a world of ends has the word "accident" a meaning. (6) Let us be on our guard against making death the antithesis of life—the living is only a species of the dead, and a rare species. (7) Let us be on our guard against thinking that the world eternally creates new things (it is really a finite quantity, and sooner or later reaches the limits of its power).[1] Moreover, it is important to stop speaking of the All as if it were a unity, a force, an absolute of some kind—we easily come in this way to take it as a highest instance and to christen it "God." We must split up the All, unlearn any particular respect for it, bring back feelings we have given to the unknown and the whole, and devote them to things next us, our own things. The All raises ever the old problems, "How is evil possible?" and so on. To speak bluntly, there is no All, the great sensorium or inventorium or storehouse of power is lacking.[2] Nietzsche is thus altogether a pluralist. Such unities as we find are, to him, derived and created things, and lie in a larger sea of the chaotic. This is true not only of the world at large, but of an individual soul. Those thinkers in whom all the stars move in cyclic paths are not the deepest; he who looks into the vast space within himself and is aware of the milky ways there, knows also how irregular all milky ways are—they lead into the chaos and labyrinth of existence.[3] Nietzsche is accordingly distrustful of systematizers, and he conjectures their descent from registrars and office-secretaries, whose business it was to label things and put them in their pigeonholes.[4] "He is a thinker: that means that he understands how to take things more simply than they are."[5] Particularly now, when science is just beginning its work, does system-building seem to him childishness. "I am not narrow enough for a system—and not even for my system."[6] f
But though Nietzsche regards the world as a more or less chaotic, irregular thing,[7] he avoids, as already stated, thinking
- ↑ Joyful Science, § 109; cf. Werke, XII, 58-9.
- ↑ Will to Power, § 331.
- ↑ Joyful Science, § 322.
- ↑ Dawn of Day, § 318; Joyful Science, § 348; cf. Twilight of the Idols, I, § 20; and what his sister says, Werke (pocket ed.), IX, xviii.
- ↑ Joyful Science, § 189.
- ↑ Werke, XIV, 413, § 292; 354, § 217.
- ↑ Cf. Joyful Science, §§ 277, 322; Werke (pocket ed.), VII, xviii (chaos sive natura); Will to Power, § 711.
