| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche: flattered the sublimest desires of the herding-animal, things
have reached such a point that we always find a more visible
expression of this morality even in political and social
arrangements: the DEMOCRATIC movement is the inheritance of the
Christian movement. That its TEMPO, however, is much too slow and
sleepy for the more impatient ones, for those who are sick and
distracted by the herding-instinct, is indicated by the
increasingly furious howling, and always less disguised teeth-
gnashing of the anarchist dogs, who are now roving through the
highways of European culture. Apparently in opposition to the
peacefully industrious democrats and Revolution-ideologues, and
Beyond Good and Evil |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Sophist by Plato: similar field: jesuits, puritans, methodists, and the like. Sometimes the
meaning is both narrowed and enlarged; and a good or bad sense will subsist
side by side with a neutral one. A curious effect is produced on the
meaning of a word when the very term which is stigmatized by the world
(e.g. Methodists) is adopted by the obnoxious or derided class; this tends
to define the meaning. Or, again, the opposite result is produced, when
the world refuses to allow some sect or body of men the possession of an
honourable name which they have assumed, or applies it to them only in
mockery or irony.
The term 'Sophist' is one of those words of which the meaning has been both
contracted and enlarged. Passages may be quoted from Herodotus and the
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Kwaidan by Lafcadio Hearn: be no gods; but the forces that shape and dissolve all forms of being would
seem to be much more exacting than gods. To prove a "dramatic tendency" in
the ways of the stars is not possible; but the cosmic process seems
nevertheless to affirm the worth of every human system of ethics
fundamentally opposed to human egoism.
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Notes
THE STORY OF MIMI-NASHI-HOICHI
[1] See my Kotto, for a description of these curious crabs.
[2] Or, Shimonoseki. The town is also known by the name of Bakkan.
[3] The biwa, a kind of four-stringed lute, is chiefly used in musical
Kwaidan |
