Animals and plants are the unconscious in man.
Man meets with that which has become unconsious to him, as the unfree, again in feeling. There is no chance, only justice.
The snake in the railway carriage, where it has begotten itself, is the lie set outwards (forked tongue, shedding of skin, strabismus divergens32), which is feared by the person who steps in; it draws the nearer to him, the sooner he is willing to capitulate to the lie: it drags his cowardice after it.
32 strabismus: failure of the eyes to align properly on the object toward which a person seeks to direct his gaze. [Trans]
The criminal invents the snake and is afraid of it; but he never dies by it. Nothing ever happens to him from outside, only inside: heart attack from the hallucinated snake.
So the criminal also constructs woman as idea (he wants sexual intercourse), but she does not exist to him. He never finds the woman that he seeks because he creates only the idea of a woman. He can sexually lust after the absolute prostitute (an old woman) and he can love the Madonna (if he wants to become pure), but he finds a Madonna only when he is good; in this moment he creates the Madonna.
The athlete has strength as an end in itself, without an ethical goal. The athlete must perish of himself, as the Valhalla-motif expires of itself.
The snake is proud: it lies only outwardly, not inwardly.
The dog is not proud at all.
The snake strikes surely; the strength of knowledge is greatest in it.
The old maid is the nothing which comes out of woman, who, for ethical reasons, is no longer met with by the man who creates her. She goes completely to ruin.
The moon is the dream; the sleepwalker is the dreamer become unfree.
Epilepsy enters after the swallowing of all evil, upon the last renouncement of introspection.
Every victory of the Good in one person helps others of itself.
The Jew’s sin is smirking at the Good, as the simpleton’s sin is smirking at wisdom.
The complete criminal must fail in his suicide, because he wants to live in order to revenge himself, to hurt.
Psychologist = Criminal
Natural scientist = Neurasthenic.
Michelangelo was guilty of pessimism (paranoia).
Compassion must become judicious inner sorrow (with appreciation of justice) and may not remain a desire for pleasure. For only then does one really love people.
The simpleton smiles slyly when questioned, the Jew smiles slyly when guilty. Both take nothing seriously.
The Jew’s trick is to stand beside God.
Epilepsy enters when a person says to himself: there is altogether nothing real. He then loses the last hold even in the sphere of the empirical.
The cat is a flatterer (sly-boots), another form of the slavish, one which the master praises.
Rabies is the dog’s revenge on the master, imputing the master that it is so and not otherwise.
God is what man can never be: father and son at the same time. The son is a self-hater and judge of himself, of the world.
Crime (murder) is: wanting to place the blame on the other (God).
The dog, the snake etc. , seek to refute the other to justify themselves (barking, hissing).
The bird has false lightness; it flies because it has hollow bones.
Telepathy is apperception.
The criminal conquers fear through hate rather than love.
Even around the time of the birth of Christ there must have been many great men, who were nevertheless not “chosen”, and whose memory has perished.
Has parthenogenesis33 something to do with lesbian love? Amazons.
Hypochondria is diverted self-hatred and paranoia.
Michelangelo’s works are in ruin, because he never conquered pessimism.
It is Jewish to blame the other (Christianity); (no humility at all)! Shifting the blame is Judaism. The Devil is the one who blames the faithful (God).
Judaism is insofar the radical evil.
The fool is he who smiles superiorly at being questioned, who acknowledges no problem: Parsifal Legend.
The Jew takes no blame upon himself: “What can I do about it?” “Nebbich” The Christian takes all.
The symbol of Jewishness is the fly. A variety of things speak for this: sugar, abundance, sums, obtrusiveness, omnipresence, apparent honesty in the eyes.
33 parthenogenesis n NL, fr. Gk parthenos + L genesis genesis: reproduction by development of an unfertilized usu. female gamete that occurs esp. among lower plants and invertebrate animals. [Trans]
The Jew does not burden himself with any guilt (nor thus with any problem); that is why he is unproductive. His guilt is that he has never posited time (dayfly, flyers, journalist; many journals are called “flies”: Fieramona in Florence, La Mouche), has not willed the final goal and the process of the world, has willed neither good nor evil. He is opposed to the will of God who wills evil as well as good.
