] have no kind of application, save only in regard to things which may be objects of possible experience.
If ... we admit that we know objects only in so far as we are externally affected, we must also recognize, as regards inner sense, that by means of it we intuit ourselves only as we are inwardly affected by ourselves; in other wads, that, so far as inner intuition is concerned, we know our own subject only as appearance, not as it is in itself.
I have no knowledge of myself as I am but merely as I appear to myself.
We cannot think an object save through categories; we cannot know an object so thought save through intuition corresponding to these concepts. Now all our intuitions are sensible; and this knowledge, in so far as the object is given, is empirical. But empirical knowledge is experience. Consequently, there can be no a priori knowledge, except of objects of possible experience.
At least this is so, immediately we are convinced that there is an absolutely necessary practical employment of pure reason - the moral - in which in inevitably goes beyond the limits of sensibility.
[M]orality necessarily presupposes freedom (in the strictest sense) as a property of our will ... [since] it yields practical principles - original principles, proper to our reason - as a priori data of reason, and ... this would be absolutely impossible save on the assumption of freedom ....
I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith.
Nothing can be conceived in the world, a even out of it which can be called good, without qualification, except a good will.
[Having] deprived the will of every impulse which could arise to it from obedience to any [particular] law, there remains nothing [as a basis for morality) but the universal conformity of the will’s actions to law in general, which alone can serve as a principle, i.e., I am never to act otherwise than so that I could also will that my maxim should become universal law.
So act as to treat humanity whether in thine own person a that of any other, in every case as an end . . . never as a means only.
Autonomy then is the basis of the dignity of human and of every rational nature.
Autonomy of the will is that property of it by which k is a law to itself (independently of any property of the objects of volition).
[W]e ought to conform [to the moral law]; consequently we must be able to do so.
Now as time past is no longer in my power, hence every action that I perform must be a necessary result of certain determining grounds which are not in my power, that is, at the moment in which I am acting I am never free.
Consequently, if we would save [freedom], no other way remains but to consider that the existence of a thing, so far as it is determinable in time, and therefore its causality, according to the law of physical necessity, belong to appearance, and to attribute freedom to the same being as a thing in itself.
The summum bonum is possible in the world only on the supposition of a Supreme Being having a causality corresponding to moral character.
[I]t is morally necessary to assume the existence of God.
The summum bonum, then, is only possible on the supposition of the immortality of the soul; consequently, this immortality, being inseparably connected with the moral law, is a postulate of pure practical reason ....

Hegel

Here we find contained the principal that Being is Thought.
In my view - a view which the developed exposition of the system itself can alone justify - everything depends on grasping and expressing the ultimate truth not as Substance but as Subject as well.
To pit this single assertion, that 'in the Absolute all is one,' against the organized whole of determinate and complete knowledge, or of knowledge which at least aims at and demands complete development - to give out its Absolute as the night in which, as we say, all cows are black - that is the very naiveté of emptiness of knowledge.
Instead of making its way into the inherent content of the matter at hand, understanding always ... assumes a position above the particular existence about which it is speaking. ... True scientific knowledge, on the contrary, demands abandonment to the very life of the object ....
Spirit alone is Realty. It is the inner being of the world, that which essentially is, and is per se; it assumes objective, determinate form, and enters into relations with itself – it is eternality (others), and exists for itself; yet, in this determination, and in its otherness, it is still one with itself - it is self contained and self-complete, in itself and for itself at once.
True reality is merely this process of reinstating self-identity, of reflecting into its own self in and from its other. ... It is the process of its own becoming, the circle which presupposes its end as its purpose, and has its end as its beginning ....
To bring philosophy nearer to the form of science - that goal where it can lay aside the name of love of knowledge and be actual knowledge - that is what I have set before me.
But this mere Being, as it is mere abstraction, is therefore the absolutely negative, which, in a similarly immediate aspect, is just NOTHING.
The truth of Being and Nothing is accordingly the unity of the two: and this unity is BECOMING.
The German spirit is the spirit of the new world. Its aim is the realization of absolute Truth as the unlimited self-determination of freedom - that freedom which has its own absolute from itself as its purport.
The family, as the immediate substantiality of mind, is specifically characterized by love, which is the mind's feeling of its own unity. Hence in a family ones state of mind is to have self-consciousness as one's individuality within this unity as the absolute essence of oneself, with the result that one is in it not as an independent person but as a member.
The task of conducting this individual mind from its unscientific standpoint to that of science had to be undertaken in its general sense; we had to contemplate the formative development of the universal individual, of self-conscious spirit. As to the relation between these two [the particular and general individual] every moment as it gains a concrete form and its own proper shape and appearance, finds a place in the life of the universal individual. The particular individual is an incomplete mind.
In like manner [to the birth of a child] the sprit of the time, growing slowly and quietly ripe for the new form it is to assume, disintegrates one fragment after another of the structure of the previous world. ... This gradual crumbling to pieces ... is interrupted by the sunrise, which, in a flash and at a single stroke, brings to view the form and structure of the new world.
Since in this independence [of the State] the being-for-self of real spirit has its existence, it is the first freedom and highest honor of a people.
War has the higher significance that through it the moral health of peoples is preserved in their indifference towards the stabilizing of finite determinations.
Philosophy must end in religion, because philosophy is thought, and thought always involves finitude and opposition, e.g., the opposition of subject and object, and of the mind that thinks to the matter that does not think. Its business, therefore, is to show the finitude of all that is finite, and through reason to demand its complement or completion in the infinite.

