I get the first, “Don’t become a monster”, part of the quote, but what does the second part mean?
It means that James Cameron makes sentient movies.
Be careful of what you hate lest you become it.
There’s another one about touching pitch that I can not recall …
Aquainting yourself with evil can bring evil into you.
Actually, I don’t know that ‘evil’ is the right word; maybe just ‘the unknown’ would work as well.
Nietzsche is talking about the tendency to “fight fire with fire”…He’s saying that when you fight against something, you run the risk of becoming the thing you’re fighting against, and that’s how causes get subverted.
They’re alive! They’re alive!
It sort of makes me wonder why he didn’t say that then. And I also wonder if our government leaders and members of Congress, for the time being, have ever considered this.
Nietsche liked hyperbolic language. He was a Romantic or near kin to a Romantic. The idea was to evoke an image that would be more powerful and meaning-laden than a straight-up statement.
Are we sure that Nietche wasn’t saying “abbess”? “When you look long into the abbess, the abbess also looks into you.” To me, it sounds like one of those recovering Catholic phenomena. :rolleyes:
That reminds me of something John Cheever once wrote:
It is not just fighting monsters.
When we concentrate on a value system, or a particular set of human behaviors, we tend to make our focus more and more narrow, in order to understand the specific thing we seek to understand. But human behavior is broad, varied, and complex. So, if I seek to understand the minds of murderers, I must look at the lives of murderers, and their opinions.
They are humans, and I too am human. What motivates them is also a mutilator to me, on at least some level. The more closely I study murder, as a behavior of humans, the more I can see the same human characteristics in myself, and in you, and in all other people. Eventually, I empathize with murderers.
So, I become more able to feel, and identify with the aberration of murder than with the more common, and more adaptive behaviors of “normal” people, because I have engaged in the aberrant behavior of murder vicariously to such an extent that it has become more normal to me than the virtue of the more common man. I distrust his virtue, because I cannot understand it.
I have studied evil, but I have not studied virtue.
I have looked into the abyss, and in the end, I peer out of it myself.
Tris
Triskadecamus, my compliments on some excellent thought and writing. Chillingly well told!
Ya have that a bit backwards - the Big N was saying
“Don’t get too close to monsters, or you risk becoming one yourself.”
Its the second part that completes it and warns against becoming a monster.
Did you mean to write “mutilator”, 13?
No.
But, I hesitate to "correct it now.
Tris
Just sittin’ staring out of the abyss.
I guess Tris meant ‘motivator’.
…Now, thaat’s creepy !
Oh, that’s not Nietzsche, it’s Yakov Smirnof: “In United States, you look into abyss—In Soviet Union, abyss looks into you!”
Pogo: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
In My Back Pages Dylan wrote
He is basically saying the same thing. He was so against hate that he ended up hating the haters, in that he became what he was against.