A Counter-Nietzschean View

Here's a guy who takes a somewhat less than Nietzschean view of his achievements:

Have I not been employed in mischief all my days? Did not the American Revolution produce the French Revolution? And did not the French Revolution produce all the calamaities and desolations to the human race and the whole globe ever since?

But the feeling passes:

I meant well, however. My conscience was clear as a crystal glass, without a scruple or doubt. I was borne along by an irresistible sense of duty. God prospered our labors; and, awful, dreadful and deplorable as the consequences have been, I cannot but hope that the ultimate good of the world, of the human race, and of our beloved country, is intended and will be accomplished by it.

--John Adams, to Benjamin Rush, Aug. 28, 1811
Excerpted in The American Enlightenment 211 (A. Koch ed. 1965)

Live Dangerously

A few days ago I posted a quote from Nietzsche on the virtues of heroic risk. Apparently he wasn't kidding:

...the secret of realizing the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment of existence is: to live dangerously! Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius! Send your ships out into uncharted seas! Live in conflict with your equals and with yourselves! Be robbers and ravagers as long as you cannot be rulers and owners, you men of knowledge The time will soon be past when you can be content to live concealed in the woods like timid deer!

Friedrich Nietzsche, Gay Science 283
(I see the exclamation point ratio is even higher than before)

Is this the stuff that Edwin Muir was reading while he was working in the bonyard? Hmph, if it's my neighbors, I suspect they'll be nagging the governor to declare them a disaster area so they can get federal aid.

Bleah. Cocoa ready yet?

The Only Genuine Ideas

Friedrich Nietzsche says we have burned our bridges and taken to ship (link). Evidently for this man, taking to ship is only the beginning:

And this is the simple truth—that to live is to feel oneself lost—he who accepts it has already begun to find himself, to be on firm ground. Instinctively, as do the shipwrecked, he will look around for something to which to cling, and that tragic, ruthless glance, absolutely sincere, because it is a questioning of his salvation, will cause him to bring order into the chaos of his life. These are the only genuine ideas; the ideas of the shipwrecked. All the rest is rhetoric, posturing, farce. He who does not really feel himself lost is lost without remission; that is to say, he never finds himself, never comes up against his own reality.

Jose Ortega y Gasset, Revolt of the Masses

Burned Our Bridges?

I must have had a real Nietzschean phase once, although I can barely remember it. Anyway, I appear to have copied this out twice:

Horizon: Infinity--We have left ther land and taken to our ship! We have burned our bridges--more, we have burned our land behind us! Now, little ship, take care! The ocean lies all around you; true, it is not always roaring, and sometimes it lies there as if it were silken and golden and a gentle favorable dream. And there will be times when you will know that it is infinite and that there is nothing more terrible than infinity...Alas, if homesickness for land should assail you, as if there were no more freedom there--and there is no longer any 'land.'!

--Friedrich Nietzsche, Gay Science

Three exclamation points. What was I thinking?

Friedrich? You? Here?

Do my eyes deceive me, or is that guy in the picture on the wall--the one behind Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez on CNN (about 430p pst)--is that guy--Friedrich Nietzsche?