Schopenhauer

How very paltry and limited the normal human intellect is, and how little lucidity there is in the human consciousness, may be judged from the fact that, despite the ephemeral brevity of human life the uncertainty of our existence and the countless enigmas which press upon us from all sides, everyone does not continually and ceaselessly philosophize, but that only the rarest of exceptions do.
[Scientific discovery is] just like perception, an operation of the understanding, an immediate intuition, and as such the work of an instant, an apperçu, a flash of insight.
'The world is my idea' is a truth valid for every living creature, though only man can consciously contemplate it. In doing so he attains philosophical wisdom. No truth is more absolutely certain than that all that exists for knowledge, and, therefore, this whole world, is only object in relation to subject, perception of a perceiver - in a word, idea. The world is idea.
Thus, any single individual endowed with the faculty of perception of the object constitutes the whole world of idea as completely as the millions in existence; but let this single individual vanish, and the whole world as idea would disappear. Each of these halves possess meaning and existence only in and through the other, appearing with and vanishing with it. Where the object begins the subject ends.
In one aspect, the world is idea; in the other aspect the world is will.
The body is given in two entirely different ways to the subject of knowledge. ... It is given as an idea in intelligent perception. ... And it is given in quite a different way as that which is immediately known to every one, and is signified by the word will.
The act of will and the movement of the body are not two different things objectively known, which the bond of causality unites; ... they are one and the same, but they are given in different ways, - immediately, and again in perception. ... The action of the body is nothing but the act of will objectified, i.e. passed into perception. ... The whole body is nothing but objectified will, i.e., will become idea.
We an surely never arrive at the nature of things from without. No matter how assiduous our researches may be, we can never reach anything beyond images and names.
Knowledge is completely subject to the will. ... Only through [its] relations [to his body] is the object interesting to the individual, i.e., related to his will. Therefore, the knowledge which is subject to the will knows nothing further of objects than their relations.
If raised by the power of the mind, a man relinquishes the common way of looking at things, gives up tracing their relations to each other, the final goal of which is always a relation to his own will ... inasmuch as he loses himself in this object ... i.e., forgets even his individuality, his will ... so that it is as if the object alone were there, without anyone to perceive it, ... in such perception the individual has lost himself:; but he is pure, will-less, painless, timeless subject of knowledge.
Virtue is as little taught as is genius; indeed, the concept is just as unfruitful for it as it is for art, and in the case of both can be used only as an instrument. We should therefore be just as foolish to expect that our moral systems and ethics would create virtuous, noble, and holy men, as that our aesthetics would produce poets, painters, and musicians.
Common people certainly look like men; I have never seen any creatures that resembled men so closely.
[The saint] no longer makes the egotistical distinction between his person and that of others, but takes as much interest in the sufferings of other individuals as in his own, and therefore is ... benevolent to the highest degree ... [and] recognizes in all beings his own inmost and true self ....
Therefore, if a man fears death as his annihilation, it is just as if he were to think that the sun dies out at evening, “Woe is me! for I go down into eternal night. ... Life is assured to the will to live; the form of life is an endless present, no matter how individuals, the phenomena of the Idea, arise and pass away in time, like fleeting dreams.
A saint may be full of the absurdest superstition, a, on the contrary, he may be a philosopher, it is all the same. His conduct certifies that he is a saint, for, in a moral regard, it proceeds from knowledge of the world and its nature, which is not abstractly but intuitively and directly apprehended ....
To repeat the whole nature of the world abstractly, universally, and distinctly in concepts, and thus to store up, as it were, a reflected image of it in permanent concepts always at the command of the reason; this and nothing else is philosophy.

