Hercules is Doric. Doric and Ionic must be sharply separated in Hellenism. They are related to each other as poverty to wealth, as simplicity to opulence.
The most pious work of art that I know is the “Farnese Hercules” (in the Naples Museum). It is more pious than the Hercules saga itself, with an endlessly captivating impression. The “Farnese Bull” appears beside it as an expression of talent.
That people can speak of Raphaelesque tripe next to Michelangelo, I understand; they will probably always do this, because Raphael is to be understood completely without genius, and Michelangelo only through it. The one makes every consideration for the beholder, the other, none whatsoever. Raphael becomes totally impotent when he seeks to portray God, Christ or philosophy. He aids himself by dispensing with the essence from the outset; people then declare that work original and praise it as a counterclaim to Michelangelo. Raphael never dared to allow a subject to be shown entirely from the back, least of all God himself (which Michelangelo has done in the Second Fresco of the Sistine).
In order to know who Michelangelo, and what Raphael is, one can compare a painting of lesser significance by the former, the “Deluge”, with one of the most outstanding of the latter, “Fire in the Borgo”. These are very well suited in homologous content and because, in Michelangelo, no depictions of the masses are otherwise present.
Raphael paints a group here, another there, piece by piece, each occupied with something different; the unity is totally lost. Michelangelo immediately grasps the essence of the matter: he paints the deluge, the event itself in its most elemental force, and thence gives himself to all else, all retroaction upon the people, who precisely here must exclude any individuation.
Freedom and universality – power and universality.
That is why the neurasthenic hates anthropocentrism.
The neurasthenic desires limitation and therefore no power.
The higher moment is God.
Unity and totality are problematic in this way. The neurasthenic renounces totality, the criminal, unity. The neurasthenic are too weak for totality, the criminal for unity.
Lack of unity in the sea! Totality is here; but unity is missing.
That is why the criminal splinters and renounces unity of consciousness.
Recovery means: to reunite with the All. Sickness means loneliness.
The river has no totality.
The swamp is the false totality of the river and the illusory victory over itself.
What makes the North German is, to the contrary, the peculiar North German mentality. The Icelander, Norwegian, Scot and in part also the Englishman are more similar to the South German than the North German.
Contrast also in nature: the most fertile regions of Europe beside volcanoes, the vile lava – muck of the Earth.
The older a person becomes, the more he looks into the future, not only into the past. The child has absolutely no relationship to his future.
Is the ocean due to the rivers, or the rivers due to the ocean? Who would decide that? So is it between God and man. The ocean wills the rivers, the river wills the ocean.
In terms of scenery, I have the greatest sense for vistas and for the All to which the earth expands, for the opening behind which one observes the vastness, for the music which trumpets (Trovatore and Lohengrin, joyous arias): entry.
The solar system and the fixed star sky have a differing relationship to space. The stars signal hither from the edge of space. It is well certain that the stars are more moral than the sun; here there is even more (e. g. glowing heat, polychromy) flung to nothing. The position has become even more exclusive, even narrower; and even for that reason simultaneously wider, greater, more encompassing.
The stars laugh no more; to desire they no longer have any connection, only to bliss and joy. They lack physis.
Vomiting is to diarrhoea as nausea is to fear.
Among the notable things about fire is that it also requires oxygen to burn -exactly like its enemy, life. Thereby are life and flames so often compared.
The purifying effect of fire indicates that even this element serves the Good.
The snake and dog have a kinship.
Rabies is the imputation the dog raises against the master.
The sin of the bird is lightness, overcoming gravitation without alighting.
The dog is the criminal who continually seeks to refute others in order to justify himself (barking!). But he can only do that when he is the slave of a master.
Sickness is dependence on the body – crime dependence on the soul.
Even short-sightedness would allow its cure, if one would recognize its cause.
The greatest criminal invariably dies of heart attack (fear).
The problem of the sick person is the problem of space.
The problem of the criminal is the problem of time.
The problem of animal psychology is the problem of chance, the problem of externalisation; because when fly-likeness is unconscious in me (that is, I become unfree against it, the fly appears against which I am unfree in feeling), space is still there in the same moment.
The body is not immoral but the skin. It is the peril of the body, the place where it yields to space, is vulnerable, soilable, infectible.
