There is no such thing as "the last word", in wisdom, or in anything else. Even conversations continue when the conversants have parted. And there may be systems of philosophy, and men who claim to belong to them, but this is also a fib. No man has ever agreed on the essential points with any other man who has ever lived. We may have to dig for him, but we always find the individual. Though he surrender his reason to the common faith, he cannot silence the mind that whispers even out of the deep unconscious, -- and every mind is uniquely formed. My greatest difficulty has been to stand at the frontier of thought and to contemplate the mystery, without building artificial bridges over the abyss. The abyss, I see, is not a thing to be traversed. It is infinite. We must stand in awe, or drown ourselves in an ocean of spirits, as we do. Answers are finite, but questions, like mysteries, are infinite. The sharpest mind cannot match the razor's edge. It cuts conclusions to ribbons (not by choice, but because it is too sharp to touch them and leave them whole), yet, is eventually blunted by contact with them. And the finer, and more subtle our thoughts become, the sooner we find the mind too dull to cut them. Nietzsche was right to conclude that we reach our opinions by default. We conclude through weariness, and because we are "human, all-too-human". The mind that neither cuts, nor concludes, does not exist. Perhaps it ceases to exist. What takes its place? A fruition of individuality, a Self in full bloom; a mind at peace with itself, but never with the infinite; a no-mind. But even this must needs wither and pass away; even Sakyamuni could not achieve perfect enlightenment; he could only achieve Sakyamuni. There is no escape from the eternal, and those who find the answer, those who find the Self, must kiss it on the wing. Even the will to release must be released; surrendered at last to the infinite. Then pity the Buddha, for he is closer to the lizard than the man; while man is closer to the Buddha than the lizard. "The first shall be last, and the last shall be first." This is the theory of eternal reccurrence. That "the Christ" becomes "the Antichrist", and Jesus becomes Nietzsche, is the greatest irony of all. And every man returns to the place where he now stands. Why be in a hurry to get here?




As I am, so shall you be.

As you are, so shall I be.

Love is not the answer, but its the only thing that makes any sense.

Interesting article, Archaeus



I agree and building artificial bridges is difficult for all of us to avoid. If we do build those bridges it is okay as long as we leave an open mind to further investigating the Mystery and be willing to tear down those erected bridges in the process.

I have to give some thought to what Nietzsche concluded about arriving at our opinions by default. As for myself, the truths and opinions that I hold are not arrived at mere default. They are truths and opinions that came to exist due to my life experience supporting and backing up my thoughts. They are also supported from my soul which gives affirmation to the opinions and truths of thought.

What the mind cannot comprehend, the soul sees all too clearly. There has to be an equal partnership between the mind and soul for that reason. I think a lot of philosophers listened to their own minds much more than they listened to their souls. That may well be due to their own disdain for emotions over their preference for their own thoughts. I think many of the philosophers, though not all of them, placed a higher value on the mind than they did the soul which is the core of our entire being. Our mind and thoughts will cease to exist when we do. Our souls and the energy of our feelings are the only thing about us that is eternal and the only thing we will take with us when we depart this veil of tears.

I feel it is more apt that a person will come to their truths and opinions by default if they choose to only listen to their own minds instead of seeking evidence to support those thoughts in their life experiences, their relationships with others, and the voice of their souls which is the Voice of God within.

God, the Universe and Creation itself is a vast and infinite mystery. Since God is not mortal but a Spirit the only real connection we have to God and any truths he wishes to convey of Him/Herself is only attainable Spirit to spirit. Then it's up to our mind and soul working in conjunction to decipher the truth and our opinions of that truth.

Just my thoughts on the Last Word. I feel that God is not only the Last Word but the First Word and THE WORD. And that can only be grasped by the soul - Spirit to spirit.

"He had a more penetrating knowledge of himself than any man who has ever lived, or is ever likely to live."
~ Sigmund Freud, speaking of Friedrich Nietzsche

Interesting thoughts, Moonflower. Nietzsche was something new in philosophy. As I see it, he was the first and only great Shaman of the Western World. That his chief concern was soul, and not intellect, is evident in his entire manner of thinking and expressing himself, and, most clearly, in his theory of infinite reflection. For him, what you think is less important than how you think, and, specifically, how soulfully you think. Freedom is the thing. To be soulful is to have a profound breadth and depth of understanding, which allows apparent contradictions to exist side by side, without being reconciled. Any attempt at a systematic deconstruction of reality is eschewed in favor of a poetic spirit, that makes use of any and all things, depending on its present inclinations. Ideas and beliefs were secondary, and the free soul could interpret and reinterpret experiences according to its own whims. What he means when he says we arrive at our opinions by default is that we gravitate to certain perspectives because of who we are, on a soul level, because of what we have experienced, and because of how we have been brought up to interpret those experiences. It is worth reflecting that "nothing teaches, and nothing prejudices, like experience". The experience is, in fact, nothing, -- while the interpretation of it, within a larger context, is everything. Nietzsche showed that, when we are honest enough with ourselves to confront and consider multiple perspectives, it becomes possible to reinterpret even the most seemingly self-evident conclusions drawn from experience. You might dig this excerpt from existentialist Karl Jaspers, on Nietzche's significance in the evolution of human consciousness:

"Kierkegaard and Nietzsche"
from the essay by Karl Jaspers:

The contemporary philosophical situation is determined by the fact that two philosophers, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, who did not count in their times and, for a long time, remained without influence in the history of philosophy, have continually grown in significance. Philosophers after Hegel have increasingly returned to face them, and they stand today unquestioned as the authentically great thinkers of their age. Both their influence and the opposition to them prove it...