Bentham

[T]he greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation.
Moral good is good only on account of its tendency to secure physical benefits: moral evil is evil only on account of its tendency to induce physical mischief.
[W]e must discover some calculus or process of moral arithmetic.
Every one to count for one and nobody to count for more than one.
Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, Pleasure and Pain. To them ... we refer all our decisions, every resolve that we make in Life.
I am an adherent of the Principle of Utility when I measure my approval or disapproval of any act, public or private, by its tendency to produce pains and pleasures.
[Q]uantity of pleasure being equal, pushpin is as good as poetry.
Now, if we examine the value of a pleasure, considered by itself and in relation to a single individual, we shall find that it depends on four circumstances: ( 1 ) its Intensity; (2) its Duration; (3) its Certainty, (4) its Proximity.
The day may come when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been witholden from them but by the hand of tyranny. ... The question is not, Can they reason? nor Can they talk? but Can they suffer?

Mill

It is better to be a human being dissatisfied, than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.
[T]he sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. . . . Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.
This then is the appropriate region of human liberty. I comprises, first, the inward domain of consciousness; ... liberty of thought and feeling; ... of tastes and pursuits; ... of doing what we like ... without impediment from our fellow-creatures, so long as what we do does not harm them, even though they should think our conduct foolish, perverse, a wrong.
We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavoring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still.
[I]t is as certain that many opinions now general will be rejected by future ages, as it is that many, once general, are rejected by the present.
But much more of the meaning ... would have been understood, and what was understood would have been far more deeply impressed on the mind, if the man had been accustomed to hear it argued pro and con ....
Individuality is the same thing with development, and it is only the cultivation of individuality which produces a can produce, well-developed human beings.
[Drugs] may, however, be wanted not only for innocent but for useful purposes, and restrictions cannot be imposed in the one case without operating in the other.
[F]ornication, for example, must be tolerated, and so must gambling; but should a person be free to be a pimp, a to keep a gambling house. ... There are arguments on both sides.
That the principle which regulates the existing social relations between the sexes - the legal subordination of one sex to the other - is wrong itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement; and that it ought to be replaced by a principle of perfect equality, admitting no power a privilege on the one side, nor disability on the other.
I am conscious in myself of a series of facts connected by an uniform sequence, of which the beginning is modifications of my body, the middle is feelings, the end is outward demeanor. In the case of other human beings I have the evidence of my senses for the first and last links of the series, but not for the intermediate link ...by supposing the link to be of the same nature as in the case of which I have experience, ... I bring other human beings, as phenomena, under the same generalizations which I know by experience to be the true theory of my own existence.

Comte

Now that the human mind has grasped celestial and terrestrial physics - mechanical and chemical; organic physics, both vegetable and animal - there remains one science, to fill up the series of sciences of observation - Social physics. This is what men have now most need of: and this it is the principal aim of the present work to establish.
In the final, the positive state, the mind has given over the vain search after Absolute notions, the origin and destination of the universe, and the causes of phenomena, and applies itself to the study of their laws - that is, their invariable relations of succession and resemblance. Reasoning and observation, duly combined, are the means of this knowledge. What is now understood when we speak of an explanation of facts is simply the establishment of a connection between single phenomena and some general facts, the number of which continually diminishes with the progress of science.
From the study of the development of human intelligence, in all directions, and through all times, the discovery arises of a great fundamental law to which it is necessarily subject, and which has a solid foundation of proof, both in the facts of our organization and in our historical experience. The law is this: that each of our leading conceptions - each branch of our knowledge - passes successively through three different theoretical conditions: the theological, a fictitious; the metaphysical, or abstract; and the scientific, or positive.
Can it be supposed that the most important and the most delicate conceptions, and those which by their complexity are accessible to only a small number of highly-prepared understandings, are to be abandoned to the arbitrary and variable decisions of the least competent minds.

