(Originally Written August 16, 2007 in Notebook 18)
Beyond Good & Evil
Frederich Nietzsche
224
We are an interbred, a mixed society which makes us all an individual chaos.
We have a taste for most things and this makes us ignoble.
225
Hedonism, pessimism, utilitarianism and eudaemonism all measure value on the basis of pain and pleasure. But pain and pleasure are merely secondary traits.
While the common man, the herd animal, wishes to see all suffering part to an end, the free spirit wishes to see it hardened and intensified.
The end of abolishing all suffering seems so undesirable to the free spirit that he would wish, if it were inevitable, to see it hastened because it would destroy man. And man without suffering is nothing.
Great suffering is the only discipline that has ever enhanced man.
The common pan pities the creature in man. The nobler, free spirit pities the creator in man.
However, there are higher problems than that of pain and pleasure and pity and whatever philosophy stops there is naïve.
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