III
Notebook
We know so little about the most sorrowful and confused period of Jesus’ life because he himself, full of pain, was constantly silent about it – until the answer he gave the angel who addressed him “Good Master”: “Why do you call me good? Nowhere is there Good!” –
Suicide from inability to achieve recovery from sickness is just as abandoning and faithless as the suicide to escape sin is cowardly.
A man’s holding of suicide to be ever allowable, or always forbidden, can be characteristic for whether he is actually superficial, or innately profound.
I know, despite the small amount of positive recognition, that I am the founder of the only healing scientific therapy, the only true pathology. I know this and have also had the good fortune, against my expectations, to meet an exceptionally high-standing person whom I have convinced, and who believes the same. Now the coming centuries must testify it.
There is only psycho-therapy34, and certainly not that entirely deficient psychotherapy from outside, which we have today, where the foreign will of a suggester must accomplish that for which one’s own is all too weak; not an heteronomous, but an autonomous hygiene and therapy, where each is his own
34 Weininger hyphenates this word to stress “therapy of the psyche” (as opposed to therapy from outside) [Trans].
diagnostician, and thereby already even his own therapist. Everyone must cure himself and be his own doctor. If that is his will, God will help him. Otherwise no-one will.
To . . .
He cannot take my suicide as a personal matter, as you did with F. , who affected you and who is there as your punishment or even as your particular misfortune. You will also feel that inclination here. But don’t believe that this is right!
I believe that my powers of mind are surely such that I would have become in a certain sense a resolver of all problems. I do not believe that I could have remained in error anywhere for long. I believe that I would have earned the name of Redeemer, because I had the nature of a Redeemer.
“To feel oneself wretched” as sickness:
Suicide from inability to escape sin.
Suicide from inability to escape sickness.
My joy in “raising hell” in class is my joy in chaos.
The sin of the man with the problem of “connectedness”, is precisely solitude. Just as the criminal takes no sin upon himself, so also no solitude.
To G. about Naples. That he must go there. Writers, and people who cannot write. Moreover, about the Farnese Hercules35. About himself. He has strength. My theory of sickness.
Why do I write this to him? Out of duty, for no other reason.
My forced uprightness is extortion of freedom, substitution of God.
G. (the athlete): strength as an end in itself, without ethical goal (seeks sport and physical exercise); that is how he sins, since he is not at all weak, (he may thus allow that to be apparent to himself) and yet through this he can fall. For strength is the consequence of Good (its means by which it can claim to have found itself), never an end in itself.
For G. : Being on guard against foreign influence means that he no more lies in his person than his imagination. I have imagination for myself, not myself for imagination. I have the same with truth. The need for originality is thus weakness.
35 Statue from the Farnese Palace in Rome. [Trans]
The Nature of the Sciences
I. The spatio-temporal elements are introduced as constants:
Geography36 – History
II. Space and time are separated:
Development of variables
a) space elements: geometry, cosmography; b) time elements: physics. 37
Nothing is the mirror of Something (of light).
Like the will, so also is its projection, movement, the child, something between Being and Non-Being.
There is a whole realm of projections. The world of experience which we perceive arises through such projections of Something onto Nothing, projections of higher life.
Notes on Ewald’s ideas:
Here lies, certainly what one never finds anywhere expressed, perhaps the most difficult problem of philosophy.
Kant has referred the life of the psyche as completely to appearance as life in the outside world. He has robbed all meaning from time.
But through this the possibility of ethics is destroyed. If all good impulses in me also pertain only to appearance and not to reality, then my life has no meaning. For
36 Geography is sadistic. Explanation is sadistic. The sadist feels the organs as real. 37 Experimental physics and numerical physics.
the meaning of my life stands and falls with whether I can enter into a positive relation to Good or not.
If all mental life is only appearance, then I cannot in any way be worthy of an eternal life. The idea contributed by Kant of
