Quotes Tagged "impluse"
There is a fascinating passage in Nietzcheās Twilight of the Idols that is one of the great passages in philosophical literature, and you donāt have to agree with anything else Nietzsche says, but this is a real gem: Writing about education in Germany in the 1880s, which very much describes our educational situation today, he says: āI shall straightaway set down the three tasks for the sake of which one requires educators. One has to learn to see, one has to learn to think, one has to learn to speak and write: the end in all three is a noble culture. Learning to see ā habituating the eye to repose, to patience, to letting things come to it; learning to defer judgment, to investigate and comprehend the individual case in all its aspects. This is the first preliminary schooling in spirituality; not to react immediately to a stimulus, but to have the restraining, stock-taking instincts in oneās control. Learning to see, as I understand it, is almost what is called in unphilosophical language āstrong will-powerā: the essence of it is precisely not to āwill,ā the ability to defer decision. All unspirituality, all vulgarity, is due to the incapacity to resist a stimulus ā one has to react, one obeys every impulse.ā He later says, with great psychological insight, āalmost everything which we crudely name āviceā is merely this physiological incapacity not to react.ā He further states: āA practical application of having learned to see: one will have become slow, mistrustful, resistant as a learner in general. Jeff Nyquist
