Page 22 - GALIET THE HEROIC SPECTACLE OF MORALS: Hume IV

Galiet & Galiet
Which feeds these deadly branches; for it were As nothing did we die; but Life will suit
Itself to sorrow’s most detested fruit,
Like to the apples on the Dead Sea’s Shore, All ashes to the taste: Did man compute Existence by enjoyment, and count o’er
Such hours’ gainst years of life, 3⁄4 say, would he name Threescore?”
(Childe Harold, Canto III, XXXIV)
Ì Hamlet to Hume. O, soft now, soft now, Hume! Thinkest thou can play me like a flute? Damn you! What sayest thou about the whips and scorns of time? And this endless thorny toss between ye and no and no and ye: this tumult of the heart. What is this fate of ours? To choose or not to choose, but let it be this in thy memory engraved: only from the better of two evils. Fie! Fie! Charybis or the Whirlpool. Whoever acts or does not act endures, endures!
ACT IV. The Hammer of Philosophy
Ì Nietzsche to Hamlet and Hume. Endure, Hamlet, endure! Bear the whips and scorns of time, the oppressor’s wrong, the pangs of disprized love, the law’s delay, the insolence of office and the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes!”70 Endure them! That is your greatness, pure amor fati! But what is this insolent whisper I now hear? Benevolence? That sympathy is my mover and the virtues of self-interest mirror society? Nonsense! What naïveté or madness has conceived of this? There is only one principle, and that is the will to power. “Life itself in its essence means appropriating, injuring, overpowering those who are foreign and weaker; oppression, harshness, forcing one’s own forms on others, incorporation, and at the very least, at the very mildest, exploitation.”71 Exploitation? Yes! “Exploitation... is part of the fundamental nature of living things”72 and “life is simply this will to power...it will want to grow, to reach around itself, pull towards itself, to gain the upper hand...”73 and this, indubitably side by side with the might of vanity!
“O vanity of human powers,
how briefly lasts the crowning green of glory,
70 Shakespeare. Hamlet. Oxford University Press. 3.1 240
71 Nietzsche. Beyond Good and Evil. Trans. Marion Faber. Oxford University Press, 1998. Aphorism 259. 72 Ibid. Aphorism 259.
73 Ibid. Aphorism 259.
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