Space comes into being through the making not-real of a real, just as with sickness (through the surrender of a part of the I to the outside, incapacity for totality).
Time (crime) is the setting as real of the not-real: separation of a past, that has been given power, and a future over which no power is wanted, from the present, which is thus no longer eternity . . . Just as with crime: the setting as real, actualising,
of some kind of unconsciousness (of an animal).
All animals are criminal, even the horse, even the swan (aimless beauty, no longer flies anywhere): there is a fear of the swan.
The sea: (the river’s attempt to attain totality? The Caspian Sea speaks for that). In any case there are stations of the river and resting points.
The sea under clouds: That is the ocean, the Black Sea, the North Sea. – Nietzsche’s face: Here are the heaviest, blackest, sheerly the darkest portentous clouds: incapacity for lightness.
The neurasthenic seeks artificial totality by going to the sea; the criminal seeks artficial unity. (Totality from outside, unity from outside. )
The neurasthenic also has a present (transient; the criminal has no present).
Nothing can be so beautiful as man; nothing so ugly!
A river’s peril is becoming a swamp. An ocean’s?
Whirlpools.
A possibility in the ocean corresponds to madness.
Swamp and night-fire.
The clouds conceal the light. The eternal embraces them.
Violet: undecided between good and evil, between pleasure and pain.
The snake is actually not in the stricter sense ugly. It is smooth; and yet siezes us with a loathing for it: Lie!
Every animal has a face in which one discovers some kind of human emotion, an instinct, a passion, a human weakness or baseness.
The tortoise always gives an impression of tiredness. On land it is awry and prostrate, condemned to crawling; and thereby inept.
Eudyptes chrysocoma41 is a problem for me. (An animal which is not vain yet still knows pain. )
The bird is the Apollonian animal?
Just as we find all possible combinations in the human kingdom, so too in the animal kingdom: fish that can fly; birds that can swim; mammals that can fly; mammals that can swim.
Why can’t man fly? Why does he fly in dreams?
Further transitions between animal and plant: sponge, coral.
The snake suffers severely under cold. Death from outside. Realisation of chance. Absolute night, without hope.
Fish are characterised by a complete lack of all expressive faculty.
“Idiocy” and fish.
Deer: weakness and cowardice. It is not beautiful in and for itself.
41 A penguin species found on Tierra del Fuego island and Patagonia. Editor’s Note. [Gerber]
The snake and absolute certainty in its strike. It hits the mark sure and straight, kills whom it bites. The problem of justice is here the problem of chance! – The snake is aggressive falsehood, it lurks in ambush, winds its way through between people. It lies outwardly. – Cowardly lie? Inward lie.
The plant is sickness. Here is unity (no cell walls), but no longer totality, because sense organs and mobility are lost (intellect, will); the plant is totally determined in space, that is: fixed to a place, spatially unfree.
Animals and plants are not humans in death, but rather that which has become unconscious in man, which he now meets with in feeling as unfree.
The ape is the man who makes a buffoon of himself: one sees in him the sadness over this.
It is neurasthenic to feel oneself guilty before nature.
If medications work, it is merely mental will, belief, hope, which work.
Constipation is characteristic for being loaded with spiritual and bodily uncleanliness, without this being directly expressed in a continual pain. Diarrhoea is the releasing of all the waste; it is related to constipation as mishap to uneasiness; it is symbolic for being routed, the chaoticisation of the total man. For this reason,
artificially induced diarrhoea (especially through calomel, the most purgative agent) can, as is well known, protect one from epilepsy: diarrhoea conducts away that which would otherwise remain stagnant and bring the individual to downfall.
Fever and fear: struggle against evil; here it’s overcome.
Man is animal and not plant, because the moral (good and evil, creation and murder), is the ultimate; that is why blood (red) and sky (blue) are the opposites of the animal; not green – brown (earth?), not health – sickness.
Astrology has a future that is founded on incarnation; character can be deduced from the constellation of stars.
Narrowness of consciousness = time = the unconscious: because the strength for unity is lacking.
1 : 2 : 3 = Form (idea, man) : Matter (woman) : Thing (child, empirical experience)
Matter is