Marx

From political economy itself we have shown that the worker sinks to the level of a commodity, and to a most miserable commodity; that the misery of the worker increases with the power and volume of his production; that the necessary result of competition is the accumulation of capital in a few hands; and thus a restoration of monopoly in its most terrible form; and finally that the distinction between capitalist and landlord, and between agricultural and factory worker, must disappear, and the whole of society divide into the two classes of property owners and propertyless workers.
What is embodied in the product of his labor is no longer his own. The greater this product is, therefore, the more he is diminished. The alienation of the worker in his product means not only that it becomes an object, assumes an external existence, but that it stands opposed to him as an autonomous power. The life which he has given to the object sets itself against him as an alien and hostile face.
Finally the external character of the work for the worker is shown by the fact that it is not his own work but work for someone else, that in work he does not belong to himself but to another person.
[T]he appropriation of unpaid labor is the basis of the Capitalist mode of production, and of the exploitation of the worker that occurs under it; even if the capitalist buys the labor power of his laborer at its full value as a commodity on the market he extracts more value from it than he paid for, and in the ultimate analysis this surplus value forms those sums of value from which are heaped up the constantly increasing masses of capital in the hands of the possessing classes.
[The solution] can only consist be the practical recognition of the social nature of the modern force of production, and therefore in the harmonizing of the modes of production, appropriation and exchange with the socialized character of the means of production.
In communist society ... society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow ....
History is economics in action.
[T]he prevailing mode of economic production and exchange, and the social organization necessarily following from it, form the basis upon which is built up, and from which alone can be explained, the political and intellectual history of that epoch; [and] consequently the whole history of mankind has been a history of class struggles.
What else does the history of ideas prove than that intellectual production changes in character b proportion as material production is changed? The ruling ideas of each age are the ideas of its ruling class.
The executive of the modem state is nothing but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.
Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
[Established law, morality, religion, and culture are] merely so many bourgeois prejudices behind which lurk just as many bourgeois interests.
The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of man, is a demand for their real happiness. The call to abandon their illusions about their condition is a call to abandon a condition which requires illusions.
The philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however is to change it.
The proof of the pudding is in the eating. From the moment we turn to our own use of these objects, according to the qualities we perceive in them, we put to an infallible test the correctness a otherwise of our sense perceptions. If these perceptions have been wrong, then our estimate of the use to which an object an be turned must also be wrong, and our attempt must fail.
The bourgeoisie is unfit ... to rule because it is incompetent to assure the existence of the slave within his slavery, because it cannot help but let him sink into such a state that it has to feed him, instead of being fed by him. Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie, in other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society.

