Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche is a name known to many. He is famous for philosophy packed in terse aphorisms, which, at times, are entertainingly trenchant and almost always hit the nail on the head. He revels in tragic happenings and views them as affirmation to life, which is – admit it – true to an extent. I believe so because pain and sorrow are sensations that heighten one’s awareness. Just think about it. Think of the last time you’ve felt intense physical pain and tell me that you haven’t felt, at that very moment, alive. Sure, he suffered from mental illness, but you can’t deny the fact that many of his ideas, had at one time or another, titillated your brain cells.

Nietzsche’s ideas usually yield highly diverse interpretations in numbers, which far exceed what I can tackle in this blog. Each one represents something different for all of us, each one yielding enough stories, I think, to warrant its own entry. I will, however, condense some ideas into this single blog post for today’s blogging activity.

Blogging Activity for Today

For each or any Nietzsche idea below, write your own interpretation and/or personal story you can think of. Let me start with my own.

The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.

For an average child to digress from the frame of mind of the people around him/her is slim. That is discounting the possibility of the child being extremely intelligent, though even then the tendency to influence a youngster is extremely high. Teaching humans to be intolerant of other people’s beliefs and opinions at an age where their minds are akin to sponges is, I believe, the first and defining step into molding a bigot. This is not one of those instances wherein a child could think for his/her own, not when adults themselves have a hard time trying to respect other people’s beliefs.

The lonely one offers his hand too quickly to whomever he encounters.

I know of a young lady who’s so hungry for love that she latched herself onto the first man who showed her a modicum of interest. All was well for a short while but in time the man started to get abusive. The young lady refuses to cut ties because, as she said, “he was the one who came when I needed someone the most”. That same young lady who used to have vibrant eyes is now in a drug rehab facility and can’t even pronounce my name correctly.

What we do in dreams, we do when we are awake: we invent and fabricate a person with whom we associate – and immediately forget we have done so

This is, perhaps, my most favorite Nietzsche idea of all. That is because this states a mistake majority of us make. How many times in your life have you claimed that you “know” someone? I’m sure, more than you can count. When other people accuse a person you “know”, chances are you would not believe the accusation(s). First impressions play a huge part in this since people tend to rely on what they initially encounter. In truth though, you would not know anyone else so thoroughly that you’d be able to fathom the very depths of his/her mind. You won’t even “know” someone you’ve been with for years, including members of your family. This is just to attest to humans being multi-faceted. Cast around your memory for an occasion where you were proven wrong on your knowledge of a person and write about how it has affected you.

A man does not hate so long as he rates something low, but only when he rates something equal or higher.

How true. Have you ever “hated” someone because he/she got one up on you? People mostly hate because they feel oppressed, insecure, or taken advantage of. When people feel strong adversity towards others whom they deem not their equals, they hold these people in contempt or despise them, which I think is a shade different than “hate”. Have you ever felt shades of difference in the animosity you’ve felt for other people? If then, how do you distinguish and differentiate them?

The power of instinct is such that when the house is burning, people forget their noonday meal. But later they haul it out of the ashes.

A couple of weeks ago I watched a documentary on the National Geographic channel about a high-end department store in South Korea, which had collapsed out of the blue. A girl was trapped under the debris for twelve whole days, in a space so tight her thin body could barely fit. Despite her predicament, however, she still managed (and remembered) to lap up drops of rainwater, which seeped between cracks of crashed concrete. This succumbing to instinct kept her alive when a human body should have already bypassed its limits. Have you ever encountered a moment in your life when instinct’s urges are so strong you could not fight them? Everyone has. What’s YOUR story?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 1st, 2007 at 3:11 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

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