Buzz word

'It ain't true until you do it; make it explicit!' This is how the fly reasons and continues to buzz around you, knowing perfectly well that it is not supposed to do so, and that it could get killed for its incredulity. But this is the covert, shameless hope of the annoying creature: that you may feel too lofty to be a swatter of flies, too pure to soil your hands, even if that means you suffer the vexing sting of the parasitic fly. And in this way it takes advantage of your magnanimity and lives on for another day!

Life's plenum

The world is not my image of it, and yet the world is alive only through the images I create.

3 levels of absurdities in Nietzsche

I.
1) The objectivity of truth or that of health is vehemently denied. The truths of each body - whether a culture, an individual or a genre - is localized and given a legitimate sphere, where the tyranny of their specific perspective has the sole right.
2) It is still maintained, in apparent contradiction to the above, that there some healthier, more truthful bodies in comparison to others. The passions, the sufferings, the desires, the needs, the joy and happiness of these nobler entities must be preferred - since they have a greater purpose to them - to that of the lower beings.
3) However, an unequivocal rule is denied, which gives one access to a method by which one can discern which body is healthier or stronger than some other bodies. The knowledge of the criterion of what counts as healthy is known only by those who possess this health! It is not accessible to everyone. This is the tragedy of the healthy ones!

II. This movement from 1) to 3) is that of the 'objectivity' to 'subjectivity'. But not in the Hegelian sense, where the movement gains momentum in this very movement. It is rather the movement from 'will to truth' to 'will to power.'

III. But at the same time, this movement is perhaps the closest one gets to having a genuine sense of objectivity. Or the closest approximation that the motion of becoming can have to that of being, as Nietzsche puts it somewhere. For, even the noblest one's claim to his health, in the end, might be another form of delusion and dogmatism. A cave which hides another cave within its abyss. The spectre of Hegel in Nietzsche.

3 purposes of art

1. Art as fantasy: Here art plays the role of an outlet for the masses, who generally live oppressed lives (like in India). Art takes people to that fantastic realm, away from the harsh reality that the common man faces. A little bit of nitrous oxide, a little tickle and run, a little dancing-around-trees - and the working man is convinced that he should go on toiling more and more: art for the sake of the common consumer.
2. Art as the mirror of reality: A more refined sense of art, dominant mostly in the western intellect. Art has a function of mimesis: to reflect back the reality to the oblivious thinker and scholar, so that he can keep tabs on it, so that it does not get out of his hand. He needs art to control reality or to make a satirical caricature of it! Art - almost like a diary that chronicles one's inner feelings, so that one does not lose oneself in one's own depths. Art as the effect of the command: "Know thyself!" Art for the sake of the sophisticated consumer.
3. Art: not for the sake of the consumer, but for the sake of the artist. Art - not for the sake of purpose, but to create purposes: falsifying, but also transforming reality, and thereby creating the audience too, the consumer! Both a satire and fantasy - a midway between the first two senses of art, but neither the first nor the second. Art as the rare rays of the comet following its own path in the night's sky.

The philosopher as a dancer

Often I am asked which philosophical problems one must take up, and which ones one must set aside as confused or paralyzed or unproductive. One does not need a critique of faculties to answer this question. The answer is quite simple and is given in its very givenness as a philosophical question. One does not "take up" a philosophical problem, but to a philosopher philosophy is given in a singular, nuanced way, which is particular to the shape and contours of that philosopher's life paths and idiosyncracies. The philosopher meets philosophy half way, and then he defines and determines the exact way in which his philosophy is unfolded by deepening or altering the forms of these contours.
But existentially speaking, that decisive moment when a person "becomes" a philosopher, when a philosophy "comes" to him, can be described as the pleasure of a bitter-sweet pain at the ever-so-slight loss he feels in his world, with which he had hitherto been completely at one. It is the sweet pain one experiences when one lifts only one toe off the ground, even though one is in every other way grounded in reality: the bitter pleasure of "metaphysics." The subsequent challenge for the philosopher is to maintain a sort of balance so that on the one hand he does not abstractly try to remove himself off the ground (lest he wants to get caught in the entrapments of false philosophies), and on the other hand not to induce himself with a narcotic which makes him again "one" with the world (unless he wants to end up being a self-satisfied mystic). Balance is the key for a philosopher.