Kierkegaard

I submit to you that if a man hasn't discovered something he will die for he isn't fit to live.
Let me first ask another question: is any more absurd contradiction thinkable than wishing to PROVE (no matter, for the present, whether one wishes to do so from history, or from whatever else in the wide world one wishes to prove it) that a certain person is God? To maintain that a certain person is God - that is, professes to be God - is indeed a stumbling block in the purest sense. But what is the nature of a stumbling block? It is an assertion which is at variance with all (human) reason. Now think of proving that! But to prove something is to render it reasonable and real. Is it possible, then, to render reasonable and real what is at variance with all reason? Scarcely; unless one wishes to contradict one's self. One can prove only that it is at variance with all reason. The proofs for the divinity of Christ given in Scripture, such as the miracles and his resurrection from the grave exist, too, only for faith; that is, they are no "proofs," for they are not meant to prove that all this agrees with reason but, on the contrary, are meant to prove that it is at variance with reason and therefore a matter of faith.
Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.
It is impossible to exist without passion, unless we understand the word 'exit' in the loose sense of a so-called existence.
Abstract thought ... ignores the concrete and the temporal, the existential process, the predicament of the existing individual arising from his being a synthesis of the temporal and the eternal situated in existence.
I have searched with resignation for the principle of my life. ... What did I find? Not my Self, which was what I was looking for (thinking of my soul, if I may so express it, as shut in a box with a spring-box which external circumstances, by pressing upon the lock, were to open).
Not only is the law which I give myself ... not a law but there is a law which is given to me by one higher than I.
It is not so much a question of choosing the right as of the energy, the earnestness, the pathos with which one chooses. Thereby the personality announces its inner infinity, and thereby, in turn, the personality is consolidated.
An objective uncertainty held fast in an appropriation-process of the most passionate inwardness is the truth, the highest truth attainable for an existing individual.
For I should very much like to know how one could bring Abraham's act into relation with the universal, and whether it is possible to discover any connection between what Abraham did and the universal ... except the fact that he transgressed it. It was not for the sake of saving a people, not to maintain the idea of the state, that Abraham did this. ... Abraham's whole action stands in no relation to the universal, is a purely private undertaking.
Faith is precisely the paradox that the single individual as the single individual is higher than the universal, is justified before it, not as inferior to it but as superior ... that the single individual as the single individual stands in absolute relation to the absolute.
It is a self-contradiction, and therefore comical, to be infinitely interested in that which in its maximum still always remains an approximation. If in spite of this, passion is nevertheless imported, we get fanaticism. ... The fault is not in the infinitely interested passion, but in the fact that its object has become an approximation object.
In every case where the object of knowledge is the very inwardness of the subjectivity of the individual, it is necessary for the individual to be in a corresponding condition.
Our age reminds one vividly of the dissolution of the Greek city-state: everything goes on as usual, and yet there is no longer anyone who believes in it.
Passion is the real thing ... and the age in which we live is wretched, because it is without passion.
Mankind en masse gives itself up to evil, ... nowadays it happens en masse. That is why people flock together, in order that natural and animal hysteria should get hold of them, in order to feel themselves stimulated, inflamed, and ausser sich.

Nietzsche

God is dead.
How much must collapse now that this faith has been undermined because it was built upon this faith, propped up by it, grown into it; for example, the whole of our European morality.
Duration “in vain” without end or aim is the most paralyzing idea....
'Disinterested contemplation' ... is a rank absurdity.
All seeing is essentially perspective, and so is all knowing.
A thought comes when “it” will and not when “I” will. Thus it is a falsification of the evidence to say that the subject “I” conditions the predicate “think.”
And when we mix up this world of symbols with the world of things as though the symbols existed "in themselves," then we are merely doing once more what we have always done: we are creating myths.
[H]ow wretched, how shadowy and flighty, how aimless and arbitrary, the human intellect appears in nature. There have been eternities when it did not exist; and when it is done for again, nothing will have happened. For this intellect has no further mission that would lead beyond human life.
[T]ruths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are ....
Also [conscience is] the generator of the greatest and most disastrous of maladies, of which humanity has not to this day been cured: his sickness of himself, brought on by the violent severance from his animal past ....
Assuming, finally, that we succeeded in explaining our entire instinctual Life as the development and ramification of one basic form of will (the will to power, as I hold); assuming that one could trace back all the organic functions to this will to power, including the solution to the problem of generation and nutrition (they are one problem) - if this were done, we should be justified in defining all effective energy unequivocally as will to power.
Life itself is assimilation, injury, violation of the foreign and the weaker, suppression, hardness, the forcing of one's forms upon something else, ingestion and - at least in its mildest form - exploitation.
The slave revolt in morals begins by rancor turning creative and giving birth to values - the rancor of beings who, deprived of the direct outlet of action, compensate by an imaginary vengeance. All truly noble morality grows out of triumphant self-affirmation. Slave ethics, on the other hand, begins by saying no to an "outside" an "other" a non-self, and that no is its creative act.
For seventeen years I have never tired of calling attention to the despiritualizing influence of our current science and industry.
Must not whatever can happen have happened, have been done, have passed by before?
[The Overman is] the truly exuberant, alive and world affirming man who does not merely resign himself to and learn to get along with all that was and is, but who want everything as it was and is back again, back forever and ever, insatiably calling da capo, not only to himself but to the whole spectacle and performance ....