In the situation of philosophizing, as well as in the real life of men, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche appear as the expression of destinies, destinies which nobody noticed then, with the exception of some ephemeral and immediately forgotten presentiments, but which they themselves already comprehended.

As to what this destiny really is, the question remains open even today. It is not answered by a comparison of the two thinkers, but is clarified and made more urgent. This comparison is all the more important since there could have been no influence of one upon the other, and because their very differences make their common features so much more impressive. Their affinity is so compelling, from the whole course of their lives down to the individual details of their thought, that their nature seems to have been elicited by the necessities of the spiritual situation of their times. With them a shock occurred to Western philosophizing whose final meaning cannot yet be estimated...

Their thinking created a new atmosphere. They passed beyond all the limits then regarded as obvious. It is as if they no longer shrank back from anything in thought... This questioning is never simply hostility to reason; rather, both sought to appropriate limitlessly all modes of rationality. It was no philosophy of feeling, for both pushed unremittingly toward the concept for expression. It is certainly not dogmatic skepticism; rather their whole thought strove toward the genuine truth.

In a magnificent way, penetrating a whole life with the earnestness of philosophizing, they brought forth not some doctrines, not any basic proposition, not some picture of the world, but rather a new total intellectual attitude for men. This attitude was in the medium of infinite reflection, a reflection which is conscious of being unable to attain any real ground by itself. No single thing characterizes their nature; no fixed doctrine or requirement is to be drawn out of them as something independent and permanent.

Out of the consciousness of their truth, both suspect truth in the naive form of scientific knowledge. They do not doubt the methodological correctness of scientific thought. But Kierkegaard was astonished at the learned professors; they live, for the most part, with science, and die with the idea that it will continue, and would like to live longer that they might, in a line of direct progress, always understand more and more. They do not experience the maturity of that critical point where everything turns upside down, where one understands more and more that there is something which one cannot understand. Kierkegaard thought the most frightful way to live was to bewitch the whole world through one's discoveries and cleverness -- to explain the whole of nature and not understand oneself. Nietzsche is inexhaustible in destructive analyses fo types of scholars, who have no genuine sense of their own activity, who can not be themselves, and who, with their ultimately futile knowledge, aspire to grasp Being itself.

Against the System

The questioning of every self-enclosed rationality which tries to make the whole truth communicable made both radical opponents of the "system", that is, the form which philosophy had had for centuries and which had achieved its final polish in German idealism. The system is for them a detour from reality and is, therefor, lies and deception. Kierkegaard granted that empirical existence could be a system for God, but never for an existing spirit; system corresponds with what is closed and settled, but existence is precisely the contrary. The philosopher of systems is, as a man, like someone who builds a castle and lives in a hovel next door. Such a fantastical being does not himself live within what he thinks; but the thought of a man must be the house in which he lives or it will become perverted. The basic question of philosophy, what it is, and what science is, is posed in a new and unavoidable form. Nietzsche wanted to doubt better than Descartes, and saw in Hegel's miscarried attempt to make reason evolve nothing but Gothic heaven-storming. The will-to-system is, for him, a lack of honesty.

Being as Interpretation

What authentic knowing is, was expressed by both in the same way. It is, for them, nothing but interpretation. They also understood their own thought as interpretation.

Interpretation, however, reaches no end. Existence, for Nietzsche, is capable of infinite interpretation. What has happened and what was done is, for Kierkegaard, always capable of being understood in a new way. As it is interpreted anew, it becomes a new reality which yet is hidden; temporal life can therefor never be correctly understood by men; no man can absolutely penetrate through his own consciousness.

Both apply the image of interpretation to knowledge of Being, but in such a fashion that Being is as if deciphered in the interpretation of the interpretation. Nietzsche wanted to uncover the basic text, homo natura, from its overpaintings and read it in its reality. Kierkegaard gave his own writings no other meaning then that they should interpret again the original text of individual, human existential relations.

Masks

With this basic idea is connected the fact that both, the most open and candid of thinkers, had a misleading aptitude for concealment and masks. For them, masks necessarily belong to the truth. Indirect communication becomes for them the sole way of communicating genuine truth; indirect communication, as expression, is appropriate to the ambiguity of genuine truth in temporal existence, in which process it must be grasped through sources in every Existenz.

Being Itself

Both, in their thinking, push toward that basis which would be Being itself in man. In opposition to the philosophy which, from Parmenides through Descartes to Hegel said, Thought is Being, Kierkegaard asserted the proposition that Faith is Being. Nietzsche saw the Will to Power. But Faith and Will to Power are mere signa, which do not connote what is meant but are themselves capable of endless explication.

Honesty

With both there is a decisive drive toward honesty. This word for them both is the expression of the ultimate virtue to which they subject themselves. It remains for them the minimum of the absolute which is still possible although everything else becomes involved in a bewildering questioning. It becomes for them also the dizzying demand for a verasity which, however, brings even itself into question, and which is the opposite of that violence which would like to grasp the truth in a literal and barbaric certitude.

Their Readers

One can question whether in general any thing is said in such thought. In fact, both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche were aware that the comprehension of their thought was not possible to the man who only thinks. It is important who it is that understands. They turn to the individuals who must bring with them and bring forth from themselves what can only be said indirectly. The epigram of Lichtenberg applies to Kierkegaard, and he himself cites it: "such works are like mirrors; if an ape peeks in, no apostle will look out." Nietzsche says one must have earned for oneself the distinction necessary to understand him. He held it impossible to teach the truth where the mode of thought is based. Both seek the reader who belongs to them.